Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  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 ofthe watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool onthe weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.

  In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kingswere 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 lordof Leviathans was Ahab.

  Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor camefrom his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew backagain 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 ismeant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors amongmild 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 hissedin the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubblethe sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchinglypaced the planks.