All these terrible and formidable changes of aspect our hero
stood watching with a motionless and riveted attention, and as
though they were to him matters of the utmost consequence and
importance; and only when the last flicker of life had departed
from his second victim did he lift his gaze from this terrible
scene of dissolution to stare about him, this way and that, his
eyes blinded, and his breath stifled by the thick cloud of
sulphurous smoke that obscured the objects about him in a pungent
cloud.




V. The Unexpected Encounter with the Sea-captain with the Broken
Nose



If our hero had been distracted and bedazed by the first
catastrophe that had befallen, this second and even more dreadful
and violent occurrence appeared to take away from him, for the
moment, every power of thought and of sensation. All that
perturbation of emotion that had before convulsed him he
discovered to have disappeared, and in its stead a benumbed and
blinded intelligence alone remained to him. As he stood in the
presence of this second death, of which he had been as innocent
and as unwilling an instrument as he had of the first, he could
observe no signs either of remorse or of horror within him. He
picked up his hat, which had fallen upon the floor in the first
encounter, and, brushing away the dust with the cuff of his coat