Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yethis deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with naturalterror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, accordingto specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in hisassaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more ofdismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exultingpursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several timesbeen known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, eitherstave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation totheir ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But thoughsimilar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no meansunusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed theWhite Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that everydismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded ashaving been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury theminds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chipsof chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam outof the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene,exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirlingin the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his brokenprow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe,blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life ofthe whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenlysweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reapedaway Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbanedTurk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with moreseeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever sincethat almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wildvindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in hisfrantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not onlyall his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritualexasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniacincarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feeleating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart andhalf a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from thebeginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribeone-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the eastreverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down andworship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to theabhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees ofthings; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews andcakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; allevil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practicallyassailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump thesum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race fromAdam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst hishot heart's shell upon it.
