him, and though I was later to become better acquainted with his
kind, I may say that that single cursory examination of this awful
travesty on Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires
had I been a free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy
could not quickly enough have carried me far from this hideous
creature.

Its hairless body was a strange and ghoulish blue, except for a
broad band of white which encircled its protruding, single eye: an
eye that was all dead white--pupil, iris, and ball.

Its nose was a ragged, inflamed, circular hole in the centre of
its blank face; a hole that resembled more closely nothing that I
could think of other than a fresh bullet wound which has not yet
commenced to bleed.

Below this repulsive orifice the face was quite blank to the chin,
for the thing had no mouth that I could discover.

The head, with the exception of the face, was covered by a tangled
mass of jet-black hair some eight or ten inches in length. Each
hair was about the bigness of a large angleworm, and as the thing
moved the muscles of its scalp this awful head-covering seemed
to writhe and wriggle and crawl about the fearsome face as though
indeed each separate hair was endowed with independent life.

The body and the legs were as symmetrically human as Nature could
have fashioned them, and the feet, too, were human in shape, but
of monstrous proportions. From heel to toe they were fully three
feet long, and very flat and very broad.