"No," he answered as boldly as he could, and then setting his teeth,
turned and tottered straight at the Horror in the chest.
He was there now, and holding the lantern against the thing, examined
it. It was a skeleton of enormous size, and the skull was fixed with
rusty wire to one of the vertebrae.
At this evidence of the handiwork of man his fears almost vanished.
Even in that company he could not help remembering that it is scarcely
to be supposed that spiritual skeletons carry about wire with which to
tie on their skulls.
With a sigh of relief he held up the lantern and looked round. He was
standing in a good-sized vault or chamber, built of rubble stone. Some
of this rubble had fallen in to his left; but otherwise, though the
workmanship showed that it must be of extreme antiquity, the stone
lining was still strong and good. He looked upon the floor, and then
for the first time saw that the nodding skeleton before him was not
the only one. All round lay remnants of the dead. There they were,
stretched out in the form of a circle, of which the stone kist was the
centre.[*] One place in the circle was vacant; evidently it had once
been occupied by the giant frame which now sat within the kist. Next
he looked at the kist itself. It had all the appearance of one of
those rude stone chests in which the very ancient inhabitants of this
island buried the ashes of their cremated dead.
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