Roby:
In that black and white edition, what is he explanation given for dropping Tintin and Milou in the sea inside the coffins, instead of mummifying them in the king's tomb?
It's not really clear what's going on, to be honest...
I mean, really the
first question we ought to ask is why the gang were mummifying
anyone?
It's not just something you do casually, and in the circumstances it seems hardly worth their time...
What with all the secret bases, mummifying your enemies, custom-building novelty sarcophagi to accommodate the very tall Lord Carnival's hat
and a small dog, and generally dressing up in hooded robes and such - they have
really over-complicated things for themselves!
Obviously the real-world answer is that the hall of mummies is both a striking image
and a great comedy-scare for the reader when the coffins for Tintin and Snowy are shown, but the story as it has been unfolding doesn't really warrant the preparations of the gang.
Nor does Hergé bother to give us any great detail, because he wants to keep the story moving along.
Having played the shock value of the mummification threat, he can neither actually carry it out (end of series), nor tie up the progress of his heroes to the east by having them escape again, so he simply has them delivered - without further explanation - along with the drugs.
Putting in the slightly nightmarish images induced by the knock-out gas covers up a multitude of sins really well, as it diverts the reader's attention away from asking questions about the lack of details: how did the smugglers find out about the tomb, when it was supposedly lost and buried in the desert? Why, if it is so easy to find, was it lost in the first place? A string of eminent Egyptologists have found it, and, rather than move to a less-easy-to-find location, the gang have bumped them off one at a time, mummified them, then put them on display...? Who is in the tomb to trap Tintin, Snowy and Sarcophagus?
The questions mount up - and then Hergé effectively wipes our collective memories by knocking us out. Genius!
There's what may be a slight clue in that Rastapopoulos appears as one of the nightmare figures, smoking a cigar, but by the same token, the Thom(p)sons, Snowy and Sarcophagus are there too, and they are not presumably to be held as suspects.
The crew of the boat aren't any wiser than the reader however, because in the black-and-white version there is no coastguard vessel to come along side, frightening the smugglers into ditching their illicit cargo.
Instead you get a brief dialogue, where an unspecified person (presumably the captain, from information in the previous frame, who becomes Allen in the colour version) who doesn't like the look of the coffins, and has them dumped without ceremony ("And that? Call that cargo? Ditch it... Chuck those old relics overboard right now!").
So I'd say that all we know is that the things that happen happen, without any given reason, and the revised version isn't much clearer.