hind him. "Nitro-glycerin! Dynamite!" Beginning
now to understand, he felt his hair stand on end.

"Yes, nitro-glycerin!" repeated Simoun slowly, with his cold smile and
a look of delight at the glass flask. "It's also something more than
nitro-glycerin--it's concentrated tears, repressed hatred, wrongs,
injustice, outrage. It's the last resort of the weak, force against
force, violence against violence. A moment ago I was hesitating,
but you have come and decided me. This night the most dangerous
tyrants will be blown to pieces, the irresponsible rulers that hide
themselves behind God and the State, whose abuses remain unpunished
because no one can bring them to justice. This night the Philippines
will hear the explosion that will convert into rubbish the formless
monument whose decay I have fostered."

Basilio was so terrified that his lips worked without producing any
sound, his tongue was paralyzed, his throat parched. For the first
time he was looking at the powerful liquid which he had heard talked
of as a thing distilled in gloom by gloomy men, in open war against
society. Now he had it before him, transparent and slightly yellowish,
poured with great caution into the artistic pomegranate. Simoun looked
to him like the jinnee of the _Arabian Nights_ that sprang from the
sea, he took on gigantic proportions, his head touched the sky, he
made the house tremble and shook the whole city with a shrug of his
shoulders. The pomegranate assumed the form of a colossal sphere,
the fissures became hellish grins whence escaped names and glowing
cinders. For the first time in his life Basilio was overcome with
fright and completely lost his composure.

Simoun, meanwhile, screwed on solidly a curious and complicated
mechanism, put in place a glass chimney, then the bomb, and crowned
the whole with an elegant shade. Then he moved away some distance to
contemplate the effect, inclining his head now to one side, now to
the other, thus better to appreciate its magnificent appearance.

Noticing that Basilio was watching him with questioning and suspicious
eyes, he said, "Tonight there will be a fiesta and this lamp will
be placed in a little dining-kiosk that I've had constructed for
the purpose. The lamp will give a brilliant light, bright enough to
suffice for the illumination of the whole place by itself, but at
the end of twenty minutes the light will fade, and then when some
one tries to turn up the wick a cap of fulminate