’Twas not so hard a task.  I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve.  Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match.  Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting!  What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do!  They think me mad—­ Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!  That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!  The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—­Aye!  I lost this leg.  I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.  Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one.  That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were.  I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes!  I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—­Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me!  No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden.  Come forth from behind your cotton bags!  I have no long gun to reach ye.  Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me.  Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there.  Swerve me?  The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.  Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush!  Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

CHAPTER 38

Dusk

By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.

My soul is more than matched; she’s over-manned; and by a madman!  Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field!  But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me!  I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it.  Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.  Horrible old man!  Who’s over him, he cries;—­aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!  Oh!  I plainly see my miserable office,—­ to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity!  For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.  Yet is there hope.  Time and tide flow wide.  The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe.  His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside.  I would up heart, were it not like lead.  But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.

[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]