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 over
whelming 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. It was six feet high, so that we could all stand comfortably, and may
have been ten feet long by eight feet wide. Upon the wooden pillars at
the side I saw that Egyptian hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by
burning. Dr. Silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. He placed a
fourth in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark
the entrance to the tunnel. We stood and stared about us, instinctively
holding our breath. “Empty, by God!” exclaimed Colonel Wragge. His voice trembled with
excitement. And then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, “And
footsteps—look—footsteps in the sand!”

Dr. Silence said nothing. He stooped down and began to make a search of
the chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and
noted the queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and
ceiling after him. Here and there thin trickles of loose sand ran
fizzing down the sides. The atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet
pungent odours, lay utterly still, and the flames of the candles might
have been painted on the air for all the movement they betrayed. And, as I watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly
that I was only standing upright with difficulty in this little
sand-hole of a modern garden in the south of England, for it seemed to
me that I stood, as in vision, at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn
Temple far, far down the river of Time. The illusion was powerful, and
persisted. Granite columns, that rose to heaven, piled themselves about
me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky itself spread above
a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession along
endless and stupendous aisles. This huge and splendid fantasy, borne I
knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that I was actually obliged to
concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor,
as he groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination
on the scene before me. But the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and
his footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently
struck something of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and
resounding echo. He stooped to examine more closely.