Not a door, not a window was left in the building.  The doors had been burnt, some on the spot, and the charcoal of them was still jagged with the action of the fire, which had gone out of itself, powerless, no doubt, to get to the heart of those massive joints of oak fastened together with iron nails.  As to the windows, all the panes having been broken, night birds, alarmed by the torch, flew away through their holes.  At the same time, gigantic bats began to trace their vast, silent circles around the intruders, whilst the light of the torch made their shadows tremble on the high stone walls.  Monk concluded that there could be no man in the convent, since wild beasts and birds were there still, and fled away at his approach.

After having passed the rubbish, and torn away more than one branch of ivy that had made itself a guardian of the solitude, Athos arrived at the vaults situated beneath the great hall, but the entrance of which was from the chapel.  There he stopped.  “Here we are, general,” said he.

“This, then, is the slab?”

“Yes.”

“Ay, and here is the ring — but the ring is sealed into the stone.”

“We must have a lever.”

“That’s a very easy thing to find.”

Whilst looking around them, Athos and Monk perceived a little ash of about three inches in diameter, which had shot up in an angle of the wall, reaching a window, concealed by its branches.

“Have you a knife?” said Monk to the fisherman.

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Cut down this tree, then.”

The fisherman obeyed, but not without notching his cutlass.  When the ash was cut and fashioned into the shape of a lever, the three men penetrated into the vault.

“Stop where you are,” said Monk to the fisherman.  “We are going to dig up some powder; your light may be dangerous.”

The man drew back in a sort of terror, and faithfully kept to the post assigned him, whilst Monk and Athos turned behind a column at the foot of which, penetrating through a crack, was a moonbeam, reflected exactly on the stone which the Comte de la Fere had come so far in search.

“This is it,” said Athos, pointing out to the general the Latin inscription.

“Yes,” said Monk.

Then, as if still willing to leave the Frenchman one means of evasion, —

“Do you not observe that this vault has already been broken into,” continued he, “and that several statues have already been knocked down?”

“My lord, you have, without doubt, heard that the religious respect of your Scots loves to confide to the statues of the dead the valuable objects they have possessed during their lives.  Therefore, the soldiers had reason to think that under the pedestals of the statues which ornament most of these tombs, a treasure was hidden.  They have consequently broken down pedestal and statue:  but the tomb of the venerable cannon, with which we have to do, is not distinguished by any monument.  It is simple, therefore it has been protected by the superstitious fear which your Puritans have always had of sacrilege.  Not a morsel of the masonry of this tomb has been chipped off.”