And everything about her had struck him especially, although there
was nothing conventional about her at all. He laughed weakly at
the recollection, for she had been as innocent of garb as Eve
before the fig-leaf adventure. Squat and lean at the same time,
asymmetrically limbed, string-muscled as if with lengths of
cordage, dirt-caked from infancy save for casual showers, she was
as unbeautiful a prototype of woman as he, with a scientist's eye,
had ever gazed upon. Her breasts advertised at the one time her
maturity and youth; and, if by nothing else, her sex was advertised
by the one article of finery with which she was adorned, namely a
pig's tail, thrust though a hole in her left ear-lobe. So lately
had the tail been severed, that its raw end still oozed blood that
dried upon her shoulder like so much candle-droppings. And her
face! A twisted and wizened complex of apish features, perforated
by upturned, sky-open, Mongolian nostrils, by a mouth that sagged
from a huge upper-lip and faded precipitately into a retreating
chin, by peering querulous eyes that blinked as blink the eyes of
denizens of monkey-cages.

Not even the water she brought him in a forest-leaf, and the
ancient and half-putrid chunk of roast pig, could redeem in the
slightest the grotesque hideousness of her. When he had eaten
weakly for a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see her,
although again and again she poked them open to peer at the blue of
them. Then had come the sound. Nearer, much nearer, he knew it to
be; and he knew equally well, despite the weary way he had come,
that it was still many hours distant. The effect of it on her had
been startling. She cringed under it, with averted face, moaning
and chattering with fear. But after it had lived its full life of