As I promised, I am going to keep going chapter by chapter. Consider this a skeleton around which the flesh of the whale can be grown.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
Here we learn more about Ahab. Melville is a master of characterisation.
This evocative image is the name of a band, Bright Quito Spring. Quito is the capital of Equador, but the map of the journey of the Pequod takes them into the Indian Ocean, not the Pacific."ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring"
http://www.myspace.com/brightquitospring is worth a listen.
And here we get a breathtaking poem
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"The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!As
When the mate Stubb complains about the noise of shark teeth made by Ahab's ivory leg, the old monster's response is"the witcheries of that unwaning weather ... wrought on Ahab's texture ... he seemed so much to live in the open air.... ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. ... the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks.
"Down, dog, and kennel!"
"said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called a dog, sir."
"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
"How he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind... He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night ... Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth ... his brow ... flashed like a bleached bone. ... Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out. "
