The scene revealed was one of the wildest confusion. Lids had been torn from coffins and lay splintered upon the floor. Mummy wrappings were tossed here and there, helter skelter. On the floor over in one corner, lay a mummy, with the head torn from the shoulders and lying several feet away from the body.
The old Egyptian threw up his hands.
“Too late! Too late!” he moaned, and tore his hair. “The tomb has been rifled!”
CHAPTER XVIII
A Night of Horror
Zeta Phalos’ companions fully shared his feelings, though they repressed them more than their emotional Oriental comrade.
“All for nothing! All for nothing!” moaned Phalos. “After all these years and all this effort, to find the tomb of Ras-Ameses too late!”
A sense of futility and depression, too great for words, gripped the hearts of all the men.
But from this first despondency a thought came to the professor that made him start up with renewed animation.
“Let me have that flashlight, will you, Frank, for a minute?” he asked.
The captain relinquished it, and the professor picked up a piece of the broken coffin lid and examined it with care. Then he gathered up the other pieces and laid them together as they had been originally.