“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.