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 hisdescendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon whythey 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 Robbins, indulged in mundane amours.
总之，可以肯定的是，这些鬼怪似的属下以后在跟水手们相处的时候，虽然好象总跟他们有所不同，然而那个扎着包头布的费达拉，却从头到底就是一个不可解的谜，他是从什么地方跑到这样一个有礼貌的世界来的，他凭什么不解之缘使他一下子就跟亚哈的特殊的命运连系起来，而且，他竟然还有一种隐隐约约的力量，都只有天晓得，不过，说不定这种力量甚至已经把亚哈给控制住了，所有这一切，谁都弄不明白。但是，我们却不能小看费达拉。象他这样一个人物，那些住在温带的文明驯良的人，只有在梦里才碰得到，而且印象也很模糊。象他这样的人，时常流动在不变的亚洲社会中，尤其是在欧洲大陆以东的那些东方岛屿——那些与世隔绝的、不知起于何时的、停滞的国家中，这些国家，甚至时至今日，也还保留有许多混沌初开时那种可怕的原始性，当时，他们对于始祖的记忆就是一个特殊的忆念，他所有的后裔，也不知道他是来自何方，都把彼此看成真正的鬼怪，于是乎仰问苍天，为什么要造他们出来，造出来干什么；不过当时根据《创世记》的记载(见《旧约·创世记》第六章二至四节。)，天使确是已跟人类的女儿结了伴，而那些恶魔跟非宗规的犹太法师们，也都耽迷于世俗的桃色事件中。