much for that.  And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—­frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it.  And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and the heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthly clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava.  How the wild winds blow; they whip about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to.  A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.  Out upon it!—­it’s tainted.  Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.  I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there.  And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it?  In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.  Run tilting at it, and you but run through it.  Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.  Even Ahab is a braver thing—­a nobler thing than that.  Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.  There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!  And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind.  These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississipies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last.  And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—­something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!  To it!  Aloft there!  What d’ye see?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Nothing! and noon at hand!  The doubloon goes a-begging!  See the sun!  Aye, aye, it must be so.  I’ve oversailed him.  How, got the start?  Aye, he’s chasing me now; not I, him—­that’s bad; I might have known it, too.  Fool! the lines—­the harpoons he’s towing.  Aye, aye, I have run him by last night.  About! about!  Come down, all of ye, but the regular lookouts!  Man the braces!”

Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.

“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled mainbrace upon the rail.  “God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh.  I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”