into my hands? flashed desperately through his head. How did it run? “KRAKATIT! Will Eng. P. send his address?” Eng. P., that means Prokop; and Krakatit, that is the cursed place, that foggy place somewhere in his head, that morbid swelling in his brain which he did not like to think about, which led him to go about running his head into walls, that which had ceased to have a name—what was it there? “KRAKATIT!” Prokop’s eyes again grew wide through the interior blow which he had received. Suddenly he saw . . . a certain lead salt, and in a flash there unrolled before him the film that had become blurred in his memory; a desperate, unduly protracted contest in the laboratory with this heavy, dull, apathetic substance; blind and foolish attempts when everything failed him, a corrosive feeling when in his anger he triturated it in his fingers, a sticky taste on the tongue and a caustic smoke, exhaustion, so that he had dropped off to sleep in his chair, cold; and suddenly—perhaps in his sleep, or at least it seemed like it—a final inspiration, a paradoxical and miraculously simple experiment, a physicist’s trick which he had never employed before. He saw thin white crystals which he finally collected in a porcelain box, convinced that he would be able to explode them finely the next day when he had buried the box in a hole in the sand out in the open fields where he had his thoroughly illegal experimental station. He saw the arm-chair in his laboratory, out of which there stuck wire and pieces of stuffing. He curled up in it like an exhausted dog and evidently dropped off to sleep, for it was completely dark when, to
