 This vigilance was not long without reward.
 

                                 Chapter XLVII

                                 The Mat-Maker

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the
decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I
were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional
lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the
scene, and such an incantation of revelry lurked in the air, that each silent
sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
    I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept
passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of
the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways,
ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking
off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so
strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the
sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as
if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving
and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject
to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration
merely enough to admit of the crosswise inter-blending of other threads with its
own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my
own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,
or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this
difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the
final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus
finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword
must be chance - ay, chance, free will, and necessity - no wise incompatible -
all inter-weavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be
swerved from its ultimate course - its every alternating vibration, indeed, only
tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;
and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity,
and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by
both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
                                 * * * * *
