In a few days Strickland began to get up. He was nothing but
skin and bone. His clothes hung upon him like rags on a
scarecrow. With his untidy beard and long hair, his features,
always a little larger than life, now emphasised by illness,
he had an extraordinary aspect; but it was so odd that it was
not quite ugly. There was something monumental in his
ungainliness. I do not know how to express precisely the
impression he made upon me. It was not exactly spirituality
that was obvious, though the screen of the flesh seemed almost
transparent, because there was in his face an outrageous
sensuality; but, though it sounds nonsense, it seemed as
though his sensuality were curiously spiritual. There was in
him something primitive. He seemed to partake of those
obscure forces of nature which the Greeks personified in
shapes part human and part beast, the satyr and the faun.
I thought of Marsyas, whom the god flayed because he had dared
to rival him in song. Strickland seemed to bear in his heart
strange harmonies and unadventured patterns, and I foresaw for
him an end of torture and despair.
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