Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.

 

[Old Thunder]

Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the topknot on some old Pottowattamie Sachem's* head.

*Chief of a Native American tribe.

 

[Old Thunder]

A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.

 

[Old Thunder]

And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command.

 

[Old Thunder]

He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.

 

[Old Thunder]

There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic network of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together.

 

[Old Thunder]

Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.

 

[Old Thunder]

"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of the tent.

 

[Old Thunder]

"Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?" he demanded.

 

[Old Thunder]

"I was thinking of shipping."