uch did I dread the
undertaking, and abhor the thought of the tedious time I foresaw it
would occupy me, that I cannot imagine any other sort of painful and
distressing work that would not have seemed actually agreeable as
compared with this.

My pipe being smoked out, I stepped into the cabin, and ascending the
ladder threw off the companion-cover and opened the doors, and then went
to the man that had his back to the steps, but my courage failed me; he
was so lifelike, there was so wild and fierce an earnestness in the
expression of his face, so inimitable a picture of horror in his
starting posture, that my hands fell to my side and I could not lay hold
of him. I will not stop to analyse my fear or ask why, since I knew that
this man was dead, he should have terrified me as surely no living man
could; I can only repeat that the prospect of touching him, and laying
him upon the deck and then dragging him up the ladder, was indescribably
fearful to me, and I turned away, shaking as if I had the ague.

But it had to be done, nevertheless; and after a great deal of reasoning
and self-reproach I seized him on a sudden, and, kicking away the bench,
let him fall to the deck. He was frozen as hard as stone and fell like
stone, and I looked to see him break, as a statue might that falls
lumpishly. His arms remaining raised put him into an attitude of
entreaty to me to leave him in peace; but I had somewhat mastered
myself, and the hurry and tumult of my spirits were a kind of hot
temper; so catching him by the collar, I dragged him to the foot of the
companion-steps, and then with infinite labour and a number of sickening
pauses hauled him up the ladder to the deck.

I let him lie and returned, weary and out of breath. He had been a very
fine man in life, of beauty too, as was to be seen in the shape of his
features and the particular elegance of his chin, despite the distortion
of his last unspeakable dismay; and with his clothes I guessed his
weight came hard upon two hundred pounds, no mean burden to haul up a
ladder.

I went to the cook-house for a dram and to rest myself, and then came
back to the cabin and looked at the other man. His posture has been
already described. He made a very burly figure in his coat, and if his
weight did not exceed the other's it was not likely to be less. Nothing
of his head was visible but the baldness on the top and the growth of
hair that ringed it, and the fluffing up of his beard ab