 in the desert; even then, the whale
always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you
will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.
    Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over-curious touching the
precise nature of the whale-spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it,
and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and
fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the
outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will
feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know
one, who coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether with some
scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from
his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous;
they try to evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much
doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this
deadly spout alone.
    Still, we can hypothesise, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other
reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great
inherent dignity and sublimity of the sperm whale; I account him no common,
shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on
soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous
and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound
beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there
always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to
place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved
worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture
of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin
shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the
above supposition.
    And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold
him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his
