Oregon landscape crispiness status:

'I'll go,' said Hornblower. He could not trust Jones or the marines. He could trust no one but himself. He seized the reel of quick match and squeezed through the shattered door. There were timbered steps under his feet, but he expected that and so did not fall down them. He crouched under the roof and felt his way down. There was a landing and a turn, and then more steps, much darker, and then his outstretched hands touched a hanging curtain of serge. He thrust this aside and stepped cautiously beyond it. Here it was utterly black. He was in the magazine. He was in the area where the ammunition party would wear list slippers, because nailed shoes might cause a spark to ignite the gunpowder. He felt cautiously about him; one hand touched a wall of cartridges, serge cylinders ready filled, and the other hand touched the harsh outline of a cask. Those were the powder-barrels--his hand involuntarily withdrew itself, as though it had touched a snake. No time for that sort of idiocy, he was surrounded by violent death.

He drew his cutlass, snarling in the darkness with the intensity of his emotion. Twice he stabbed into the wall of cartridges, and his ears were rewarded by the whispering sound of a cascade of powder-grains pouring out through the gashes he had made. He must have a firm anchorage for the fuse; and he stooped and sank the blade of the cutlass into another cartridge. He unravelled a length of quick match and wound a bight firmly round the hilt, and he buried the end in the pile of powder-grains on the floor; an unnecessarily careful measure, perhaps, when a single spark would set off the explosion. Unreeling the quick match behind him, carefully, very carefully, lest he jerk the cutlass loose, he made his way out past the curtain again, and up the steps, up into the growing light, round the corner. The light through the broken door was dazzling, and he blinked as he came out crouching through it, still unreeling the quick match.