hing with a piece of the
glass; but before doing this it occurred to me to search the body on the
starboard side.

I approached him as if he were alive and murderously fierce, and I own I
did not like to touch him. He resembled the figure of a giant moulded in
snow. In life he must have been six feet and a half tall. The snow had
bloated him, and though he leaned he stood as high as I, who was of a
tolerable stature. The snow was on his beard and mustaches and on his
hair; but these features were merged and compacted into the snow on his
coat, and as his cap came low and was covered with snow too, he, with
the little fragment of countenance that remained, the flesh whereof had
the colour and toughness of the skin of a drum that has been well
beaten, submitted as terrible an object as mortal sight ever rested on.
I say I did not like to touch him, and one reason was I feared he would
tumble; and though I know not why I should have dreaded this, yet the
apprehension of it so worked in me that for some time it held me idly
staring at him.

But I could not enter the cabin without first scraping the snow from the
companion door; and the cold, after I had stood a few moments inactive,
was so bitter as to set me craving for shelter. So I put my hand upon
the body, and discovered it, as I might have foreseen, frozen to the
hardness of steel. His coat--if I may call that a coat which resembled a
robe of snow--fell to within a few inches of the deck. Steadying the
body with one hand, I heartily tweaked the coat with the other, hoping
thus to rupture the ice upon it; in doing which I slipped and fell on my
back, and in falling gave a convulsive kick which, striking the feet of
the figure, dislodged them from their frozen hold of the deck, and down
it fell with a mighty bang alongside of me, and with a loud crackling
noise, like the rending of a sheet of silk.

I was not hurt, and sprang to my feet with the alacrity of fright, and
looking at the body saw that it had managed by its fall much better than
my hands could have compassed; for the snow shroud was cracked and
crumpled, slabs of it had broken away leaving the cloth of the coat
visible, and what best pleased me was the sight of the end of a hanger
forking out from the skirt of the coat.

Yet to come at it so as to draw the blade from its scabbard required an
intolerable exertion of strength. The clothes on this body were indeed
like a suit of mail. I never could have bel