a little crumpled spray of flowers. I did not touch it with my fingers
naturally, but I managed to loop a piece of twine around the stem,
and by that means I gingerly removed the flowers and carried them to
an orchid-hunter of my acquaintance who chanced to be visiting Manipur.

"Grahame--that was my orchid man's name--pronounced the specimen to be
an unclassified species of _jatropha;_ belonging to the _Curcas_
family. He discovered a sort of hollow thorn, almost like a fang,
amongst the blooms, but was unable to surmise the nature of its
functions. He extracted enough of a certain fixed oil from the flowers,
however, to have poisoned the pair of us!"

"Probably the breaking of a bloom ..."

"Ejects some of this acrid oil through the thorn? Practically the
uncanny thing stings when it is hurt? That is my own idea, Petrie. And
I can understand how these Eastern fanatics accept their sentence--
silence and death--when they have deserved it, at the hands of their
mysterious organization, and commit this novel form of _hara-kiri_.
But I shall not sleep soundly with that brass coffer in my possession
until I know by what means Sir Gregory was induced to touch a Flower
of Silence, and by what means it was placed in his room!"

"But, Smith, why did you direct me to-night to repeat the words,
'Sâkya Mûni'?"

Smith smiled in a very grim fashion.

"It was after the episode I have just related that I made the
acquaintance of that pundit, some of whose statements I have already