Free The Periodic Table by Primo Levi Page B

water, in which it floats (a metal that floats!), dancing frenetically and developing hydrogen. I ransacked the entrails of the Institute in vain: like Ariosto’s Astolfo on the Moon I found dozens of labeled ampules, hundreds of abstruse compounds, other vague anonymous sediments apparently untouched for generations, but not a sign of sodium. Instead I found a small phial of potassium: potassium is sodium’s twin, so I grabbed it and returned to my hermitage.
    I put in the flask of benzene a lump of potassium, “as large as half a pea”—so said the manual—and diligently distilled the contents: toward the end of the operation I dutifully doused the flame, took apart the apparatus, let the small amount of liquid in the flask cool off a bit, and then with a long pointed stick skewered the “half pea” of potassium and lifted it out.
    Potassium, as I said, is sodium’s twin, but it reacts with air and water with even greater energy: it is known to everyone (and was known also to me) that in contact with water it not only develops hydrogen but also ignites. So I handled my “half pea” like a holy relic: I placed it on a piece of dry filter paper, wrapped it up in it, went down into the Institute’s courtyard, dug out a tiny grave, and buried the little bedeviled corpse. I carefully tamped down the earth above it and went back up to my work.
    I took the now empty flask, put it under a faucet, and turned on the water. I heard a rapid thump and from the neck of the flask came a flash of flame directed at the window that was next to the washbasin and the curtains around it caught fire. While I was stumbling around looking for some even primitive means to extinguish it, the panels of the shutter began to blister and the room was now full of smoke. I managed to push over a chair and tear down the curtains; I threw them on the floor and stomped furiously on them, while the smoke half blinded me and my blood was throbbing violently in my temples.
    When it was all over, when the incandescent tatters were extinguished, I remained standing there for a few minutes, weak and stunned, my knees turned to water, contemplating the vestiges of the disaster without seeing them. As soon as I got my breath back, I went to the floor below and told the assistant what had happened. If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.
    The assistant listened to my account with polite attention but with a questioning look: Who had compelled me to embark on that voyage, and to distill benzene by going to so much trouble? In a way, it served me right: these are the things that happen to the profane, to those who dawdle and play before the portals of the temple instead of going inside. But he didn’t say a word; he resorted for the occasion (unwillingly, as always) to the hierarchical distance and pointed out to me that an empty flask does not catch fire: so it must not have been empty. It must have contained, if nothing else, the vapor of the benzene, besides of course the air that came in through its neck. But one has never seen the vapor of benzene, when cold, catch fire by itself: only the potassium could have set fire to the mixture, and I had taken out the potassium. All of it?
    All, I answered; but then I was visited by a doubt, returned to the scene of the accident, and found fragments of the flask still on the floor: on one of them, by looking closely, one could see, barely visible, a tiny white fleck. I tested it with phenolphthalein: it was basic, it was potassium hydroxide. The guilty party had been found: adhering to the glass of the flask there must have remained a minuscule particle of potassium, all that was needed to react with the water I had poured in and set fire to the benzene vapors.
    The assistant looked at me with an amused, vaguely