"Look there!" he said in a hoarse voice, clutching Godfrey with one hand, and pointing with the other. "Tell me whether I see aright. What's that?"
And there, protruding from the side of the hillock in the place where the mandrake had grown, was—a human hand!
A human hand, rising from the earth, motionless and rigid, the crooked fingers seeming to tell of the agony of a death by suffocation.
Some one, since the morning, had been trying to force a way through the soil at the entrance of the passage, and had lost his life in the attempt.
Such was Idris' first thought. A closer inspection, however, showed that the event had not happened that day. The nails had fallen from the fingers, and there was, besides, a decayed, vegetable look about the hand, differing altogether from the aspect presented by the skin of the newly-dead. How Idris came to overlook it during his morning visit was a mystery, since the hand must have been in its present position for several days, if not for several weeks. Its sudden exposure was perhaps due to the afternoon storm, which had washed away a portion of the soil.
To endeavour to ascertain the identity of the victim by pulling at the withered hand, and thus bringing the decayed form to view, was an act that not only Idris shrank from, but even Godfrey, the surgeon, familiar with the disjecta membra of the dissecting room.
Then Idris, bending forward to examine the hand more closely, gave vent to a peal of laughter.
"Brave heroes we are to be frightened by a plant! It is nothing but the root of the mandrake."
Godfrey drew a breath of relief, as he assured himself by a nearer view that what he had taken for a human hand was indeed the withered root of the mandrake, so apt to assume strange and unaccountable shapes.