Whence he came in a mannerly
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced
himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far
as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows,
but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew.
But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was
such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone
only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom
now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities,
especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent--
those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in
these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness
of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first
man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked
of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end;
when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with
the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins,
indulged in mundane amours.
CHAPTER 51
The Spirit-Spout
Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod
had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds;
that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate
(so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata;
and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,
southerly from St.
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