My chance came the same afternoon, as we were finishing lunch. At last
Uncle Harry lit a cigar and called for coffee. "By Jove!" he remarked
as he blew out a cloud of fragrant smoke, "those varos were wonderfully
good. I reckon the best restaurant in San Francisco couldn't produce a
finer dish!" The moment seemed opportune.
"We can always get plenty when the weather is calm," I said, "in fact
it only takes a third of our time to catch more fish than the Tara can
use. We were speaking of this to-day and wondering if you wouldn't let
us go out with the divers in our spare time; Marama says he has often
been down to twelve fathoms, and offers to do the diving if I will open
shell. I wish you could let us go--it would be fun and somehow I feel
sure that we'd be lucky. Of course, if you'd let me, I'd like to try a
little diving myself." My uncle looked at me with a twinkle in his
dark eyes.
"I knew you'd ask me that sooner or later," he said. "As a matter of
fact I ought not to let you do it--I'm responsible to your father,
after all, and old Taura's a good friend of mine. Diving is always a
dangerous business, though I don't believe there are any more bad
sharks in the lagoon. Still, the other men do it every day, and you
two are old enough to take the same risks. If I had youngsters of my
own, they'd have to take their chances with the rest--otherwise they'd
miss their share of good times and hard knocks, and become the helpless
sort of men and women who are no use in the world. Yes, you may go,
and dive too, if you wish. But, for my sake, keep your eyes open and
be as careful as you can!"
That evening, when the day's work was over and the people lay on mats
before their houses, smoking and gossiping in the brief twilight, we
went ashore. My uncle led the way to where old Maruia lived with one
of her nephews: Teura, a pleasant and amusing boy, who paddled her
canoe to the diving-grounds and opened the shell that she brought up.
Her house was surrounded by a fence of stakes, inside which a pair of
pigs wandered, rooting up the earth. As we opened the gate, I heard
her voice give the hospitable shout of "_Haere mai_!--Come in!"
"I have come to talk with you about Tehare, my nephew," said Uncle
Harry, when a mat had been spread and we had taken our places on it,
native-fashion. "He and Marama have become so clever at the sea
fishing that we are glutted with fish and time hangs heavy on their
hands. To-day they have asked me if they might go out and dive for
shell with you others; they are strong boys and well grown--it is in my
mind to let them go. What think you of the plan? Is Iriatai a lagoon
overdangerous for boys?"
The old woman shook her head as she replied.
"There is little danger here," she said. "Ten fathoms would not hurt a
child, and the great shark you killed was the only evil shark in the
lagoon. And he was not a shark, as I and all the others know! For the
rest, we have seen neither _tonu_ nor conger eel in all the days we
have been diving, though it is well to watch closely, for a tonu is an
ill thing to meet! But let them go--they will come to no harm; perhaps
they will find a pearl like mine, and in any case the white boy will
have strange tales to tell when he returns to his own land. I myself
will show them where there is shell in seven fathoms of water--not so
much as where we dive, but a good place to begin. Let them beware of
the clefts and crevices where an eel might lurk, and avoid the dark
caverns in the coral, for it is in such places that the tonu lies in
wait. There seems little to fear in Iriatai, but one is never sure.
As for pearls, watch always for the great lone oysters crusted with
coral and misshapen with old age--_parau tahito_, we call them, and
every diver knows that they contain the finest pearls."
When the divers went out next morning Marama and I went with them, our
canoe equipped like the others with basket and weight and line.
Maruia, smoking a cigarette in the bow of her canoe while Teura
paddled, showed us the way to a patch of shell she had found in shallow
water, a quarter of a mile east of where the others were diving. "Drop
your anchor here," she said, bending over the gunwale to examine the
bottom. "The depth is seven fathoms and there is enough shell to keep
you busy, though not so much nor of such great size as in the deeper
water where we work. Now I must leave--stay here, you two!"
