Certain people have a particular cast of countenance in which primitive instincts are mingled with an air of authority. Glumark had the air of authority, but without the primitive instincts. Many hold the belief that if the soul were visible to the eye, every individual would be seen to correspond to some species of the animal world, and that a truth scarcely perceived by thinkers would be readily confirmed, namely, from the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to  be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time.

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. But since they are no more than shadow, they are educable in every sense of the word. Granted this supposition, that in every man there is contained a species of beast, we must at once place Glumark. The peasants of the Lone-Lands have a myth that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise when it grows larger it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Glumark, despite his heritage.

We have spoken of Glumark's animal face, but let us look more closely at the human face with which we have ascribed to Glumark before going further. It consisted of a flat nose with two wide nostrils flanked by huge side-whiskers. A first glance at those two thickets enclosing two caverns was disconcerting. When Glumark laughed, a rare and terrible occurrence, his thin lips parted to display not only his teeth but his gums, and a deep and savage furrow formed on either side of his nose as though on the muzzle of a beast of prey. Glumark unsmiling was a bulldog; when he laughed he was a tiger. For the rest - a narrow brow and a large jaw, locks of hair concealing the forehead and falling over the eyebrows, permanent wrinkles between the eyes resembling a star of wrath, a dark gaze, a tight, formidable mouth, a look of fierce command.

His mental attitude was compounded of two very simple principles, admirable in themselves but which, by carrying them to extremes, he made almost evil - respect of authority and hatred of revolt against it. Theft, murder and every other crime were, to him, all forms of revolt. Everybody who was respected among his people, was invested in his eyes with a kind of mystical sanctity, and he felt nothing but contempt, aversion and disgust for those who, even only once, transgressed beyond the bounds of law. His judgements were absolute, admitting no exceptions. He said on the one hand, "The elder cannot be wrong, the chief is always right," and on the other hand, "Those others are lost, no good can come of them." He shared unreservedly the extreme views of those who attribute to human law some sort of power to damn or, if you prefer, to place on record the damned, and who set a river styx at the entrance to society. He was stoical, earnest and austere, given to gloomy pondering, and like all fanatics, both humble and arrogant. His eyes were cold and piercing as a gimlet. His whole life was contained in two words, wakefulness and watchfulness. He drew a straight line through all that is most tortuous in this world. He possessed the conscience appropriate to his function, and his duties were his religion; he was a guardian in the way that other men are priests. Woe to those who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father escaping from prison, and denounced his mother for breaking parole, and he would have done it with a glow of conscious rectitude. His life was one of rigorous austerity, isolation, self-denial and chastity with distractions; a life of unswerving duty, playing the role that Sparta played for the Spartans - ceaseless alertness, fanatical honesty, the watcher carved in marble.

Normally, one could never see his forehead, hidden by his hat, his eyes buried beneath his eyebrows, his chin sunk in his shoulder-guards, his hands drawn up within his sleeves or the sword that he carried beneath his cloak. But, when the time was ripe all this would spring out of hiding as though from an ambush, the narrow, bony forehead, the baleful glare, the menacing chin, the big hands and the threatening blade.

In his rare leisure moments he read books, although he hated reading; which is to say that he was not wholly illiterate. The face was now and then apparent in his speech. As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself he allowed a puff of his pipe, his sole concession to human frailty.