Mr. Forester picked him up, and found him not much hurt, only a little singed, and very much frightened. But the whole interior of the apartment continued to blaze. Mr. Forester and Sir Oran Haut-ton ran for water: Mr. Fax rang the nearest bell: Mr. Mystic vociferated ‘Fire!’ with singular energy: the servants ran about half-undressed: pails, buckets, and pitchers, were in active requisition; till Sir Oran Haut-ton ascending the stairs with the great rain-water tub, containing one hundred and eight gallons of water,[90] threw the whole contents on the flames with one sweep of his powerful arm. The fire being extinguished, it remained to ascertain its cause. It appeared that the gas-tube in Mr. Mystic’s chamber had been left unstopped, and the gas evolving without combustion (the apartment being perfectly air-tight), had condensed into a mass, which, on the approach of Mr. Mystic’s taper, instantly ignited, blowing the transcendentalist downstairs, and setting fire to his curtains and furniture. Mr. Mystic, as soon as he recovered from his panic, began to bewail the catastrophe: not so much, he said, for itself, as because such an event in Cimmerian Lodge was an infallible omen of evil—a type and symbol of an approaching period of public light—when the smoke of metaphysical mystery, and the vapours of ancient superstition, which he had done all that in him lay to consolidate in the spirit of man, would explode at the touch of analytical reason, leaving nothing but the plain common sense matter-of-fact of moral and political truth—a day that he earnestly hoped he might never live to see. ‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Forester, ‘it is a very bad omen for all who make it their study to darken the human understanding, when one of the pillars of their party _is blown up by his own smoke_; but the symbol, as you call it, may operate as a warning to the apostles of superstitious chimaera and political fraud, that it is very possible _for smoke to be too thick_; and that, in condensing in the human mind the vapours of ignorance and delusion, they are only compressing a body of inflammable gas, of which the explosion will be fatal in precise proportion to its density.’ CHAPTER XXXII THE DESERTED MANSION They rose, as usual, before daylight, that they might pursue their perlustration; and, on descending, found Mr. Mystic awaiting them at a table covered with a sumptuous apparatus of tea and coffee, a pyramid of hot rolls, and a variety of cold provision. Cimmerian Lodge, he said, was famous for its breed of tame geese, and he could recommend the cold one on the table as one of his own training. The breakfast being despatched, he rowed them over the _Ocean of Deceitful Form_ before the sun rose to disturb his navigation.