Yellow and bony was the face too, with its bald skull and hooked nose, its angular cheekbones and bushy, reddish-yellow moustaches, whose full curve gave the grey and stubbly hollows of the cheeks a yet hollower look. The eyes were closed, with a certain unnatural definiteness⁠—pressed down, not shut, thought Hans Castorp. That was what they called the last service of love; but it happened rather as a service to the survivors than to the dead. And it must be done betimes too, soon after death; for if the myosin process went far in the muscles, it would be too late, he would lie there and stare and one could no longer sustain the illusion of his slumber.