Moby Dick

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in the one technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,
lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,
loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There
it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had
taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive
to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering
hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one
crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running