While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains
over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship,
and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon
his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself
was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts,
some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon
the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude
of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts.
Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night
some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted.
For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was
threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more
certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one
solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet.
But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all
tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of
the sperm whale's food; and, also calling to mind the regular,
ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;
could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching
to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this
or that ground in search of his prey.
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