111. CHAPTER CXI.
THE PACIFIC.
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon
the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could
have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now
the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene
ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea,
whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul
beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod
over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over
these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters'
Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and
ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades
and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all
that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still;
tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves
but made so by their restlessness.
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once
beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the
midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic
being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the
new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the
recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous
skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all
between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless,
unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this
mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about;
makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of
earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the
seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing
like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen
rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary
musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers
must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the
salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated
White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at
length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the
Japanese cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified
itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of
his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very
sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern
all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!”
