Now X, as foretold, had returned to their city. He brought a sword, and if he also carried peace with him, it was a peace that passed understanding. And his name, in this place and time, had suddenly become Legion. Each one of the horde was X, but such an X as had never been dreamed of. He was eight feet tall, and made of eternalloy over which plastiskin had been stretched to simulate flesh. So clever was the craftsmanship that only one who knew beforehand, like Revanche, that the creature was begotten in the factory could have told that here was not a living X. The artistry extended to the magnificent body, which had broad shoulders that tapered to slim hips and long, panther-muscled legs. The delicate feet were shod in brass, as the gods of old Egypt were reputed to be shod. IV Revanche, who was seeing for the first time the Messinan's work, scrutinized with cynical elation the creature who had landed closest to him. Awed despite himself, he saw that a fast-whirling halo hovered perhaps a foot above the noble head. Every five seconds the luminous ring changed color. Even as he watched it, it changed color. From gold it dissolved into a bloody red, and then into a gangrenous green. Next it became a bruise purple, a witching hour black and finally shifted back to gold. The aspect that startled Revanche most, however, was the face. The false flesh-mask stretched over the metal skull was a grotesque representation of the features of X as seen in the paintings of the Spanish and Italian masters. There was the somewhat narrow and bearded face with the "sensitive" full-lipped mouth and the gentle nose that poised between straightness and aquilinity. There were the same eyes--flowing and compassionate. But on the mask those conventional features had been slightly altered, or, as it were, "pulled." Though the lips had been cast with meekness and love on their curves, the smile had been lengthened, and subtly twisted until it had passed over the boundary of a smile and became a snarl. Whatever fearsome hand had fashioned that mask had known that a snarl is an elongated smile, just as a smile is a modified snarl. The hand had perceived that it was the snarl of the ape that had become the smile of the man, perceived too that, the process of evolution continuing, the smile of the man had passed into the ultra-tender mouth-curving of X. And now, that smile which was the apex of Nature's efforts, had been remolded, recast, rehammered, and returned into a caricature of itself. Da Vincelleo was not only a scientist, he was an artist supreme. In that mask he had shown the people of Dafess a reflection of themselves. And he made them see what they had done to X, how they had twisted the face of universal love into an inverted image of their true nature--that of self-love. The mask was the face of X--_reductio ad absurdum_.