! Get a
light!"

"And the apology," he said, folding up the letter.

"All right," I said; "Apology."

My hand shook with anger as I wrote, and afterwards I could not sleep
for hate of him. At last I got up. I suffered, I found, from an unusual
clumsiness. I struck my toe against my cabin door, and cut myself as I
shaved. I found myself at last pacing the deck under the dawn in a
mood of extreme exasperation. The sun rose abruptly and splashed light
blindingly into my eyes and I swore at the sun. I found myself imagining
fresh obstacles with the men and talking aloud in anticipatory rehearsal
of the consequent row.

The malaria of the quap was already in my blood.

V

Sooner or later the ridiculous embargo that now lies upon all the coast
eastward of Mordet Island will be lifted and the reality of the deposits
of quap ascertained. I am sure that we were merely taking the outcrop
of a stratum of nodulated deposits that dip steeply seaward. Those heaps
were merely the crumbled out contents of two irregular cavities in the
rock; they are as natural as any talus or heap of that kind, and the
mud along the edge of the water for miles is mixed with quap, and is
radio-active and lifeless and faintly phosphorescent at night. But the
reader will find the full particulars of my impression of all this in
the Geological Magazine for October, 1905, and to that I must refer him.
There, too, he will find my unconfirmed theories of its nature. If I am
right it is something far more significant from the scientific point
of view than those incidental constituents of various rare metals,
pitchblende, rutile, and the like, upon which the revolutionary
discoveries of the last decade are based. Those are just little
molecular centres of disintegration, of that mysterious decay and
rotting of those elements, elements once regarded as the most stable
things in nature. But there is something--the only word that comes near
it is CANCEROUS--and that is not very near, about the whole of quap,
something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying; an
elemental stirring and disarrangement, incalculably maleficent and
strange.

This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind radio-activity
is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It
spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and
those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of
coherent existence. It is in matte