Tsan-Sgam." The girl stood for a moment puzzled at the
queer name, and then the memory of the strange outlandish human
creatures, from the ends of the world, who used sometimes to
visit her father, in the old time, returned, and with it there
came a sudden upward sweep of the heart - was there an answer to
her longing, somehow, incredibly on the way!
She gave a direction for the visitor to be brought in. He was a
big old man. His body looked long and muscular like that of some
type of Englishmen, but his head and his features were Mongolian.
He was entirely bald, as bald as the palm of a hand, as though
bald from his mother he had so remained to this incredible age.
And age was the impression that he profoundly presented. But it
was age that a tough vitality in the man resisted; as though the
assault of time wore it down slowly and with almost an
imperceptible detritus. The great naked head and the wide
Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the
aspect of some old child. He was dressed with extreme care, in
the very best evening clothes that one could buy in a London
shop.
He bowed, oddly, with a slow doubling of the body, and when he
spoke the girl felt that he was translating his words through
more than one language; as though one were to put one's sentences
into French or Italian and from that, as a sort of intermediary,
into English - as though the way were long, and unfamiliar from
the medium in which the man thought to the one in which he was
undertaking to express it.
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