 which at these times
he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as
the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep
from the whale-ship's mastheads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic
zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that
path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.
    And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well-known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the
widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place
and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a
meeting.
    There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in reality, perhaps. Though
the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds,
yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which haunted such and such a
latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to be identically the same
with those that were found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar
and unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In
general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the
solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though
Moby-Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
Seychelle ground in the Indian Ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese coast; yet
it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any
subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So,
too, with some other feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to
speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of
accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been
made to whatever wayside, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular
set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to
a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one
technical phrase - the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several
consecutive years, Moby-Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those
waters for a while, as the sun,
