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to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than
man-still a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the
sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature he is nearly
my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a
well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkably
otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon
the face--it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of
old age, so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense--a
sentiment ineffable. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to
bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years.--His gray hairs are records
of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin
floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and
mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts.
His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery
unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at
all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself, as
did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables
of a foreign tongue, and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his
voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.
*
* * * *
The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide
to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager
and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the
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