o me that walking, waving my arms,
anything, was imperative. My lungs felt glued up, and the muscles of my
chest refused to work. Everything swam before my eyes, and I was soon
reduced to walking up and down the laboratory with halting steps, only
preventing falling on the floor by holding fast to the edge of this
table. It seemed to me that I spent hours gasping for breath. It
reminded me of what I once experienced in the Cave of the Winds of
Niagara, where water is more abundant in the atmosphere than air. My
watch afterward indicated only about twenty minutes of extreme distress,
but that twenty minutes is one never to be forgotten, and I advise you
all, if you ever are so foolish as to try the experiment, to remain
below the five-centigram limit.

"How much was administered to the victims, Doctor Nott, I cannot say,
but it must have been a good deal more than I took. Six centigrams,
which I recovered from these small samples, are only nine-tenths of
a grain. Yet you see what effect it had. I trust that answers your
question."

Doctor Nott was too overwhelmed to reply.

"And what is this deadly poison?" continued Craig, anticipating our
thoughts. "I have been fortunate enough to obtain a sample of it from
the Museum of Natural History. It comes in a little gourd, or often a
calabash. This is in a gourd. It is blackish brittle stuff encrusting
the sides of the gourd just as if it was poured in in the liquid state
and left to dry. Indeed, that is just what has been done by those who
manufacture this stuff after a lengthy and somewhat secret process."

He placed the gourd on the edge of the table where we could all see it.
I was almost afraid even to look at it.

"The famous traveller, Sir Robert Schomburgh first brought it into
Europe, and Darwin has described it. It is now an article of commerce
and is to be found in the United States Pharmacopoeia as a medicine,
though of course it is used in only very minute quantities, as a heart
stimulant."

Craig opened a book to a place he had marked:

"At least one person in this room will appreciate the local colour of a
little incident I am going to read--to illustrate what death from this
poison is like. Two natives of the part of the world whence it comes
were one day hunting. They were armed with blowpipes and quivers full
of poisoned darts made of thin charred pieces of bamboo tipped with this
stuff. One of them aimed a dart. It missed the object overhead, glanced