I weighted the basket with a heavy stone and lowered it till it rested
on the bottom, while Marama tucked up his pareu, adjusted his goggles,
and fastened the glove on his right hand. Then he went overboard, a
grin on his brown good-natured face. I passed him the weight; at the
signal, I let go the line and watched him shoot down into the blue and
green of the depths. After all, seven fathoms were more than forty
feet. I pulled up the lead, coiled the line for the next dive, and
waited, watching the figure of my companion, seen dimly in the twilight
beneath the canoe, as he moved along the bottom with deliberate motions
of the arms and legs. Once I thought I saw him place something in the
basket, and finally, when more than two minutes had elapsed, he seized
the upright line and pulled himself to the surface. But he gave no
shout of exultation as he raised the goggles from his eyes.
"Aué!" he exclaimed, shaking his head, "it is more difficult than I had
thought! The oysters are there, but I have not the eyes to see them,
nor the art to twist them off the rocks. There is no need to pull up
the basket; I got only two oysters, though in all my life I have never
stayed longer beneath the water. But I shall learn!"
All through that morning Marama dove with increasing success. It was
well for me that he did not send up as much shell as the older divers,
for I was clumsy at opening it and so afraid of missing a pearl that I
wasted a great deal of time in useless fumbling under the fringes of
the oysters. At mid-day I had found no pearls, but the shell Marama
had brought up was opened and neatly stacked amidships, and the soft
bodies of the oysters were thrown into our kerosene-tin for inspection
in the evening.
"I am going to dive this afternoon," I announced to Marama, as we lay
resting after lunch.
"That is well," he answered. "I am not accustomed to being so long in
the water--my bones are chilled! I will open the shell and you can try
your hand as I have done. It is strange down there, and very
beautiful, with the coral colored like flowers and the great fish
passing close at hand. At first I was a little afraid. Do not let
yourself grow discouraged; the shell is hard to see and harder still to
wrench off until you learn the trick. Remember that the old divers
never look upward--to gaze into the blue water overhead gives one a
horror of the depth!"
At last, with a beating heart, I made ready for my first dive. I loved
the sun, which had burned my back and shoulders to the color of
mahogany, and I wore nothing but a pareu. This savage garment I
hitched about my waist as I had seen the others do, before I polished
my glasses and fastened the glove tightly on my wrist. Once in the
water, I held the lead-line with my left hand and the toes of my left
foot, adjusted the goggles to my eyes and gave the signal to let go. I
saw Marama's answering grin--felt the water close over my head. Then,
gripping the line tightly, I plunged down into a strange purple
twilight.
An instant later there was a gentle shock and the line slackened in my
hand. I had reached the bottom. My ears ached and the pressure on my
chest and stomach made my body feel as if it were being squeezed flat.
I could understand now the curiously deliberate movements of the
divers, for my limbs seemed weighted with lead--the same feeling I have
had in dreams, when to my horror I have found myself unable to avoid
the attack of some nightmare monster. I swallowed as I had been
instructed, then held my nose and blew. The pains in my head ceased at
once.
Frightened and ill at ease, I let go the line and saw the weight
ascending through the deep bluish purple of the sea above me, which
seemed, like the earth's atmosphere, to extend upward into infinity.
There was no sign of the surface--nothing to catch the eye in the break
between sea and air. For a moment I was in a panic; it seemed to me
that I should never reach the air again, never feel the friendly warmth
of the sun nor see the bright sun-lit world above. Then I saw the
bottom of the canoe, close over my head. Fifteen or twenty seconds had
passed, and though far from feeling at home, I had gained enough
assurance to gaze with interest at the strange new world in which I
found myself.
