lost again.
Gradually they beat nearer until they made it--a circular ragged high
ridge jutting abruptly from a deep sullen sea, with a red glow showing
fitfully in the smoke of the summit.

There was an outer reef, but Thalassa knew the passage, and steered the
ketch through a tortuous channel above sunken needle-pointed rocks to a
little sheltered harbour inshore. Here they made the ketch fast, and
landed on a beach of volcanic violet, where they sometimes sank knee deep
into sulphuric water, and felt squirming sea things squelch beneath their
tread. Above this margin of violet-black sand, deposits of volcanic rock
and lava rose almost perpendicularly, enclosing the central cone in a kind
of amphitheatre.

The stones they had travelled so far to obtain were there waiting for
them. Thalassa hurried over that part of the story, narrating it in barest
outline with suspicious glances directed at his listener's intent face.
Apparently he led his companions to the spot as soon as they landed--up a
path through a gap in the crater wall, across a furrowed slope all
a-quake, where jets of steam issued from gurgling fissures in snaky
spirals. On the other side of this dreary waste Thalassa led the way
across a ledge to firmer ground and a grave. Charles gathered that the
occupant of the grave had been coffined in a seaman's chest in his
clothes: "There he was, with his bottles of diamonds in his coat pockets,
and more in his leather bag in his breast pocket, just as I left him
twelve months afore to go to the other end of the world looking for what
I'd buried." A grim smile curved Thalassa's face as he uttered these
words; the idea seemed to contain elements of humour for him.

"They were diamonds, then?" said Charles curiously.

"Ay; they were diamonds right enough. Him--Turold--said they were diamonds
as soon as he uncorked one of the bottles and poured a few into the palm
of his hand. There was some rare big ones in one of the bottles--enough to
have brought all those fools tumbling out of Africa if they'd know of
them. From some papers they found on the chap Turold said he'd must a-been
prospecting in nigh every part of the world."

"How did he come to be buried there with his diamonds, in that lonely
spot?" asked Charles wonderingly.

"He was a passenger, and died as we was passing the island. 'Twas the
skipper's fancy to give him a land burial. But that doesn't matter a
dump--it's outside the story." He turned his e