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:
hers, 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 scarabaeus. 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 candlelight 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 scarabaeus shining again like a living eye. Colonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did,
and I found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise
the frail body of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced
the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot,
while he issued brief directions. I heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that
cramped tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated
with heat, was in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half an
hour to reach the open air. And, even then, we had to wait a
considerable time for the appearance of Dr. Silence. We carried her
undiscovered into the house and up to her own room. “The mummy will cause no further disturbance,” I heard Dr. Silence say
to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night
train, “provided always,” he added significantly, “that you, and yours,
cause it no disturbance.”

It was in a dream, too, that we left. “You did not see her face, I know,” he said to me as we wrapped our
rugs about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite
unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he
turned toward me, his face pale, and genuinely sad.