What the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, remains unsaid. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. In many natural objects whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as in pearls and marble and the white horses of kings. Yet there lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. Think of the white bear of the poles and the white shark of the tropics. Think of the dead, whom we clothe in white. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe? Of all these things the albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?