It seemed to me I was looking at the man for the first time, and it was not a pleasant picture.

His face was swarthy, long and thin, with hard, set lips under a long, intensely black moustache, his cheeks strangely crisscrossed by lines.

The nose was large, distinctively Roman, yielding him a hawklike appearance, but it was his eyes which fascinated me.

They were dark, and deeply set, absolute wells of cruelty.

I had never before seen such eyes in the face of a human being; they were beastly, devilish; I could feel my blood chill as I looked into their depths, yet I held myself erect, and waited for the man to speak.