 possess a thousand-fold
more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable
object.
    This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But
vain to popularise profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down
from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand -
however grand and wonderful, now quit it; - and take your way, ye nobler, sadder
souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic
towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits
in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes!
So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a
Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures
of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad
king! A family likeness! ay, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and
from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
    Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are
sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun
the fact, he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort,
did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his
perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he
succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last,
no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the
quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
    The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed
to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterward,
to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on
his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for
another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people
of that prudent isle were inclined to harbour the conceit, that for those very
reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched
without, with the unfixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an
one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and
