“I knew nothing,” the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the words
he hated saying. “Absolutely nothing.”

“It must be returned,” repeated the other, “if it is not now too late. For I fear--I fear----”

Colonel Wragge made a movement of assent with his head. “It shall be,” he said. The place was still as the grave. I do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with
so sudden a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least. The doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when
he straightened up as if he had been shot. “There’s something coming,” said Colonel Wragge under his breath, and
the doctor’s eyes, peering down the small opening of the tunnel, showed
me the true direction. A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point
about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated. “It’s the sand falling in,” I said, though I knew it was foolish. “No,” said the Colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the ring
of iron, “I’ve heard it for some time past. It is something alive--and
it is coming nearer.”

He stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost
noble. The horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there
prepared for anything that might come. “There’s no other way out,” John Silence said. He leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. I knew by the mask-like
expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes,
that he anticipated something that might be very terrible--appalling. The Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still
held my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the
grease all over me; but the soldier had set his into the sand just
behind his feet. Thoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap,
of being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force
we could not grapple with, rushed into my mind. Then I thought of
fire--of suffocation--of being roasted alive. The perspiration began to
pour from my face. “Steady!” came the voice of Dr. Silence to me through the vault. For five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from
each other’s faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and
all the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually
nearer. The tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point
when at last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge. It was
hidden for a moment just behind the broken rim of soil. A jet of sand,
shaken by the close vibration, trickled down on to the ground; I have
never in my life seen anything fall with such laborious leisure. The
next second, uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view. And it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had
anticipated. For the sight of some Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or
even of some demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but
when, instead, I saw the white visage of Miss Wragge framed in that
round opening of sand, followed by her body crawling on all-fours, her
eyes bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles, my first
instinct was to turn and run like a frantic animal seeking a way of
escape. But Dr. Silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and
steadied me, and we both saw the Colonel then drop upon his knees and
come thus to a level with his sister. For more than a whole minute, as
though struck in stone, the two faces gazed silently at each other:
her’s, for all the dreadful emotion in it, more like a gargoyle than
anything human; and his, white and blank with an expression that was
beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he looked down. It
was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close
to the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights. Then John Silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low,
yet perfectly calm and natural. “I am glad you have come,” he said. “You are the one person whose
presence at this moment is most required. And I hope that you may yet
be in time to appease the anger of the Fire, and to bring peace again
to your household, and,” he added lower still so that no one heard it
but myself, “_safety to yourself_.”

And while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the
sand in his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted
chamber and slowly rose upon her feet. At the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy I was fully prepared
to see her scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete
amazement, she merely bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her
knees. Then, after a pause of more than a minute, she raised her eyes
to the roof and her lips began to mutter as in prayer. Her right hand,
meanwhile, which had been fumbling for some time at her throat,
suddenly came away, and before the gaze of all of us she held it out,
palm upwards, over the grey and ancient figure outstretched below. And
in it we beheld glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabæus. Her brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound
that was half cry, half exclamation, but John Silence, standing
directly in front of her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed
downwards to the staring face below. “Replace it,” he said sternly, “where it belongs.”

Miss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. We three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader
who by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly
laid from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat
of the Egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of
life, can form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced
when the silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand. Slowly, before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint rustling of the
immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and bandaged
eyes, stared across the yellow candle-light at the woman who had
violated it. I tried to move--her brother tried to move--but the sand seemed to hold
our feet. I tried to cry--her brother tried to cry--but the sand seemed
to fill our lungs and throat. We could only stare--and, even so, the
sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision....

And when I managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying
once more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face
upturned towards the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and
was lying in the semblance of death with her head and arms upon its
crumbling body. But upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the
sacred scarabæus shining again like a living eye.