Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little particolored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade-owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times-this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
From a last turn in the road, the motel, the roller coaster track, the skeeball and french fry stands on the boardwalk stood stiff as theater flats set up against the drape of ocean. The crowd edged around them. Right of the town stretched the beach, there kids staggered through the sand until stopped short by the water. That day no one swam or splashed in the shallows, though it was a late summer day and they all wore bathing suits or shorts. From this far north, the hurricane in equatorial waters gathered its strength: television, radio warned that the undertow had pulled out six people, not swimmers, but waders swinging their shoes on two fingers, had pulled them out to sea, like the tentacle of a giant squid.
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