 He
had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had
received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his
own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to
the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly
enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and
wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
    And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading,
mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that
dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the
Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone
upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable,
unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that
it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without
extreme difficulty that the agonising wound was entirely cured.
    Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the
anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe;
and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the
marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove;
so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their
like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and
posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not
to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that
while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the
other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of
all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely
beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave;
not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper
analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly
felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at
bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic
grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To
trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries
