A few casualties amongst the peasants were reported, but not a life had been lost and hardly a bone was broken.

Yet Giovanni was missing.
With the confidence of men who understood that the magazine must have been so entirely destroyed at once as to annihilate all further danger in an instant, the searchers went up to the ruin of the outer wall and peered into the great dusty pit out of which the foundations of the magazine had been hurled hundreds of feet into the air.

Something of the outline of the enclosure could still be traced, and the sentinels whom Giovanni had warned from their post had already told their story.
They found, too, that the missing man himself had been one of the sentries, and the inference was clear: their commanding officer had been killed before he had reached the last post.
For a long time they searched in vain.

Great masses of masonry had shot through the outer wall and had rolled on or been stopped by the inequalities of the ground.

Most of the wall itself was fallen and its direction could only be traced by a heap of ruins.