Moby Dick

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Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks
and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in
luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through
those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.

It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that
knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three
Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a
crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the
keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.