A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point about halfway 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 masklike expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes, that he anticipated something that might be very terrible⁠—appalling.