page 001: Call me Ishmael. page 002: But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. page 003: It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. page 004: What of it, if some old hunks of a sea captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? page 005: ...this, the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way... page 006: Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. page 007: With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver... page 008: ...and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. page 009: ...where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. page 010: But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.
page 011: With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. page 012: Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. page 013: One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner. page 014: He stood a full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. page 015: I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. page 016: For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down! page 017: '...ain't there too many heads in the world?' page 018: 'Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.' page 019: I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. page 020: Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler.
page 021: His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. page 022: ...he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby. page 023: 'Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam- me, I kill-e!' again growled the cannibal... page 024: Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. page 025: Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. page 026: ...and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside. page 027: But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. page 028: However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing... page 029: They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers... page 030: Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking...
page 031: Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. page 032: And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. page 033: Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. page 034: ...and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. page 035: What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. page 036: Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favorite. page 037: Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? page 038: But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship's tossed deck... page 039: Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone / The face of my Deliverer God. page 040: Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sea-line sound!
page 041: 'Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.' page 042: ...Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowel's wards. page 043: 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!' page 044: 'And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead...' page 045: 'Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly.' page 046: '...and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth...' page 047: 'Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin...' page 048: Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. page 049: I'll try a pagan friend...since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. page 050: ...he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married...