CHAPTER 30
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.
