“Within three minutes of the time of injection the dizziness and vertigo had become so great as to make walking seem impossible.  In another minute the lassitude rapidly crept over me, and the serious disturbance of my breathing made it apparent to 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 off the tree, and fell down on the hunter himself.  This is how the other native reported the result: 

“’Quacca takes the dart out of his shoulder.  Never a word.  Puts it in his quiver and throws it in the stream.  Gives me his blowpipe for his little son.  Says to me good-bye for his wife and the village.  Then he lies down.  His tongue talks no longer.  No sight in his eyes.  He folds his arms.  He rolls over slowly.  His mouth moves without sound.  I feel his heart.  It goes fast and then slow.  It stops.  Quacca has shot his last woorali dart.’”