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.