"
"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else,
never mind how foolish?"
"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing
his hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale
comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick?
the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there;
where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--
his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away,
if thou must!
"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"
"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,"
soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question.
"The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair
wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is
blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up there;
but not with the lightning."
At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness,
following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost
at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
"Who's there?"
"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks
to his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain
to him by elbowed lances of fire.
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