Ahab's Adventure's In Wonderland; or The Rabbit

Chapter Sixty-Two

And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary journey, Ahab seemed to have chased his foe into a corner, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very location where the tormenter who had inflicted his wound was located; now that someone had actually encountered Moby Dick;-- now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon us. It domineered above us so, that all our bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath our souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.

In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Franklin no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, we dumbly moved about him, ever conscious that the old man's despot eye was on us.

'I will have the first sight of the rabbit myself,'-- he said. 'Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon! He set off with that peculiar gait of his, one quick stride immediately followed by what looked like a loping door slamming shut as he swung his body around with his ivory leg as an anchor point. Fast, slow, fast, slow, back and forth his body teetered with hypnotic force, and we had no choice but to follow mindlessly.

Now, Ahab had not managed more than a few hundred feet; ere one of those red-billed savage hawks which so often one sees perched on a lonely fence post along the side of a little traveled rural road; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiraled downwards, and went eddying again round his head.

But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance compared to what we had already seen that day; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.

'Your hat, your hat, sir!' suddenly cried Starbuck, who being closest on his heels, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.

But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.

An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of our party: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height onto the ground.