Paired with the owlish, reticent young Watson, Sherlock Holmes embarks on the solution of a mystery that involves a hallucinatory and lethal drug, and a religious cult celebrating ancient Egyptian rites of mummification. They all enter and view, from a hiding place, an Ancient-Egyptian-themed cult, known as the Rame-Tep (also known as Rametep and Ramatep), performing a ceremony in which a young girl is hypnotized, wrapped in linen and killed with the pouring of boiling wax atop her body. The trio gets spotted, and are each hit by a thorn and experience their own horrific hallucinations in a graveyard, but eventually recover.