Silence shook his head. “I must see this through to the end,” he said gravely, and in a tone
that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He
went on talking while I dressed. “This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and
none of them are cases to trifle with,” he explained, “for the mummies
of important people--kings, priests, magicians--were laid away with
profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected,
as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against
destruction. “The general belief,” he went on, anticipating my questions, “held,
of course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its
Ka,--the owner’s spirit,--but it is not improbable that the magical
embalming was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of
the body preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline
of earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful
guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to
remove the mummy, or especially to unwind it--well,” he added, with
meaning, “you have seen--and you _will_ see.”

I caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It
was deeply serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he
believed and knew. “The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too,”
he continued, “for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making
a magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he must
have known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the
still flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he
did not know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy’s guardian
was a fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw,
it can be released by it.”

“Then that awful figure in the laundry?” I asked, thrilled to find him
so communicative. “Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its
agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old.”

“And Miss Wragge----?” I ventured once more. “Ah, Miss Wragge,” he repeated with increased gravity, “Miss Wragge----”

A knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready,
and the Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was
broken. Dr. Silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. But
his manner told me that in any case no real answer would have been
forthcoming to my question. “And the place to dig in,” I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity,
“will you find it by some process of divination or----?”

He paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me
to finish my dressing. It was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the
Twelve Acre Plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out
of the east. Gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of
sighings. We found the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and
each shouldering his piece, we followed our leader at once in among the
trees. He went straight forward for some twenty yards and then stopped. At his feet lay the blackened circle of one of the burned places. It
was just discernible against the surrounding white grass. “There are three of these,” he said, “and they all lie in a line with
one another. Any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the
laundry--the former Museum--with the chamber where the mummy now lies
buried.”

He at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began
to dig. While I used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. No
one spoke. Colonel Wragge worked the hardest of the three. The soil
was light and sandy, and there were only a few snake-like roots and
occasional loose stones to delay us. The pick made short work of these. And meanwhile the darkness settled about us and the biting wind swept
roaring through the trees overhead. Then, quite suddenly, without a cry, Colonel Wragge disappeared up to
his neck. “The tunnel!” cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red,
breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. “Now, let me lead
the way.” And he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment
later we heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to us. “Hubbard, you come next, and then Colonel Wragge--if he wishes,” we
heard. “I’ll follow you, of course,” he said, looking at me as I scrambled in. The hole was bigger now, and I got down on all-fours in a channel not
much bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness. A minute later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand,
announced the arrival of the Colonel. “Catch hold of my heel,” called Dr. Silence, “and Colonel Wragge can
take yours.”

In this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel
that had been roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up
clumsily by means of wooden pillars and posts. Any moment, it seemed to
me, we might be buried alive. We could not see an inch before our eyes,
but had to grope our way feeling the pillars and the walls. It was
difficult to breathe, and the Colonel behind me made but slow progress,
for the cramped position of our bodies was very severe. We had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much
as ten yards, when I lost my grasp of the doctor’s heel. “Ah!” I heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. He was standing
up in a clear space, and the next moment I was standing beside him. Colonel Wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. Then
Dr. Silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking
matches. Yet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came
over us all. In this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground,
we stood side by side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an
overwhelming apprehension of something ancient, something formidable,
something incalculably wonderful, that touched in each one of us a
sense of the sublime and the terrible even before we could see an inch
before our faces. I know not how to express in language this singular
emotion that caught us here in utter darkness, touching no sense
directly, it seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the
blackness of this underground night there lay something that was mighty
with the mightiness of long past ages. I felt Colonel Wragge press in closely to my side, and I understood the
pressure and welcomed it. No human touch, to me at least, has ever been
more eloquent. Then the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and I
saw John Silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely
by the flickering light below it. I had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing
to explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. We stood
in a small vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with
bars of wood, and the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles.