objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there
aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind
almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when
exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or
universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be
respectively elucidated by the following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if
by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels
just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under
precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock
to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky
whiteness--as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white
bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious
dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him
as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off
soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue
water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell
thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as
the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?"

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such
vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it
would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is
it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative
indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no
shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not
so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at
times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost
and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows
speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless
churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and
splintered crosses.

But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is
but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a
hypo, Ishmael.

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley
of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon
the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him,
so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal
muskiness--why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the
ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of
any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the
strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated
with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New
England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?

No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles
from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending,
goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings
of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the
shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the
mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt,
somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects
this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were
formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange
and far more portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the most
meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent
in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with
the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the
milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a
colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the
concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a
dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a
colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we
consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all
other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning--the sweet
tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of
butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are
but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only
laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints
like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the
charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself,
and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects,
even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this,
the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring
glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind
at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around
him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.


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