The clock struck eleven as he passed through it.

Roland stopped, counted the strokes, and slowly walked around the cloister, looking and listening.
He saw nothing and heard no noise.

The monastery was the picture of desolation and solitude; the doors were all open, those of the cells, the chapel, and the refectory.

In the refectory, a vast hall where the tables still stood in their places, Roland noticed five or six bats circling around; a frightened owl flew through a broken casement, and perched upon a tree close by, hooting dismally.
"Good!" said Roland, aloud; "I'll make my headquarters here; bats and owls are the vanguards of ghosts." The sound of that human voice, lifted in the midst of this solitude, darkness and desolation, had something so uncanny, so lugubrious about it, that it would have caused even the speaker to shudder, had not Roland, as he himself said, been inaccessible to fear.

He looked about for a place from which he could command the entire hall.