He awoke not knowing in the least where he was; then he remembered.

His tongue felt huge in his mouth and his hands seemed the size of pillows. He had felt all this before once, long ago, when a knock-out drop had been put in his drink and he had been shanghaied. It was a frightful sensation, for, added to it was the depression of the rum and the knowledge that he had drunk to excess.

Ah! those nervous temperaments that liquor makes god-like for a moment of illusion, how they suffer face to face with their beastlikeness the morning after!

The wind was blowing—the faintest breath—through the open door of the tent, and the sea lay beyond the beach still and grey.

The sea that yesterday had been blue as sapphire had lost its blueness and beauty and lay grey and still, breaking on the beach in little ripples. The sky above the sea was of a dull zinc colour, darker at the horizon than at the zenith. Gaspard did not remember ever having seen a tropic sky like that, so still in its greyness, so steadfast, so gloomy.

Through the open door of the tent the wind carried with it the faintest powdering of dust. It irritated his eyes; he looked at his right hand—it was covered with grey dust. This was not sand from the beach; this was dust, volcanic dust, grey and dismal. Some volcano of244 the islands was in eruption, some volcano down Martinique way, for the dust was blown from that direction by the southeast trade wind.

But Gaspard knew nothing of volcanoes or their dust. He lay listening for the voice of Sagesse. He had not yet recognized that a drug had been used against him the night before. He put everything down to the drink, and felt ashamed to face his companion.

He lay listening. Not a sound except a slight pattering and scratching of the palm fronds as now and then they lifted to the faintest breath of air. Then what breeze there was died utterly away, and complete silence held the island, broken now and then by the far-off crying of the gulls.

He struggled to his feet, cursing the rum he had drunk the night before, and himself for having drunk it. Then he came tottering out on to the beach. The first thing that struck his eye was the empty space where last evening the pile of stores had stood, covered with a sail-cloth. The stores had not been completely removed; a bag of biscuits and a case of canned meat had been left.

His gaze travelled from these to the shore edge, where the longboat ought to have been had the working party been ashore. It was not there. Then, flinging off his shoes and working his way a couple of yards up the stem of a palm, he sought the western anchorage.

La Belle Arlésienne was gone.

He came down from the tree shaking and faint, the perspiration running from the palms of his hands and his lips dry as sandstone.

He was marooned. The thing was clear. Sagesse had doctored him the night before with a knock-out drop; he had been “doped,” and as he lay unconscious the evasion245 had been made. But why? The answer was easy enough to find when one knew the character of Sagesse. To leave Gaspard alone on his island, knowing what he had suffered there before, would be a piece of revenge after Sagesse’s heart; yet Gaspard felt this not to be the solution.

Why had Sagesse flown like this, leaving the ship of coral in the lagoon untouched? Had he, then, sure knowledge that the treasure was not there, and that time would be wasted in looking for it? Trying to find an answer to the riddle set him, and scarcely knowing where he went, he took the path across the islet along which the quarterboat had been drawn to the lagoon.

Even before he reached the northern beach two things struck his eye; the quarterboat, with all the diving apparatus on board, lay floating in the lagoon and moored to the eastern edge of the basin; and far out at sea La Belle Arlésienne with all sail set lay becalmed.

Out there on the desolate grey of the calm sea, her old sails hanging flaccid and without a motion, La Belle Arlésienne had an inexpressibly lugubrious and sinister appearance.

It was as though she had been caught in some wicked act and, trying to escape, had been arrested. The calm was holding her in a grip as powerful as the iron grip of ice; the south equatorial current, broken here, would not give her a drift of more than a mile an hour to the north. She might hang in sight of the island for a day or more.<............