Ishmael and Queequeg lay in bed together chatting and napping. The experience of making friends in a shared room when the night was so bitter cold outside moved Ishmael:
“..truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.”
“…a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
Queequeg and Ishmael napped and chatted for so long that they sat up in a crouching position and continued their conversation. Ishmael had the habit of always keeping his eyes shut when in bed, seated or otherwise:
“Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.”
After their long ritualistic conversation, Ishmael and his savage friend began smoking from Queequeg’s tomahawk pipe:
“With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
“Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it…”
