30. CHAPTER XXX.
THE PIPE.
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning
over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of
late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for
his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the
binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the
deck, he sat and smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings
were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.
How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod
of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?
For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great
lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from
his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into
his face. “How now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the
tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard
must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been
unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring,—aye, and ignorantly
smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets
were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have
I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to
send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not
among torn iron grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no
more—”
He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed
in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the
sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced
the planks.
