Moby Dick

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pronounced himself fit for a fight.

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and
seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on
his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical
treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own
proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but
whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart
beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in
the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were
inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must
have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when