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Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject , can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens , and boats in pursuit of them ; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds . Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me . And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo - Navis , and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish . With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle - bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs , would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies , to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight ! CHAPTER 58 . Brit . Steering north - eastward from the Crozetts , we fell in with vast meadows of brit , the minute , yellow substance , upon which the Right Whale largely feeds . For leagues and leagues it undulated round us , so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat . On the second day , numbers of Right Whales were seen , who , secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod , with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit , which , adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths , was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip . As morning mowers , who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads ; even so these monsters swam , making a strange , grassy , cutting sound ; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea . * * That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “ Brazil Banks ” does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do , because of there being shallows and soundings there , but because of this remarkable meadow - like appearance , caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes , where the Right Whale is often chased . But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers . Seen from the mast - heads , especially when they paused and were stationary for a while , their vast black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else . And as in the great hunting countries of India , the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such , taking them for bare , blackened elevations of the soil ; even so , often , with him , who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea . And even when recognised at last , their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct , in all parts , with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse .
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