Chapter Eight: Stinks and Bangs

Another experiment, suggested by David, involved pouring concentrated, oily sulphuric acid on a little sugar, which instantly turned black, heated, steamed, and expanded, forming a monstrous pillar of carbon rising high above the rim of the beaker. ‘Beware,’ David said, as I gazed at this transformation. ‘You’ll be turned into a pillar of carbon if you get the acid on yourself.’ And then he told me horror stories, probably invented, of vitriol throwings in East London, and patients he had seen coming into the hospital with their entire faces all but burned off. (I was not quite sure whether to believe him, for when I was younger he had told me that if I looked at the Kohanim as they were blessing us in the shul – their heads were covered with a large shawl, a tallis, as they prayed, for they were irradiated, at this moment, by the blinding light of God – my eyes would melt in their sockets and run down my cheeks like fried eggs.)

Footnote 9: I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima a few years later, and I was struck by this passage:

When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off…)