He sounded one or two, but found them empty.

Time had shrunk their stout timbers and tapped their contents.
Then he held up his flickering light and looked quickly round this prison-house which had turned into a tomb, and shivered, as a dim idea of what it all meant came over him.
It was a large, low, natural rock chamber, and all round the walls were black slits which might mean it passages leading on into the bowels of the island.

To investigate them all would mean the work of many days.
The dead man, the perished packages, the empty kegs--there was nothing else, except his own boot lying in the mouth of the largest of the black slits, as though anxious on its own account to be gone.
The still air was already becoming heavy with the pungent smoke of his torches.

He stepped cautiously across to the body again, and picked a couple of buttons from the coat.

They came off in his hand, and when he touched the buckles on the shoes they did the same.