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After that he shut his lips and continued motionless while the boy brushed the flies from his eye-sockets; but the Hermit's heart sank, and for the first time he felt all the weariness of the way he had fared, and the great distance dividing him from home.
The flies that crept into his nose and his mouth and his eye-sockets, and bit him through his clothing, and the hateful sounds from the village assured him of all its reality. The blazing day burnt itself to a close, and night came hard upon its heels, still baking and breathless.
In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head.
Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton; he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent comments, and when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows deepened queerly in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical expression of an ironical goblin.
Excepting his eyes he had no appearance of humanity left; he was a long, perfectly red shape; his broken bonds hung down his thighs, but they could not be distinguished from the tendons of his wrists, which were laid quite bare; his mouth remained wide open; from his eye-sockets there darted flames which seemed to rise up to his hair; and the wretch still walked on!
The white front of the house was still standing, though riven from top to bottom, and through its empty window-places the westering sun poured great streams of fire which looked like flame shining through the eye-sockets of a gigantic skull. "I did that well," she said; "and yet how blind I was! I should have known that he spoke the truth when he said the letters were not there.
The white hands removed the mask, and the floating coils of hair, and revealed, to Sir Norman's horror-struck gaze, the grisly face and head, and the hollow eye-sockets, the grinning mouth, and fleshless cheeks of a skeleton! He saw it but for one fearful instant the next, she had thrown up both arms, and leaped headlong into the loathly plague-pit.
Shadowy eye-sockets, deep as those of a death's head, suddenly turned into pits of lustre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining; wrinkles were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated entirely by a changed ray.
They had dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the brows; but every touch had a meaning it was not the languid hand of time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and action. She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.
They were more than twice the size, on the average, of Earth people, and at first glance seemed to resemble them very much, save that their eyes, of which each Martian was possessed of two, were set on the ends of long tentacles which could stretch forth to a length of two feet or more from the eye-sockets and thus be turned in any direction.
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