Prokop clutched at his head so markedly that passers-by stopped to look at him. For he remembered that up there in his laboratory shed in Hybsmonka he had left nearly four ounces of Krakatit! That is to say enough to blow off the earth I don’t know what,—the whole district! He became frozen with horror and ran for a tram. What did not hang upon these few minutes! He went through hell before the tram took him across the river; then he climbed the street as fast as he possibly could and finally reached the shed. It was locked up and Prokop vainly hunted in his pockets for something resembling a key; then, taking advantage of the twilight like a burglar, he broke open the window, pulled back the bolts and crawled home through the window.
He only needed to strike a match to see that the place had been plundered in the most methodical way possible. Certainly the bedding and a few sticks of furniture remained; but all the flasks, test-tubes, crushers, mortars, dishes and apparatus, spatulas and balances, all his primitive chemical kitchen, everything which had contained material upon which he had experimented, anything on which there might be left the slightest sediment or trace of any chemical, had disappeared. There was missing also the Porcelain box containing Krakatit. He pulled out a drawer of the table; all his papers and notes, every scrap of paper on which he had scribbled, the smallest relic of twelve years of experimental work, all had gone. Finally, even the spots and splashes had been scraped off the floor, and his overall, that ancient, ragged covering, positively encrusted with
