Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard* hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--our first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.

*In nautical language, right, the opposite of port, or larboard.

 

[Old Thunder]

However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.

 

[Old Thunder]

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by *****' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway.

 

[Old Thunder]

The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.

 

[Old Thunder]

Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving.

 

[Old Thunder]

A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two or them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.

 

[Old Thunder]

It's ominous, thinks I.

 

[Old Thunder]

A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!

 

[Old Thunder]

Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

 

[Old Thunder]

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.