re. That lop-sided
laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original
guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about
him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not
normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think
of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would
look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.

Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed
eccentricity. Syme's original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was
the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with
more terror than anything, except the President's horrible, happy
laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him,
there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme
thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very
distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that
troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure
thought was pain.

He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and differently
wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a man more
obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a
sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing
unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore
the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black
French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer.
But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a
rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded
one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker
poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not
in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer
and warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of
profound colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being
too dense a purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by
being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his
dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not
a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in
the dark heart of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and
pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see jus