Whether the hatches were on or not I could
not tell, so thickly coated were the decks; but whether or not, the
deposits and marine growths rendered the surface as impenetrable
as iron, and I believe it would have kept a small army of labourers
plying their pickaxes for a whole week to have made openings into
the hold through that shelly coating of mail.
My eye was taken by a peculiar sort of protuberance at the foot
of the mainmast. It stood as high as I did, and had something of
the shape of a man, and, indeed, after staring at it for some time,
I perceived that it had been a man; that is to say, it was a human
skeleton, filled up to the bulk of a living being by the shells and
barnacles which covered it. Ashore, it might have passed for some
odd imitation in shells of the human figure; but, viewing it as I
did, in the midst of that great ocean, amid the frightful solitude
of the great dome of heaven, in a ship that was like the handiwork
of the sea-gods at the bottom of the deep--I say, looking at it as
I did, and knowing the thing had had life in centuries past, and
had risen thus wildly garnished out of the unfathomable secret
heart of the ocean, it awed me to an extent I cannot express, and
I gazed as though fascinated.
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