ight wake, yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these
times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but
never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads,
when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at
particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
whales may with great confidence be looked for.

And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
without prospect of a meeting.

There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese
Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of
those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where
he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged
abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have
hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular
set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next
thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined
in the one technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
for several consecutive years,