The doors, of course, did not long withstand the blows of the axes. The soldiers smashed them and stormed into the chancel, where the helpless monks stood assembled in their priestly attire, with the Superior, the aged Gurij, at their head. He, venerable old man, knelt down and held out a gilt cross to the enemy, and at the same time asked for mercy for himself and his helpless brothers. But he was at once ruthlessly struck down by the leader, and the cross snatched from his hands. Then they set to work upon the others, and struck them down man by man. There was only one who offered anything like resistance. Ambrose had rushed into the Sanctuary and put on the coat of armour and seized the sword. Thus armed, he thrust himself forward, and restrained some of the enemy who were on the point of killing the rest of the monks. He struck out all round, and defended himself with great spirit, his back being against the Sanctuary, while the bodies of his dead and dying brethren lay in a heap at his feet, and the whole of the floor of the church flowed with their blood. All of a sudden, as if shot from a cannon, a man sprang out of the Sanctuary to his assistance. It was the huge, powerful Jussi, his trusty friend. Jussi had entered by a secret door, and had armed himself with a long, heavy iron crowbar. Armed with this, he sprang forward in front of Ambrose and wielded it with his giant-like strength, and dealt blows with such violence on all sides that he mowed down like grass a number of the soldiers, and drove the others back. But like a swarm of bees they surrounded him again from all sides, so that at last, mortally wounded, he turned towards Ambrose, and, falling over him, gasped: ‘Fly for it—Unnas is waiting—secret door.’ More he could not utter, before he was stabbed through and through a dozen times. Ambrose leaped over the half-door of the Sanctuary, slammed firmly back the upper half of it, and so gained a moment’s respite. A secret door opened out of the Sanctuary into the back of the monastic enclosure, and through that door peeped the terror-stricken face of Unnas. ‘Come, come,’ he whispered. The Sanctuary door crashed and burst in just as Ambrose disappeared through the secret door, which was so placed that the soldiers had not detected it, and so had not guarded it. But, in escaping through the wooden fencing which surrounded the whole of the monastery, Unnas and Ambrose had to jump across the burning remains of a part of the servants’ dwellings. Unnas jumped over them first, and his Finn’s dress and thick cap protected him from the flames, but Ambrose, with nothing on his head, had his face badly scorched, although he had held his hands over it.