Though not so dark as the greater depths I visited later on, there was
far less light than I had supposed. The floor of the lagoon, here at
seven fathoms, was bathed in a sort of purplish twilight which enabled
me to see as clearly, I should say, as on an average moonlight night
ashore. But instead of being silvery, like moonlight, the light was
purple, and tinged with changing shades of green and blue. The bottom
was of dense reef-coral, which dies when sheltered from the breaking
sea, but a hundred fantastic varieties of still-water coral grew on the
dead madrepore, as vegetation grows on the inanimate earth, and its
forms were those of vegetation. Close beneath me I saw little coral
plants, fragile as violets or anemones; on a level with my head were
leafless shrubs, marvelously colored and perfect in trunk and limb and
twig; yonder a giant mushroom, ten feet across and growing on a tall
thick stalk, towered above the undergrowth. Shoals of small fish, gay
as the bird life of the tropics, drifted through the coral foliage or
darted into the shelter of the mushrooms when larger fish passed
overhead.
The floor of the lagoon was irregular, seamed by gullies and rising in
rough hillocks here and there, and my weighted basket lay at the edge
of one of these ravines. By swimming slowly in a horizontal position I
could move from place to place without great effort, and hoping to find
at least one oyster before I was forced to rise for air, I swam along
the brink, scanning the coral sharply for the pearl oysters I knew to
be plentiful at this place. A great silver cavally, four feet long and
with goggle-eyes as large as dollars, darted out of a gloomy cleft,
halted to gaze at me for an instant, passed within a foot of my face,
and disappeared in the shadows. The fish gave me a start; in the
flurry I let go a good half of my breath, which rose in a string of
bubbles toward the air. My lungs were cramped. I had reached the
limit of endurance.
I made for the line, seized it with both hands, heaved strongly and
felt myself bounding upward like a cork. When my head broke water and
I raised the goggles from my eyes, I saw that the native boy was
bending over me with an air of concern.
"Another moment," he said, "and I would have gone down after you. You
were long on the bottom--I feared that you had been seized with cramps."
"It is strange down there," I answered, a little apologetically, "the
pressure--the dim light--I was so interested that I nearly forgot to
look for shell and when I did look there was none to be seen."
"It was the same with me at first," declared Marama, smiling, "but if
you look closely in the rough places, on piles of coral and along the
edges of the gullies, you will see the oysters there by hundreds. It
is easy to mistake them for lumps of rock--coral and barnacles grow on
them as on the rock itself. They lie open like the _pahua_ (the
tridacna clam), but that helps you little, for their fringes are not
blue and yellow like the clam's tongue."
I did not waste my strength by climbing into the canoe, but lay in the
water resting as I had seen the natives do. When five minutes had
passed I put down my glasses and went to the bottom again, and this
time I saw two pearl-oysters. I found them at the edge of the gulley,
when I was on the point of giving up in despair of seeing the elusive
things. They looked for all the world like irregular lumps of coral,
projecting like hundreds of other lumps from the rocky wall, and I
would have passed without a second glance if one of them had not moved.
Though they have no eyes, in our sense of the word, all bivalves which
do not habitually lie buried in sand or mud seem to possess a subtle
sense of light. As my body passed over the oyster, shutting off the
light, the creature was thus mysteriously warned, and instantly its
shells closed with a smooth swiftness. Looking more closely, I
recognized the outlines of the _margaritifera_, the pearl oyster,
beneath a protective growth of parasites, and grasping it with my
gloved hand, I endeavored to wrench it from its fibrous moorings. As I
struggled to free it from the coral, the water must have been agitated,
for another rough lump closed with the same smooth swift movement,
revealing a second great oyster. By this time I had been under nearly
a minute, and though I tugged with all my might I was unable to wrench
the shell free before I rose.
"I have seen the oysters," I told Marama, as I lay resting in the
sunlight, "but try as I would, I could not tear one loose!"
He picked up an opened shell from the bottom of the canoe.
"Take hold thus," he instructed me, "and turn the oyster with a sudden
wrench. It is useless to pull. Ah--your left hand is bleeding--take
care to use the gloved hand only, for the coral cuts like a knife, and
oftentimes the wounds are poisoned."
By the third time down I had gained confidence and was beginning to
feel at home on the bottom. Now I remembered the trick of which the
Paumotan diver had told me, and when I had been half a minute under
water I began to let the air out of my lungs. The native had spoken
truly; each little string of bubbles brought its moment of relief and
enabled me to go about my work more calmly.
