At this table, seated upon short quaintly-wrought benches, and immediately facing each other, were two men. They were incomparably more lifelike than the frozen figures. The one whose back was upon the hatchway ladder, being the man whose face I had stroked, sat upright, in the posture of a person about to start up, both hands upon the rim of the table, and his countenance raised as if, in a sudden terror and agony of death, he had darted a look to God. So inimitably expressive of life was his attitude, that though I knew him to be a frozen body as perished as if he had died with Adam or Noah, I was sensible of a breathless wonder in me that the affrighted start with which he seemed to be rising from the table was not continued--that, in short, he did not spring to his feet with the cry that you seemed to _hear_ in his posture. The other figure lay over the table with his face buried in his arms. He wore no covering to his head, which was bald, yet his hair on either side was plentiful and lay upon his arms, and his beard fluffing up about his buried face gave him an uncommon shaggy appearance. The other had on a round fur cap with lappets for the ears. His body was muffled in a thick ash-coloured coat; his hair was also abundant, curling long and black down his back; his cheeks were smooth manifestly through nature rather than the razor, and the ends of a small black mustache were twisted up to his eyes. These were the only occupants of the cabin, which their presence rendered terribly ghastly and strange. There was perhaps something in keeping with the icy spell of death upon this vessel in the figure of the man who was bowed over the table, for he looked as though he slept; but the other mocked the view with a _spectrum_ of the fever and passion of life. You would have sworn he had beheld the skeleton hand of the Shadow reaching out of the dimness for him; that he had started back with a curse and cry of horror, and expired in the very agony of his affrighted recoil. The interior was extremely plain: the bulkheads of a mahogany colour, the decks bare, and nothing in the form of an ornament saving a silver crucifix hanging by a nail to the trunk of the mainmast, and a cage with a frozen bird of gorgeous plumage suspended to the bulkhead near the hatch. A small lanthorn of an old pattern dangled over the table, and I noticed that it contained two or three inches of candle. Abaft the hatchway was a door on the starboard side which I opened, and found a narrow dark passage. I could not pierce it with my eye beyond a few feet; but perceiving within this range the outline of a little door, I concluded that here were the berths in which the master and his mates slept. There was nothing to be done in the dark, and I bitterly lamented that I had left my tinder-box and flint in the boat, for then I could have lighted the candle in the lanthorn. "Perhaps," thought I, "one of those figures may have a tinder-box upon him."