It was a solemn, silent, gloomy assemblage, and the sight of it thrilled through my very flesh and bones. I was not frightened, but appalled, as I saw all those eyes, out of those expressionless dark faces, fixed upon me. I felt as if they were phantoms, or dead men, in whom only the eyes lived. The large man stood up. He was indeed a giant. He seemed to uncoil himself from his throne as he rose. "Unmask," he said. There was a rustle, and the next moment the masks were gone and the cloaks had fallen down. It was an extraordinary assemblage that greeted my eyes; a long array of stern faces, dark and toil-hardened, with great, broad brows and solemn or sinister eyes. Last night I had beheld the council of the Plutocracy. Here was the council of the Proletariat. The large heads at one end of the line were matched by the large heads at the other. A great injustice, or series of wrongs, working through many generations, had wrought out results that in some sense duplicated each other. Brutality above had produced brutality below; cunning there was answered by cunning here; cruelty in the aristocrat was mirrored by cruelty in the workman. High and low were alike victims--unconscious victims--of a system. The crime was not theirs; it lay at the door of the shallow, indifferent, silly generations of the past. My eyes sought the officers. I noticed that Maximilian was disguised--out of an excess of caution, as I supposed--with eye-glasses and a large dark mustache. His face, I knew, was really beardless. I turned to the president. Such a man I had never seen before. He was, I should think, not less than six feet six inches high, and broad in proportion. His great arms hung down until the monstrous hands almost touched the knees. His skin was quite dark, almost negroid; and a thick, close mat of curly black hair covered his huge head like a thatch. His face was muscular, ligamentous; with great bars, ridges and whelks of flesh, especially about the jaws and on the forehead. But the eyes fascinated me. They were the eyes of a wild beast, deep-set, sullen and glaring; they seemed to shine like those of the cat-tribe, with a luminosity of their own. This, then--I said to myself--must be Cæsar, the commander of the dreaded Brotherhood. A movement attracted me to the man who sat below him; he had spoken to the president.