Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 5, 2025
"The aerostats have stationed themselves at great elevations over the ramparts of fortresses and the bivouacs of armies, and have rained down a hail of dynamite, melinite, fire-shells and cyanogen poison-grenades, which have at once put guns out of action, blown up magazines, rendered fortifications untenable, and rent masses of infantry and squadrons of cavalry into demoralised fragments, before they had the time or the opportunity to strike a blow in reply.
The cyanuret of mercury, when heated in an open glass tube, is resolved into cyanogen gas and metallic mercury; if this substance is heated in a tube hermetically sealed, the decomposition occurs as before, but the gas, unable to escape, and shut up in a space several hundred times smaller than it would occupy as gas under the ordinary atmospheric pressure, becomes a fluid in that part of the tube which is kept cool.
Then I realized the most tragic truth of my life. I had taken one of the deadliest poisons in the world. The odor of the released gas of cyanogen was strong. But more than that, the metallic taste and the horrible burning sensation told of the presence of some form of mercury, too. In that terrible moment my brain worked with the incredible swiftness of light.
After nearly sixty hours of almost continuous fighting, during which the fortifications had been wrecked by the war-balloons, the German ammunition-trains burnt and blown up by the fire-shells rained from the air, and the heroic defenders of the city disorganised by the aërial bombardment of melinite shells and cyanogen poison-bombs, and crushed by an overwhelming force of not less than four million assailants.
The second view is that, when the earth had passed through its white-hot stage, great masses of very complex chemicals, produced by the great heat, were found on its surface. There is one complex chemical substance in particular, called cyanogen, which is either an important constituent of living matter, or closely akin to it. Now we need intense heat to produce this substance in the laboratory.
This, Sloggett explained, was the characteristic flame of both cyanogen and hydrocyanic acid vapour, which, being inflammable, may have become locally ignited in the passage over cities, and only burned in that limited and languid way on account of the ponderous volumes of carbonic anhydride with which they must, of course, be mixed: the dark empurpled colour was due to the presence of large quantities of the scoriae of the trappean rocks: basalts, green-stone, trachytes, and the various porphyries.
"I will tell you precisely how is was, Professor Kennedy. When I was called in to see Miss Lytton I found her on the bed. I pried open her jaws and smelled the sweetish odor of the cyanogen gas. I knew then what she had taken, and at the moment she was dead. In the next room I heard some one moaning. The maid said that it was Mrs. Boncour, and that she was deathly sick.
Rummaging about in the drawer of the table, I had come to a package of gold-tipped cigarettes which had interested me and I had left them out. Kennedy was now looking at them curiously. "What is to be the method, do you suppose?" I asked. "By a poison that is among the most powerful, approaching even cyanogen," he replied confidently, tapping the cigarettes. "Do you smell the odor in this room?
Apparently disregarding Andrews entirely, he now asked, "Doctor, supposing it had been cyanogen gas which caused the congestion of the lungs, and supposing it had not been inhaled in quantities large enough to kill outright, do you nevertheless feel that Mr.
Kennedy was all attention as Dr. Thornton added this new evidence. "You know," concluded the doctor, "that in cyanogen poisoning there might be hallucinations of the wildest kind. But then, too, in the delirium of pneumonia it might be the same." I could see by the way Kennedy acted that for the first time a ray of light had dawned upon him in tracing out the case.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking