I saw someone in front of me lying in a bed. I could not at once
decide if it was a man or a woman. Indeed at first I doubted if it
was anything human. But, afterwards, I knew it to be a man,--for
this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible such a
creature could be feminine. The bedclothes were drawn up to his
shoulders; only his head was visible. He lay on his left side, his
head resting on his left hand; motionless, eyeing me as if he
sought to read my inmost soul. And, in very truth, I believe he
read it. His age I could not guess; such a look of age I had never
imagined. Had he asserted that he had been living through the
ages, I should have been forced to admit that, at least, he looked
it. And yet I felt that it was quite within the range of
possibility that he was no older than myself,--there was a
vitality in his eyes which was startling. It might have been that
he had been afflicted by some terrible disease, and it was that
which had made him so supernaturally ugly.

There was not a hair upon his face or head, but, to make up for
it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of
wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small
as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on
the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its
dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of
some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face--and an
uncomfortable one I--was that, practically, it stopped short at
the mouth. The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately
underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there
was none. This deformity--for the absence of chin amounted to
that--it was which gave to the face the appearance of something
not human,--that, and the eyes. For so marked a feature of the man