It domineered above them so,
that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain
to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single
spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forced
or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile;
Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow,
hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered,
for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul.
Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious
that the old man's despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential
hours when he thought no glance but one was on him;
then you would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed
the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance awed his;
or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin
Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him;
that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain,
as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance,
or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen
being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there.
For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known
to slumber, or go below.
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