Chapter Link http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0028
"Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin."
This sense of how Ahab keeps himself aloof is part of his mystique of terror and power.
Recalling "the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences", Ishmael is worried about why he has not yet seen the captain.
Finally, "foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say."
Ahab's "ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw... moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face"
I lent my nephew my old children's book of Moby Dick that has the picture of Ahab I like best. And now I can't find a good one, with a scar. This will have to do.
