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. whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. but one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning fedallah. he was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging asiatic communities, especially the oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.