five other balls went
hissing to splinter the vault, plow the ground, or indent the sides of
the cavern.

A burst of laughter replied to this volley; then the arm of the giant
swung round; then was seen to pass through the air, like a falling star,
the train of fire. The barrel, hurled a distance of thirty feet, cleared
the barricade of the dead bodies, and fell amid a group of shrieking
soldiers, who threw themselves on their faces. The officer had followed
the brilliant train in the air; he endeavored to precipitate himself
upon the barrel and tear out the match before it reached the powder it
contained. Useless devotedness! The air had made the flame attached to
the conductor more active; the match, which at rest might have burned
five minutes, was consumed in thirty seconds, and the infernal work
exploded. Furious vortices, hissings of sulphur and niter, devouring
ravages of the fire which caught to objects, the terrible thunder of the
explosion, this is what the second which followed the two seconds we
have described, disclosed in that cavern, equal in horrors to a cavern
of demons. The rock split like planks of deal under the ax. A jet of
fire, smoke, and debris sprang up from the middle of the grotto,
enlarging as it mounted. The large walls of silex tottered and fell upon
the sand, and the sand itself, an instrument of pain when launched from
its hardened bed, riddled the face with its myriads of cutting atoms.
Cries, howlings, imprecations, and existences--all were extinguished in
one immense crash.

The three first compartments became a gulf into which fell back again,
according to its weight, every vegetable, mineral, or human fragment.
Then the lighter sand and ashes fell in their turns, stretching like a
gray winding-sheet and smoking over these dismal funerals. And now seek
in this burning tomb, in this subterraneous volcano, seek for the king's
guards with their blue coats laced with silver. Seek for the officers
brilliant in gold; seek for the arms upon which they depended for their
defense; seek for the stones that have killed them, the ground that has
borne them. One single man has made of all this a chaos more confused,
more shapeless, more terrible than the chaos which existed an hour
before God had created the world. There remained nothing of the three
compartments--nothing by which God could have known His own work. As to
Porthos, after having hurled the barrel of powder amid his enemies, he
had