He said, “It must be a thready silk fringe.”
He felt further in. It was somewhat warm. Knight instantly felt somewhat cold.
To find the coldness of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter frigidity is anticipated.
“God only knows what it is,” he said.
He felt further, and in the course of a minute put his hand upon a human head. The head was warm, but motionless. The thready mass was the hair of the head—long and straggling, showing that the head was a woman’s.
Knight in his perplexity stood still for a moment, and collected his thoughts. The vicar’s account of the fall of the tower was that the workmen had been undermining it all the day, and had left in the evening intending to give the finishing stroke the next morning. Half an hour after they had gone the undermined angle came down. The woman who was half buried, as it seemed, must have been beneath it at the moment of the fall.
Knight leapt up and began endeavouring to remove the rubbish with his hands. The heap overlying the body was for the most part fine and dusty, but in immense quantity. It would be a saving of time to run for assistance. He crossed to the churchyard wall, and hastened down the hill.
A little way down an intersecting road passed over a small ridge, which now showed up darkly against the moon, and this road here formed a kind of notch in the sky-line. At the moment that Knight arrived at the crossing he beheld a man on this eminence, coming towards him. Knight turned aside and met the stranger.
“There has been an accident at the church,” said Knight, without preface. “The tower has fallen on somebody, who has been lying there ever since. Will you come and help?”
“That I will,” said the man.