There were no remains of clothing anywhere visible. The man must have been seized naked.
Gilliatt, attentively examining, began to remove the shells from the skeleton. What had this man been? The body was admirably dissected; it looked as if prepared for the study of anatomy; all the flesh was stripped; not a muscle remained; not a bone was missing. If Gilliatt had been learned in science, he might have demonstrated the fact. The periostea, denuded of their covering, were white and smooth, as if they had been polished. But for some green mould of sea-mosses here and there, they would have been like ivory. The cartilaginous divisions were delicately inlaid and arranged. The tomb sometimes produces this dismal mosaic work.
The body was, as it were, interred under the heap of dead crabs. Gilliatt disinterred it.
Suddenly he stooped, and examined more closely.
He had perceived around the vertebral column a sort of belt.
It was a leathern girdle, which had evidently been worn buckled upon the waist of the man when alive.
The leather was moist; the buckle rusty.
Gilliatt pulled the girdle; the vertebra of the skeleton resisted, and he was compelled to break through them in order to remove it. A crust of small shells had begun to form upon it.
He felt it, and found a hard substance within, apparently of square form. It was useless to endeavour to unfasten the buckle, so he cut the leather with his knife.
The girdle contained a little iron box and some pieces of gold. Gilliatt counted twenty guineas.