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 wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as
I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in
antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec,
and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.
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