Pierre's face, already pale, became distorted by fury.
He writes like a man whose view is distorted by physical or mental pain.
How little confidence can be placed in the pre-Islamic history appears very clearly from the distorted accounts of Abraha's excursion against the Hejaz, which fell but a few years before the birth of the Prophet, and is the first event in Meccan history which has confirmation from other sources.
Until 1909, when Mr. Alexander Carlyle published his edition of the " love-letters," the full material was not accessible; they had been read by Carlyle's biographer, Froude, and also by Professor Charles Norton, and Norton (in his edition of Carlyle's Early Letters, 1886) declared that Froude had distorted the significance of this correspondence in a sense injurious to the writers.
And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury, struck Vereshchagin on the head with the blunt side of his saber.
