Prometheus reading the readings of an illustrated man

[alice wellintown]

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet
and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written
out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in
his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one
volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his
own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon
they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought
it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of
his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg- "Oh,
devilish tantalization of the gods!"