to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but
stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.
I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me;
but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all,
and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself
in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this
very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at
feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar,
in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking
up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me.
But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred,
one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to
the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm--
unlock his bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still
hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.
I now strove to rouse him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer
was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it
were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.
Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping
by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby.
A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange
house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk!
"Queequeg!--in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length,
by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations
upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that
matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt;
and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over
like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,