midnight
For though he was tall , and strong , yet strange ! his body and his limbs were rounded , and delicately shaped , and slender , with soft and tender hands and feet that were almost too small , even for a girl : and as he moved , he fell as if by accident into attitudes that as it were imitated unconsciously the careless grace of Shrí -LSB- 16 -RSB- , caught unaware when she thinks that there is nobody to look at her , and carved by a cunning sculptor in stone upon a temple wall ; so that the eyes of all followed him as if against their will , drawn to him by an involuntary admiration that they could not understand , not realising that in his case only , the beauty of their own sex was reinforced , and as it were , reduplicated with the magic of a spell , by the mysterious and additional fascination of the other . And his face was so strange that whoever saw it , started , and fell , after a little while , into a kind of dream . And yet this was not merely by reason of its beauty , though that beauty was excessive , resembling a vision seen suddenly in the water by a Dryad , musing at midnight by a moonlit pool , with eyes that resembled the reflections of the shadows of the lotuses , and eyebrows that met together , in the middle of his brow , each drawn exactly in imitation of the other , like a lotus-fibre half in and half out of water , and lips that were almost too red , resembling that love-sick nymph 's own pair of _ bimba _ lips , mirrored -LSB- 17 -RSB- in the clear black water , and dying to be kissed by others like themselves . But wonderful ! the Creator had put into his face some ingredient of recollection , so that without knowing why , every beholder found himself plunged , as it were , into the agitation of dreamy reminiscence , and said within himself : Ha ! now , somewhere or other , in this birth or another , I have seen that miracle of a face before .