Moby Dick

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question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it
into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,
all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up
there; but not with the lightning."

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following
the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.

"Who's there?"

"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
lances of fire.

Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off
the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some