In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished.  Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one.  Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul.  Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.  Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body.  And that shadow was always hovering there.  For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below.  He would stand still for hours:  but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say—­ We two watchmen never rest.

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—­the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—­his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat.  The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.

He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—­ breakfast and dinner:  supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure.  But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—­one man to the other—­unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary.  Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they