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 masklike 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:  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.”