The Sorcerer's Stone

by Beatrice Grimshaw

I don’t think I shall ever forget that afternoon. It was one of the awful black days that one experiences at times about the steaming river flats of Papua; the sky was a dark lead-pencil sort of color and seemed to sit down on our heads like the lid of a hot saucepan. The enormous trees that had escaped the clearing and stood about at its edges, lifted their endless run of naked trunk and their weird, sky-pointing branches up into the heights of the sky with never a motion or a tremor. Their leaves, far up beneath the iron lid of the clouds, were as still as photographs. Indeed, the whole clearing had the unnaturally dead appearance that one notices in a stereoscope; a thing that always seems to me like the ghosts of dead scenes and places.

As for the heat, it was just the next thing to unendurable, and would have been quite unendurable if one did not recollect that scores of men had stood it, off and on, for years. So that one reckoned, after all, one could stand it too.

And it was on an afternoon such as this that Burchell gave out his intention of holding an auction of Bobby-the-Clock’s effects, according to the custom of the field. The money, of course, would be sent to any surviving relatives Bobby might be found to possess.

The Marquis wanted to go and see it, and I went with him, though I was not particularly anxious to do so. Burchell had arranged to lend me three or four of the carriers belonging to the store, and I wanted to get my packs ready and prepare for a start tomorrow or the next day, as our condition might permit. I didn’t fancy sleeping any longer than I could help in an open shed with the riff-raff of Australia, while the Sorcerer’s Stone was on my person—or, worse, on the Marquis’. There were several days of utter wilderness between us and the coast, along the worst of tracks, through pathless, unexplored forests, full of natives who might at any time turn hostile. That sort of thing provided far too many ready-made occasions for accident, in my opinion—should any one want an accident to happen.

I have said that Papua is not a lawless country on the whole, and it is not. But there are things that affect the value of laws and principles in their neighborhood, as a mountain of ironstone affects the working of the compasses on ships that pass beneath it. A big diamond is one of these. In the Sorcerer’s Stone we had, so to speak, a charge of moral dynamite that was ready at any moment to shatter friendship, honesty, regard for human life, even regard for a man’s own precious skin.... There was not a bulwark built up through æons of evolution, against the savage passions of mankind, that this lump of crystal in our possession could not send flying in a second.

Which meant, in brief, that if the rabble at present polluting the Kilori goldfield got the faintest inkling of the royal fortune we carried, our lives, on that long track through the lonely primeval forests down to the solitary, unsettled coast might not be worth the smallest of the chips that the wheels of busy Amsterdam one day would send flying from the surface of the stone.

I was thinking about this a good deal while the auction went on. The proceedings themselves did not interest me very much, though I daresay the Marquis found them amusing. Bobby-the-Clock’s old clothes, his cooking-pots, his tin box, his blankets, were put up and bid for; and most of them brought very little. No gold had been found in his camp; he had died of fever, and was quite alone when he passed out, so that the place had been left unguarded for a day or more before any one found him. There were those of us who thought that some among the new-chums might have told where Bobby’s gold had gone; but nothing could be proved.

It seemed as if the auction, all in all, would scarce produce the worth of a couple of pounds to send to Bobby-the-Clock’s relations.

Then the celebrated clock itself was put up, and the bidding brightened at once. Most of the old miners wanted it as a souvenir, and some of the new ones seemed determined to get it out of spite—for there was much bad blood between the two different parties. The bidding went up and up, till at last the clock was knocked down to my old mate, Hubbard, for no less than two ounces—which, at the price of the Kilori gold, was worth about seven pounds eight.

“I’ll take it and pay for it now,” said Hubbard, reaching out for his property. He put it on the counter before him (we were all sitting or standing about the bar, with the doors and windows open for air; the men who could not get places loafing round the wall) and looked at it.