 in its annual round, loiters for a predicted
interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the
deadly encounters with the White Whale had taken place; there the waves were
storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old
man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious
comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding
soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his
hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be
to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillise his
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
    Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavour then could enable her commander to
make the great passage southward, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty
degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.
Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of
the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view
to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and
sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of
impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by
chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian
Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his
race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but
the Levanter and Simoom, might blow Moby-Dick into the devious zig-zag
world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
    But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but
a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if
encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his
hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of
Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby-Dick, and his
snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the
whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long
after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries - tallied him, and shall
he escape? His broad
