But not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of
a revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed
the intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and I slept the sleep
of the dead, dreamless and undisturbed. A touch on the shoulder woke
me, and I saw Dr. Silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out.
“Come,” he said, “it’s tea-time. You’ve slept the best part of a dozen
hours.”
I sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and
talked. He looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter
than usual.
“Colonel Wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. We’re going out to
unearth this mummy at once,” he said; “and there’s no reason we should
not get away by the morning train.”
“I’m ready to go to-night, if you are,” I said honestly.
But Dr. Silence shook his head.
“I must see this through to the end,” he said gravely, and in a tone
that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He
went on talking while I dressed.
“This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and
none of them are cases to trifle with,” he explained, “for the mummies
of important people--kings, priests, magicians--were laid away with
profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected,
as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against
destruction.
“The general belief,” he went on, anticipating my questions, “held,
of course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its
Ka,--the owner’s spirit,--but it is not improbable that the magical
embalming was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of
the body preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline
of earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful
guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to
remove the mummy, or especially to unwind it--well,” he added, with
meaning, “you have seen--and you _will_ see.”
I caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It
was deeply serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he
believed and knew.
“The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too,”
he continued, “for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making
a magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he must
have known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the
still flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he
did not know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy’s guardian
was a fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw,
it can be released by it.”
“Then that awful figure in the laundry?” I asked, thrilled to find him
so communicative.
“Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its
agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old.”
“And Miss Wragge----?” I ventured once more.
“Ah, Miss Wragge,” he repeated with increased gravity, “Miss Wragge----”
A knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready,
and the Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was
broken. Dr. 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
overwhelming 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.
He was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this
happened, and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. In
less than a minute a smooth surface became visible--the surface of a
wooden covering. The next thing I saw was that he had raised it and was
peering down into a space below. Instantly, a strong odour of nitre
and bitumen, mingled with the strange perfume of unknown and powdered
aromatics, rose up from the uncovered space and filled the vault,
stinging the throat and making the eyes water and smart.
“The mummy!” whispered Dr. Silence, looking up into our faces over his
candle; and as he said the word I felt the soldier lurch against me,
and heard his breathing in my very ear.
“The mummy!” he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to
look.
It is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in
me so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had
not a little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even
experimented magically with not a few. But there was something in the
sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead
and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of
centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of Egypt
had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years
before--something in the sight of it lying there and breathing its own
spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in this remote
land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and touched
that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears
and the passion of true worship.
I remember turning quickly from the Colonel, lest he should see my
emotion, yet fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch John Silence
by the arm, and then fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered
his head and was hiding his face in his hands.
A kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of I know not what
utter deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision I heard the magical
old chauntings from the Book of the Dead, and saw the Gods pass by in
dim procession, the mighty, immemorial Beings who were yet themselves
only the personified attributes of the true Gods, the God with the
Eyes of Fire, the God with the Face of Smoke. I saw again Anubis, the
dog-faced deity, and the children of Horus, eternal watcher of the
ages, as they swathed Osiris, the first mummy of the world, in the
scented and mystic bands, and I tasted again something of the ecstasy
of the justified soul as it embarked in the golden Boat of Ra, and
journeyed onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed.
And then, as Dr. Silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched
the still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose
again to our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of
years, and time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in
haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world.
A gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved
quickly backwards. It came close to our faces and then seemed to play
about the walls and ceiling.
“The last of the Fire--still waiting for its full accomplishment,” he
muttered; but I heard both words and hissing as things far away, for I
was still busy with the journey of the soul through the Seven Halls of
Death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to men.
The earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the
mummy, and round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass,
stood the four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the
cynocephalus, and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail
parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body. Even the
amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of the Ka, and the lamp with
seven wicks were there. Only the sacred scarabæus was missing.
“Not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place,” I heard Dr.
Silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at Colonel Wragge with
fixed gaze, “but it has been partially unwound,”--he pointed to the
wrappings of the breast,--“and--the scarabæus has been removed from the
throat.”
The hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had
ceased; only from time to time we heard it as though it passed
backwards and forwards in the tunnel; and we stood looking into each
other’s faces without speaking.
Presently Colonel Wragge made a great effort and braced himself. I
heard the sound catch in his throat before the words actually became
audible.
“My sister,” he said, very low. And then there followed a long pause,
broken at length by John Silence.
“It must be replaced,” he said significantly.
“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.
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 towards me, his face pale, and genuinely sad.
“Scorched and blasted,” he whispered.