The Red Hand | Page 8

sign of the hand, and the insupportable conviction seized him that
between the death of this fashionable West End doctor and the weird
spirals of the tablet there were most secret and unimaginable links.
For days he sat before his desk gazing at the tablet, unable to resist its
lodestone fascination, and yet quite helpless, without even the hope of
solving the symbols so secretly inscribed. At last, desperate he called in
Mr. Phillipps in consultation, and told in brief the story of the finding
the stone.
"Dear me!" said Phillipps, "this is extremely curious; you have had a
find indeed. Why, it looks to me even more ancient than the Hittite seal.
I confess the character, if it is a character, is entirely strange to me.
These whorls are really very quaint." "Yes, but I want to know what
they mean. You must remember this tablet is the 'black heaven' of the
letter found in Sir Thomas Vivian's pocket; it bears directly on his
death."
"Oh, no, that is nonsense! This is, no doubt, an extremely ancient tablet,
which has been stolen from some collection. Yes, the hand makes an
odd coincidence, but only a coincidence after all."
"My dear Phillipps, you are a living example of the truth of the axiom
that extreme scepticism is mere credulity. But can you decipher the
inscription?"
"I undertake to decipher anything," said Phillipps. "I do not believe in
the insoluble. These characters are curious, but I cannot fancy them to
be inscrutable."
"Then take the thing away with you and make what you can of it. It has
begun to haunt me; I feel as if I had gazed too long into the eyes of the
Sphinx."
Phillipps departed with the tablet in an inner pocket. He had not much

doubt of success, for he had evolved thirty-seven rules for the solution
of inscriptions. Yet when a week had passed and he called to see Dyson
there was no vestige of triumph on his features. He found his friend in a
state of extreme irritation, pacing up and down in the room like a man
in a passion. He turned with a start as the door opened.
"Well," said Dyson, "you have got it? What is it all about?"
"My dear fellow, I am sorry to say I have completely failed. I have tried
every known device in vain. I have even been so officious as to submit
it to a friend at the Museum, but he, though a man of prime authority
on the subject, tells me he is quite at fault. It must be some wreckage of
a vanished race, almost, I think, a fragment of another world than ours.
I am not a superstitious man, Dyson, and you know that I have no truck
with even the noble delusions, but I confess I yearn to be rid of this
small square of blackish stone. Frankly, it has given me an ill week; it
seems to me troglodytic and abhorred."
Phillipps drew out the tablet and laid it on the desk before Dyson.
"By the way," he went on, "I was right at all events in one particular; it
has formed part of some collection. There is a piece of grimy paper on
the back that must have been a label."
"Yes, I noticed that," said Dyson, who had fallen into deepest
disappointment; "no doubt the paper is a label. But as I don't much care
where the tablet originally came from, and only wish to know what the
inscription means, I paid no attention to the paper. The thing is a
hopeless riddle, I suppose, and yet it must surely be of the greatest
importance."
Phillipps left soon after, and Dyson, still despondent, took the tablet in
his hand and carelessly turned it over. The label had so grimed that it
seemed merely a dull stain, but as Dyson looked at it idly, and yet
attentively, he could see pencil-marks, and he bent over it eagerly, with
his glass to his eye. To his annoyance, he found that part of the paper
had been torn away, and he could only with difficulty make out odd
words and pieces of words. First he read something that looked like

"in-road", and then beneath, "stony-hearted step----" and a tear cut off
the rest. But in an instant a solution suggested itself, and he chuckled
with huge delight.
"Certainly," he said out loud, "this is not only the most charming but
the most convenient quarter in all London; here I am, allowing for the
accidents of side streets, perched on a tower of observation."
He glanced triumphant out of the window across the street to the gate
of the British Museum. Sheltered by the boundary wall of that
agreeable institution, a "screever", or artist