I was beginning to see the oysters now: my eyes were growing accustomed
to the dim light. This time I managed to tear off a couple of oysters
and put them in the basket before I rose for air. Three dives filled
the basket, and when Marama pulled it from the water with its
coral-encrusted load, I gave an imitation of the exultant native
shout--a cry which brought a grin to my companion's face.
"We are learning," he said mockingly, "but it will be time to shout
when we can fill the basket at one dive!"
That afternoon, when we joined the little fleet of canoes to paddle
home, Maruia stood up, craning her neck for a look at our catch. "You
have done well," she remarked, a smile wrinkling her brown face, "not
badly for the first day's diving! I have seen grown men do worse. No
pearls? Never mind--you will find them surely. Beginners always have
the luck!"
From that day onward the fishing occupied less than a third of our
time, and the balance was put in on the lagoon. We learned fast, as
boys do, and gradually worked our way into deeper water till we were
diving with the rest. Within a few weeks we were bringing in as much
shell as the Paumotans, and my uncle was enthusiastic over our success!
He could dive with any native, and once or twice, when he had leisure,
he sent Marama out alone to fish and accompanied me to the
diving-grounds. On those days my uncle's share of the shell went to
the native boy's account--growing into a round little sum.
As for me, the diving fascinated me more each day: the beauty and
strangeness of the underwater world; the spice of danger--small, but a
reality, nevertheless; the thought of the money I was earning; the
daily, even hourly, hope of finding a rich pearl, perhaps worth a small
fortune. From time to time we found a few small pearls, but when at
last good fortune came to us, it came hand in hand with tragedy.
As the nearer shell-patches became worked out, the canoes moved
gradually northward, taking the cream of the shell without diving
enough to exhaust the beds at any one place. One morning, in the
latter part of July, Marama and I anchored close beside Maruia's canoe,
on new and very promising grounds. It was my turn to open shell. The
Paumotan woman, not ten yards away from me, was loafing that
day--letting her nephew dive, for once. Teura was a boy of twenty or
twenty-one, a favorite among the natives because of his skill as a
musician and his jokes. I had grown fond of him since we had been
thrown with the divers, and often went ashore in the evening to chat
with old Maruia and listen to her nephew's songs, accompanied by wild
native airs on his accordion.
I remember that morning as if it were yesterday. The bottom was at
about eleven fathoms, rougher than any part of the lagoon that we had
seen. Here and there pinnacles of coral rose to within a few yards of
the surface; in the shadowy depths below, the bottom was seamed with
crannies and pitted with the mouths of caves. The look of the place,
in fact, was by no means reassuring, but the men sent out to survey the
bottom reported that the lagoon there was fairly paved with shell.
It had become my habit to take a water glass in the canoe, for by now I
was expert at opening the shell, and I found it interesting, in leisure
moments, to watch my companion at his work. The depth was too great to
see clearly, but I watched Marama plunge feet-first into the shadows,
and a moment later, a second string of bubbles told me that Maruia's
nephew had followed him down. Vaguely in the depths I could see Marama
moving about, a dim moving shadow when his body passed above a patch of
sand. Then, before half a minute had passed, the canoe lurched
suddenly and sharply--the native boy was pulling himself up the line in
desperate haste.
His head broke water. With a heave and a spring that nearly capsized
us, he threw himself into the canoe.
"Ah, the great tonu--he nearly had me!" he panted, trembling with
excitement. "Aué! Teura! Where is he?"
I snatched up the water glass, and side by side, with our heads close
together, we gazed down into the blue water. Hearing the boy's words,
Maruia had seized her own glass. Next moment a sudden sharp wail came
from her lips. Then I saw the figure of her nephew, mounting his line
with great heaves of both hands--and rising deliberately beneath him a
monster hideous as a nightmare memory. It was a huge fish, eight or
nine feet long and of enormous bulk. Its great spiny head, four feet
across and set with a pair of eyes like saucers, terminated in jaws
larger than a shark's; its rough body was spotted and brindled in a way
that rendered it almost invisible against the coral; its pectoral fins,
frilled and spiny as the fins of a sculpin, spread out like wings on
either side. It had the look of an incredibly old and gigantic
rock-cod--to which family, indeed, I have been told that the tonu
belongs.
