"Can you tell me to what port we are bound?"
"No," I replied; "but how came you to take passage without inquiry? To
me it makes little difference."
"Nor do I care," he answered, when he next came near enough; I have
already been there."
"Where?" asked I.
"Wherever we are going," he replied. "I have been there a great many
times, and, oh! I am very tired of it."
"But why are you here at all, then; and why don't you stop?"
There was a singular mixture of a hundred conflicting emotions in his
face, as I spoke. The representative grandeur of a race, which he
sometimes showed in his look, faded into a glance of hopeless and puny
despair. His eyes looked at me curiously, his chest heaved, and there
was clearly a struggle in his mind, between some lofty and mean
desire. At times, I saw only the austere suffering of ages in his
strongly-carved features, and again I could see nothing but the
second-hand black hat above them. He rubbed his forehead with his
skinny hand; he glanced over his shoulder, as if calculating whether
he had time to speak to me; and then, as a splendid defiance flashed
from his piercing eyes, so that I know how Milton's Satan looked, he
said, bitterly, and with hopeless sorrow, that no mortal voice ever
knew before:
"I cannot stop: my woe is infinite, like my sin!"--and he passed into
the mist.
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