Night in Samarai Island town.
Stars in the water all round about the houses; stars glinting and disappearing, high among the eighteen-foot leaves of Samarai’s splendid palms. At the back of the island, where one walks for quiet, the sea lying like a witch’s mirror of black glass between the scarcely visible white of the coral pathway and the dark, lurking hills of Sariba and Basilisk.
Strolling there in the pleasant gloom, by the fresh, salt-smelling straits, the Marquis and I pursued our quest of the great stone that we had seen in the charm-bag of Mo, the Sorcerer of Kata-Kata, and that had already nearly cost us our lives.
“I like this Samarai,” observed the Marquis, treading along the tinkling gravel of the path with the lightness Nature had oddly linked to his enormous bulk. “So small that you go round it all in the quarter of an hour; so beautiful that it resembles a dream of heaven. This place is Eden, my friend.”
“So all the steamer passengers say,” I answered. “If you’d seen some of the ladies of Samarai punching one another’s heads with umbrellas in front of Bunn’s Hotel, or watched half the people of the town going off in boats on Sunday afternoon and all rowing away from each other, you’d maybe reckon the Eden part was wearing a little thin. You’ve never lived on coral islands; I have.”
“I shut my eyes for what I do not like, and look at the rest in a strange novelty like this: I am not the new broom that never rejoices,” replied the Marquis, twisting the proverb in a superior tone. “We are come here on a confounded dangerous and fragile mission; therefore, we need all the refreshness we can get for our minds.”
“Well, admire the scenery all you like,” I said, “though I don’t see how it is going to help you to find out where Mo has got to with the diamond.”
“I demand of you, don’t we jolly well know he is here?” asked the Marquis. “Wasn’t it on the cause of that, that we are come from Kata-Kata right off, as soon as we are found that he is taken fright and enlisted on a pearling vessel to get away before the magistrate and ourselves should come back to punish him?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “We only guessed. You remember, when the police had burned the town, and killed the pigs, and all the people had run off into the bush, being well scared, as they deserved to be—that was when we heard from our boys that Mo wasn’t there at all; but they only knew he’d gone down to the coast.”
“But we ourselves, we knew that the pearler vessel had been recruiting along that veritable coast; that suffices, since the boys have said that Mo recruited once a long time ago to Thursday Island, and knows the diving.”