We watched in terrible suspense, all three of us, Teura was nearing the
surface; in another moment he would be safe. The tonu seemed
undecided, as if it were following the man out of curiosity rather than
pursuing him. I began to breathe more freely. Then when the diver was
within twenty feet of us. the fish reared itself suddenly and came
rushing up, huge jaws agape.
In a twinkling it was beneath us, so close that the water beneath the
canoes swirled with its passage. The next instant the monster flashed
downward and the man was gone.
The tonu halted, four or five fathoms down, and lay with gently moving
fins. It was then I saw, to my unutterable horror, that Teura's feet
and the calves of his legs hung from the creature's twitching jaws.
Another spectator was close at hand. "Aué!" cried old Maruia bitterly,
in a choking voice. "Teura is gone! But I shall kill that devil as he
has killed my boy!"
She had been baptized--she was a churchgoer and a keeper of the Sabbath
day; but now I heard her half chanting a strange invocation, in loud
and solemn tones. "She prays to the heathen gods," muttered Marama in
an awed whisper, "to Taiao, and to Ruahatu, the old shark-god of her
people!"
I glanced up. The woman was standing in the stern of her canoe. She
wore her usual diving-dress, a loose gown of cotton over a pareu worn
as the men wore theirs. The goggles were on her eyes and she had taken
up a heavy fish-spear from its place on the outrigger-poles of the
canoe. It was a formidable weapon, a haft of tough black wood tipped
with a yard of steel: a tapering lance sharpened to a needle-point. I
turned my head to look into the water glass. The great fish lay
beneath us, a monstrous vision in the blue twilight below; but now the
man's legs had disappeared.
Maruia's canoe came alongside. I heard the outrigger knock softly
against our own. Then both canoes rocked violently, and we started at
the sound of a heavy plunging splash.
Without a word to us or an instant's hesitation, Maruia had leaped
overboard. One hand held a leaden diving-weight and the other gripped
the spear, point downward. The fish scarcely moved at the turmoil in
the water; the hideous lord of the lagoon was making his meal. Our
hearts beat fast as we watched what followed, gazing through our little
pane of glass. Swift and straight, the woman went down head-first till
she was within two yards of the tonu's back. She let go the weight,
which plunged down out of sight among the shadows; she drew herself
together and struck--struck squarely where the head joined the
misshapen body, a foot behind the monstrous goggle eyes. I saw the
steel strike deep--saw Maruia raise herself upright in the water to
drive the spear home with both hands on the shaft. The fish started;
its jaws gaped wide--the sprawled and mangled body of Teura eddied down
toward the coral forty feet below. The wounded monster turned on his
side, the shaft of the spear protruding from his spiny back, and swam
feebly and aimlessly to the surface, where the divers, now gathering
from all sides, put a quick end to his struggles.
Then I heard the eerie diver's whistle close beside our canoe and the
voice of Maruia calling to us. "I am going home," she said. "Lend me
a hand to put Teura in the canoe." She had been nearly four minutes
under water and had brought up with her the body of her boy.
The natives did no more diving that day. Anchors came up, gear was
stowed away, and one after another the canoes fell in behind old
Maruia, while the wailing of the _tangi_, the native mourning for the
dead, floated across the lagoon. I reached for our own anchor-line,
but Marama stopped me with a gesture.
"Wait," he said seriously, "we will go back soon, but first there is
something I must tell you."
"Let us go to the Tara," I answered, "and tell Seroni what has
happened. This place makes me shudder. I have no more heart for
diving to-day."
The native boy looked at me solemnly.
"Like you, I am afraid," he confessed, "but I have seen what moves me
more strongly than fear. And I know that our fears are baseless, for
my grandfather, who was the most skilled fisherman of Raiatea, has told
me many times that where one tonu lives, another is never to be found
close by.
