I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance.
I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness
of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.
With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew
over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame
of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage
away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke
of his native island; and, eager to hear his history,
I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied.
Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words,
yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar
with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole
story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
CHAPTER 12
Biographical
Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West
and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands
in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were
a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul,
lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom
than a specimen whaler or two.
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