Before he was born it had been taken by his father.
Ill-cured it was, and battered and marred with ancientness and rough usage.

Yet he studied its features, decided that it had once had two lips as live as his own and a mouth as vocal and hungry as his had often been in the past.

Two eyes and a nose it had, a thatched crown of roof, and a pair of ears like to his own.

Two legs and a body it must once have had, and desires and lusts.

Heats of wrath and of love, so he decided, had also been its once on a time when it never thought to die.
A head that amazed him much, whose history went back before his father's and grandfather's time, was the head of a Frenchman, although Bashti knew it not.