1 It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
2 Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah. 3 With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
4 My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side.
5 The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there.
6 The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din.
7 But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah. 8 But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
9 By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
10 As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings.