noon
No , I would not have moved a finger to recover him , even though I should have been able to do so by merely putting him to the furnace . He was dead , and there was an end ; and without further ado I carried him into the forecastle and threw a hammock over him , and left him to lie there till there should come clear water to the ship to serve him for a grave . All day long the weather remained sullen and still , and the swell powerful . I was on deck at noon , looking at an iceberg half a league distant when it overset . It was a small berg , though large compared with most of the others ; yet such a mighty volume of foam boiled up as gave me a startling idea of the prodigious weight of the mass . The sight made me very anxious about my own state , and to satisfy my mind I got upon the ice and walked round the vessel , and to get a true view of her posture went to the extreme end of the rocks beyond her bows , and finally came to the conclusion that , supposing the ice should crumble away from her sides so as to cause the weight of the schooner to render it top-heavy , her buoyancy on touching the water would certainly tear her keel out of its frosty setting and leave her floating . Indeed , so sure was I of this that I saw , next to the ice splitting and freeing her in that way , the best thing that could happen would be its capsizal .