to
have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it
was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for
a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin
was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He
lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of
the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter
there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age,
Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the
sullen paws of its gloom!

CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
other seamen my first mast-head came round.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may
have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage
she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial
even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her
skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether
relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.
I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great
stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread
gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders
priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of
mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among
archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical
purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like
formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, wit