“…like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two” Rereading yesterday’s post on writers and Lima’s weather, I became curious about Herman Melville’s riff on Lima as “the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see.”  When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn’t belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick.  The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishamel begins: What the white whale was…