But while
this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch;
slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.
Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday,
in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through
that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.
Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
CHAPTER 36
The Quarter-Deck
(Enter Ahab: Then, all)
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe,
that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont,
ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains
usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal,
take a few turns in the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his
old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all
over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk.
Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow;
there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints
of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper,
even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark.
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