man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded
with hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and
complex that one could see five or ten different faces besides
the real one, as one can see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And
yet while his face seemed like a scripture older than the gods,
his eyes were quite bright, blue, and startled like those of a
baby. They looked as if they had only an instant before been
fitted into his head.

Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster
spoke that Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had
spoken. He said something or nothing. And then he waited for this
dwarfish voice that had been hidden under the mountains of the
world. At last it did speak, and spoke in English, with a foreign
accent that was neither Latin nor Teutonic. He suddenly stretched
out a long and very dirty forefinger, and cried in a voice of
clear recognition, like a child's: "That's a hole."

He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger,
and then he cried, with a crow of laughter: "And that's a head
come through it."

The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another
sick turn. He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling
madmen who trailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens.
But there was something new and subversive of the universe in the
combination of so much cheerful decision with a body without a
brain.

"Why did they put you in such a place?" he asked at last with