have hitherto revealed to mankind.
A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating
from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible
face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or
instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,
chance-like apparition of life.

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
exclaimed--"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to
have seen thee, thou white ghost!"

"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.

"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and
returned to their ports to tell of it."

But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;
the rest as silently following.

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being
so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few
of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale
his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above
water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti
whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and
only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that
food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what
are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus
exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that
the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to
the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is
supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.

There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond.
But much abatement