"Watch well," he went on, "and move the basket if there is danger, for
I am going down once more. In the cave where I first saw the tonu, are
two _parau tahito_--the old oysters of which the divers speak. They
are covered with barnacles, very old and huge, and perhaps they hold
pearls--great pearls that will make rich men of you and me. But that
cave is an evil place! Teura went down with his back to me, and I saw
him reach the bottom close to the entrance of the cavern, which he did
not see. Then I looked in, and my heart beat fast as I saw that pair
of old oysters, just inside. I looked more closely, and there in the
shadows were the eyes of the tonu watching me, and his great jaws
opening as he made ready to rush out. For a moment my limbs were
paralyzed! The rest you saw."
I was becoming infected with my companion's excitement. Ever since we
had begun to dive I had heard stories of famous pearls, taken
throughout the group in years gone by, and the pearls which fetched the
greatest sums and made immortal the names of their finders had always
come from these huge, old, and sickly-looking oysters, growing apart
from the rest.
Marama had picked up his goggles and was making ready to go over the
side, when a saying of my uncle's flashed across my mind. "Never let
one of your men do a job you're afraid to do yourself!" Then all at
once I knew that I should have no peace unless I acted quickly.
"Stop," I said--a little shakily, at the prospect of the task before
me. "You have been down once. Now it is my turn!"
All my life I have found that the more one fears a thing, the quicker
it should be done. Without heeding Marama's protests, I snapped on my
glasses, tucked up my waistcloth, and went overboard. Next moment I
seized the lead-line and signaled Marama to let go.
Never, before or since, have I been more afraid than on that day, as
the weight took me plunging down into a bluish gloom. The bottom, as I
have said, was at about eleven fathoms,--close to seventy feet,--and
since the coral was of the dark-purple kind, the light was very dim.
When my weight struck the coral my heart was beating so that I nearly
choked; I lost my bearings and wasted half a minute before I found the
entrance of the tonu's cave. Suddenly, five yards ahead of me, I
perceived the dark mouth of the cavern, like a low wide doorway,
fringed with pink coral and gently waving weeds. As I stared into the
darkness which seemed to fill a vast chamber, I felt a prickling at the
roots of my hair--what if the tonu had a mate.
Then, dimly in the gloom, I made out the forms of the two great
oysters, their barnacled and crusted shells agape. I moved forward to
wrench them from the rock. With one in each hand I swam toward the
basket, glancing back fearfully as went. There was no shout of triumph
when I reached the surface--I flung myself into the canoe and lay there
while Marama pulled up the basket.
"You got them?" he inquired eagerly, without turning his head in my
direction.
"They are In the basket," I said, "but if I had not found them, I would
not have gone down again!"
"My stomach was cold at the thought of it. Come--let us open the shell
and leave this evil place. I can scarce wait to see what is inside!"
"You take one," I suggested, "and I will open the other."
"Yes!" he answered, with a boy's eagerness to prolong the moment of
suspense, "I will open mine first, and when we have seen what it
contains, you can look into the other one."
He inserted his knife close to the hinge, severed the muscle connecting
the shells, and laid the great oyster open on the bottom of the canoe.
His fingers, skilled with long practice, went under the fringing mantle
where nearly all pearls are found, searching rapidly and in vain. He
felt more carefully--uttered an exclamation of disgust.
"There is nothing," he said mournfully, "not so much as a blister
pearl!"
I took my knife and opened the oyster he had handed me. It was very
old and diseased; the shells seemed half rotten, pierced with the holes
of borers, and the flesh of the creature inside had a sickly, greenish
look. My forefinger went under the mantle--felt something hard and
smooth, which moved loosely at the touch. Next moment I laid in
Marama's hand a magnificent pearl, the size of a marble, round,
flawless, and glimmering with the sheen of perfect orient.
We gazed at it, awed by our good fortune. A man might spend years
among the atolls without laying eyes on a pearl one half so beautiful!
