Moby Dick

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down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time
to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been
correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of
things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days
and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently
enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance
the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the
Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers,
Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might
blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's
circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary