Reality outran apprehension;
Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,
nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away
from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all
the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle
from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form,
seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould,
like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among
his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny
scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,
you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.
It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight,
lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly
darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and
grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into
the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.
Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar
left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.
By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little
or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates.
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