With less obloquy, Vance describes him as "a man of many capabilities, with a disposition at once flexible and pertinacious. He was long of leg, deft of hand, light of finger, soft of tongue ... His darting eye, long inquisitive nose and droll mouth gave his somewhat lean and bony face an expression of vivacity, candor, and affability. He had known many vicissitudes, gaining therefrom a suppleness, a fine discretion, a mastery of both bravado and stealth." Cugel often finds himself in a situation of revenge, and tries to take advantage of those who used him, complaining when they trick him, curse him as he harms them, or expose his wiles. But almost always Cugel comes out on top, leaving a blazing trail of destruction and chaos behind him. He can be said to simultaneously have both the best and worst luck in all the Dying Earth. Cugel fancies himself a seducer of women, but his charms are apparent mainly to himself, and to certain types of women that wish to use him. His record is not good: he trades one, having lost her the rulership of a city (after she had manipulated him), to bandits in exchange for safe passage; another he must leave to drown, in the face of the monster "Magnatz", and does nothing to avert the destruction of her village (after she had broken a promise of everlasting love engagement); he causes the village of a third to be abandoned in dread (after she lies to the local thug religious zealots to get them to use force upon him). It must be said that he treats men scarcely better. For example, he bribes a priest, with all of his very valuable magical items, into tricking fifty pilgrims into a futile pilgrimage, to guard his crossing of a perilous desert – only fifteen survive. On the other hand, Cugel displays a genuine regard for the most selfless of the pilgrims, showing a trait of "do unto others..." which is essentially the basis of the book. Fix-up The components of the fix-up were five novelettes published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between December 1965 and July 1966 and one, the second in sequence, published directly as part of the novel The Eyes of the Overworld in 1966 without any prior magazine appearance. "Cil", the second chapter, was later published as a stand-alone novelette in 1969