Popocatepetl is to the Consul what Moby Dick is to Captain Ahab. Although in the final version of Under the Volcano this relationship between the smoking mountain and the white whale is never insisted on, throughout the drafts it is often explicit, and in earlier versions of this passage Moby Dick is mentioned by name.

The allusion is to the final words of Ch. 1 of Moby Dick: "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air". A note in Prescott suggests the very devious ruote by which this terrestrial whale may have grounded itself on the volcano. Discussing the shape of Ixtaccihuatl from a similar vantage point, he writes: "This mountain ... with its neighbour Popocatepetl ... has been fancifully likened, from its long dorsal swell, to the back of a dromedary (Prescott, V.vii, p 495). Lowry knew his Conquest of Mexico, and probably appreciated Prescott's tendency to use latinate words in their original etymological sense, but the word dorsal would here in incongruously inappropriate: very like a whale, in fact.

Left: Rockwell Kent's engraving of the white whale from Melville's Moby Dick. [Lowry owned the edition containing Kent's engravings: Modern Library Giant; New York: Random House, 1930.]