My fingers had gone back to the oyster to complete the habitual
inspection when Marama found his voice.
"With such a pearl," he said softly, "a man could buy a schooner like
the Tara, or an entire island for himself! Not one of the divers has
ever seen its match, nor--"
I interrupted him with a frenzied shout, as I laid in the palm of his
hand, beside the first pearl, a second one--its twin in size, in color,
in lustre, and perfection of form.
"Marama," I said when we had grown a little calmer, "we must say
nothing of this to anyone except Seroni. I know little of pearls, but
the value of this matched pair is too great to be made known. The
sight of them would tempt a man to things he might regret."
Our mood of exultation was quenched by the wailing of mourners as we
passed the islet, and the sight of my uncle's sober face when he met us
at the Tara's rail. "I'm glad you came in," he said. "This has been a
bad day and I'm feeling anxious and depressed. Teura--poor devil; he
was one of the best of the lot; I've known him since he was a lad at
school. This business won't stop the diving, of course,--it's all part
of the day's work to them,--but it's a pity that such a tragedy has
come to spoil our season at Iriatai. I've been jumpy as an old woman
since the canoes came in--a silly idea that you might have gone on
diving and that there might have been another of those damned tonus
about!"
"We want to have a talk with you, Uncle Harry," I said. "Can we go
down to your stateroom--all three of us?"
I followed my uncle and Marama into the stateroom and closed the door
behind me. Then I unrolled the tuck of my pareu, opened a knotted
handkerchief and laid on the table the twin pearls of the tonu's cave.
My uncle's dark brilliant eyes opened wide, his eyebrows went up, and
he whistled a soft and long-drawn note. Without a word he took up
first one pearl and then the other, turning them in his fingers and
letting the light play over their gleaming and flawless surfaces.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed at last, "you take my breath away! I reckon
this is the most beautiful matched pair that ever came out of the
Paumotus--by long, long odds! In Paris, on the Rue de la Paix, the
jewelers would fight one another for a chance to bid on them! You
can't set a price on a pair of pearls like these. One of them by
itself would make you independent in a small way; the fact that they're
matched probably doubles the value of each." He turned to the native
boy. "Eh Marama," he said to him, in his own tongue; "you are a lucky
boy! This morning's work will make you the richest man of Raiatea,
with a fine house, a cutter, and plantations enough to keep all your
relatives in plenty. But say nothing of this, for not all men are good
at heart."
"Of course they are yours," he went on in English, "to do with as you
wish; but I advise you two to let me handle this matter for you. They
must be sold as a pair, and I know a Jew on Tahiti who will give us the
top of the market. He is buyer for one of the largest firms in Paris,
and in a case like this, something more than money is involved. These
pearls will make history, you will see; I haven't a doubt they'll end
among the jewels of some European court. Sikorsky knows me and knows
that I know the game; it will be a matter of naming our own price,
within reason, for the acquisition of such a pair of pearls would be a
tremendous feather in his cap. Come, we must christen them, for pearls
of real importance are always named. What do you say to calling them
the _Marama Twins_? Marama means the moon, and their orient has the
pure, pale glimmer of moonlight. What beautiful things! If I were a
rich man I'd take them off your hands myself!
"See--we'll put them in cotton-wool in this tobacco-tin, and stow it
away in the safe. The less said the better, I fancy, even among
ourselves. Such a temptation might prove too much for almost any man!
But tell me about Teura--his aunt was too much cut up to talk."
Marama left us to go on deck while I told my uncle the story of the
morning's happenings. He shook his head when I told of how the canoes
had gone home, and of our resolution to go down after the two old
oysters Marama had seen. Then I spoke of my feeling that I must be the
one to dive, and how I had gone down to bring up the oysters from the
tonu's cave.
"I know what you mean," he remarked, as I concluded, "and you did the
right thing; but don't take such chances very often! You'll have to
keep on diving for a few days, if only for the sake of public morale,
but I wish you'd slack off gradually and give it up altogether in a
week or two."