By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how? how?--
but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again;
and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks
over by daylight."
CHAPTER 30
The Pipe
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks;
and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of
the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.
Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on
the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings
were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.
How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones,
without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?
For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord
of Leviathans was Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came
from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back
again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at last,
withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes.
Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone!
Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--
aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward,
and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale,
my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble.
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