he 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:
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 t