I am a scholar: it is an odour that excites in me an almost unmentionable panic—the worse because I do not know this library and it is vast. Orange flames curl around the white stone stacks scorching the rough marble black. Stone burns, if you get it hot enough. I am an alchemist: I have cause to know. Marble explodes, tiny shards slashing and blinding. Soon this room will be a storm of razors. A person could not survive here. Even if one were not struck, or broiled, or gashed, one would breathe in shards of glass and bleed into the lungs. I wonder if Scipio died of great blades of flying glass: if he came to a place like this, and was dismembered by some quite uncaring cataclysm.