John Collier Horace and Lydia painting

John Collier Horace and Lydia paintingCaravaggio Boy with a Basket of Fruit paintingBartolome Esteban Murillo Inmaculada Museo del Prado painting
And there, propped up next to the village well, was the figure Postwand had described, just as he had described it—legless, sexless, the face almost featureless, blind, with skin like badly burned bread, and thick, matted, filthy white hair.
I stopped, appalled.
A woman came out of the hut to which the children had run. She came down the rickety steps and walked up to me. She gestured at my translatomat, and I automatically held it out to her so she could speak into it.
"You came to see the Immortal," she said.
I nodded.
"Two radio fifty," she said.
I got out the money and handed it to her.
"Come this way," she said. She was poorly dressed and not clean, but a fine-looking woman, thirty-five or so, with unusual decisiveness and vigor in her voice and movements.