The disturbed man woke from violent sleep. He wondered to himself of the soundness of his reasons for absence from the deck. His illness. The numerous days that were spent in solitude were of good use to him but wasn’t there a better and simpler way of achieving such a thing as confidence? One evasive whale and a megalomaniac at its ghostly tail. If there existed such means, could he have employed it?

He toyed with the three month old locks that fell from his pale scalp unkempt. An older beard lined the jaw on an even paler face. He looked at his hands - sinewy and covered with veins that carried blood full of stale air. His gnarled fingernails were black with permanently implanted fragments of meat and dirt from the incessant scratching of the rash, another of his alleged illnesses. Ever since that stump had been rectified with a wooden prosthesis, a rash had erupted on the skin of the stump. He suddenly reached out as if to pluck out the wooden aid but settled for scratching the rash, with more fervour than before, which in turn immediately turned red hot.

He cursed out aloud. The reverberations died down as suddenly as they had begun. He straightened his legs off the hammock and stood up precariously. He walked up to the section of wall where his pistols hung, brown with rust and uncared for. He removed the nearest he could grasp from its nail and hobbled back to the hammock. The three months of rest had not healed his stump, even slightly. The pain rose and fell in cycles and eventually numbed out. He clasped the handle of the pistol in his grubby hands and raised it to his head when suddenly he heard a faint almost inaudible knock. Despite the nimbleness of the knock, in the undisturbed silence of the room, it sounded disproportionately loud and sharp. The hand holding the pistol wavered, only for a moment, and the metal hit his ear as it fell. It hit his shoulder and then plonked to the hammock.

‘Who is it?’ he growled in a low monotone. There was no reply. He asked again, raising his voice. There was no response, yet. Exasperated, he shouted the question.

‘Stubb, skipper!

‘Enter!’ Ahab said and the door opened to reveal a clean shaven man of about thirty years of age. His scalp was hairless. He was short and as if in lieu of that deficit, his thighs and calves along with his shoulders and biceps were abnormally large. The neck was that of a bear’s and appeared an extension of his head. Tremendous volumes of hair erupted from his shirt sleeves, that were folded up to the biceps, and from his neck. The shirt was without a collar and tight fitting. Where its first two buttons failed to find their button holes was a hirsute man. A brute he was, thought Ahab, even that voice was suchlike. He put the pistol elsewhere and adjusted the wooden leg.

‘Sir, I have a request from the crew’ Stubb began.

‘Speak for yourself’ Ahab cut in.

‘You must be beyond insane,’ Stubb said, ’to proclaim so surely that we hunt down Moby Dick alone.’

Noticing the lamp on the wall, adjacent to the hammock, flickering, Ahab said as though Stubb hadn’t spoken at all. ‘Help that lamp live for a while longer. Pour it some oil, dog.’

‘I will not be spoken to with slurs of the like’ Stubb said after gathering the most composed demeanour the two insults would let him afford. One would turn into a pile of bones and skin, both broken, if he was spoken to in such a manner. Ahab countered: ‘Then you are no better than a plumped swine. Attend to that lamp you cursed mongrel.’ There was calm before the storm. Then it came, red faced and cloth tearing.

‘You are cursed, Ahab. You are hell bent on doing the impossible and you have a crew hoodwinked to come to your aid. Whalery they say, unaware of what they’re out at sea for. Have you signed a pact with the White Whale himself? So he can quench his thirst for the rest of your and our blood?’

The shouts rang out for moments before the reverberations died down. Calm as ever, Ahab requested Stubb to leave. The other, tensed and ready to strike at Ahab, refused. At this Ahab raised his pistol from beside him and repeated the request. With much anger suppressed and reluctance, the door of the cabin was opened and with its closing departed Stubb.

Picking up an oilcan, Ahab staggered to the dying lamp and refilled the receptacle. Painfully aware of the overwhelming ache in his thigh-stump, he managed the few steps to the hammock. He cleared it of is contents and lay down.

As his hold over his thoughts returned, he contemplated for a few moments what Stubb had said. Had his own days of isolation impacted his cognitive abilities? He probably should change his mind about Moby Dick. After all they were a whaling crew in the business of whaling and not merely marionettes driven by revenge.

But then what did that make him? Mediocre and spineless? Cowardly for having exiled himself from the crew? Was his life an embodiment of hopelessness? What had become of him after that shoddy and vile fight with his wife? She probably was accurate about the monomania and stupidity of his. What had become of her - a whore? He had spent his younger days with her before losing himself in whaling, and in those ephemeral shore days between his whaling voyages. The last stretch of time about her was in the time only days before the voyage of the Pequod had begun. Her, with whom he had raised a daughter and son. Where were they? If anything more than a withering memory already in fragments, what had become of them?

A sudden pang of thirst had him unconsciously reaching out to the empty mug. The odour of the drink kept on the table guided his other hand to its source. It was uncorked. The thoughts that occupied his mind make pouring the drink into the horn a challenge. Instead, drops from the flowing bitter liquid fell to the table and the spray was thrown at his face. He startled and regained consciousness and moved the mug to where the liquor fell on the table. It filled briefly. Now again half-conscious, he brought the liquor to his lips and let the intoxicant run down the length of his tongue into his parched throat. The warm trickle inside was in stark contrast to the cold of the splattering of the same on his face. He wiped the spray from his face roughly with the sleeve of his shirt.

The cold of the evening was beginning to lose its vigour. The single window on the bare walls was suddenly thrown open. The shutter was wrenched open, its stopper sheared clean off, and the cold wind, thick with moisture from the salt ridden seas found its way through. The incessant gale eventually unhinged the shutter and dropped it onto the wooden floor.

The lone occupant of the hammock had by then drained the remnants of a second liquor bottle. The black glass of the bottle lay in shards on the floor. There was no one to attend to it. Nor to the shutter for the occupant of the cabin lay in the hammock, unwilling to rise. The movements of the ship was in synchrony with the sway of the hammock. Its user was once again left to his disturbed sleep.

The dream was of himself riding on a whaling boat at the bow. He could see his shipmates rowing but their faces he couldn’t recognise. Blurred as they were, he ignored them and turned to the mighty whale that they were in pursuit of. Its immense hoary tail was not more than fifteen yards away. He moved to the back of the boat and pulled out one of the three harpoons, its line was uncoiled. It was thrown.

Within the next couple of moments the boat began moving faster. The seasickness in him worked its way through the weather beaten skin and conquered his watery soul. The bitter taste in his mouth gave way. Seconds later, he was heaving and involuntarily began to hurl the contents of his intestines and stomach into the sea that frothed in the whale’s wake. It was either a wave or a tug from the hoary leviathan but Ahab and his lean, illness-ridden body was flung into the mouth of a whirling mass of water. He couldn’t swim. Nor could he feel the wooden prosthetic. The daylight faded and the water enclosed him in its deceptive calm and then he jerked awake lying in a puddle of regurgitated liquor and food. It was frozen. The stump ended at the knee. The matter hair and beard were a tangled disorderly sight.