We knew where Mo’s house was—a fine building with a high-gabled roof, and an extraordinary amount of ornament in the way of carved birds and crocodiles, and fringes of waving fiber. We scuttled up the ladder silently and swiftly, like two thieves, and dodged in under the low door. Inside, the house was high and cool and empty. A pleasant amber light filtered down from somewhere in the lofty roof; but there were no windows, and the door was buried in the overhanging thatch. Straining our eyes, we looked about us.... Mats, wooden sleeping-pillows shaped like alligators; lime gourds carved and poker-worked; tall shields with devilish faces carved upon them; a string of human skulls, extending from the gable to the floor; a dagger carved from a thigh-bone; dancing-masks made in the semblance of sharks and birds and kangaroos; arrows; pineapple-shaped stone clubs; long, barked, ebony spears....
In one corner hung the sorcerer’s great feather bonnet, taken off for bathing; his ugly human-hand locket was tidily laid away on a rafter. The thick bamboo that we had seen him carrying like a wand lay on the floor—tightly corked up. But what interested us more than anything was the big charm-bag, hung on the wall, and bursting full.
We had it down in a moment, and tumbled the things out on the floor, tossing them recklessly here and there, in the search for our wonderful stone. I took the opportunity of looking at all the quartz crystals it contained—there were a good many—and opening all the little banana-leaf parcels, hoping to find another diamond in the absence of our first discovery, which (I saw almost at once) was not there. But there was nothing.
This did not surprise me much, for Koppi Koko had told me (under pressure of certain threats) that the crystal, which was well known to all the natives, had been the property of innumerable sorcerers from time to time, and had, in all probability, passed about over half Papua. Nothing could be more impossible, in that country of Babel-dialects, than to find out where the stone had originally come from. However, if we could only get hold of it, I was not bothering much about anything else.
“It seems to me,” said the Marquis, drawing himself erect and kicking aside the bag with his foot, “that our friend, Monsieur Mo, is not such a fool as he glitters.”
67
I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder and out in the street almost before the Marquis
“That’s right,” I answered, looking round again. Rolled-up mats?—gourds?—clay water-pots? Impossible to say. At all events, we might——
“My God, Flint!” said the Marquis, in a low, horrified voice. “My God of Gods, look at that!”