‘Treasure,’ Mr Krest’s voice was soft as velvet. ‘Just supposin’ you keep that flippin’ trap shut about my personal affairs. Yes?’ The voice was amiable, nonchalant. ‘You know what you just done, treas? You just earned yourself a little meeting with the Corrector this evening. That’s what you’ve gone and done.’
The girl’s hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes were wide. She said in a whisper: ‘Oh no, Milt. Oh no, please.’On the second day out, at dawn, they came up with Chagrin Island. It was first picked up by the radar – a small bump in the dead level line on the scanner – and then a minute blur on the great curved horizon grew with infinite slowness into half a mile of green fringed with white. It was extraordinary to come upon land after two days in which the yacht had seemed to be the only moving, the only living thing in an empty world. Bond had never seen or even clearly imagined the doldrums before. Now he realized what a terrible hazard they must have been in the days of sail – the sea of glass under a brazen sun, the foul, heavy air, the trail of small clouds along the rim of the world that never came closer, never brought wind or blessed rain. How must centuries of mariners have blessed this tiny dot in the Indian Ocean as they bent to the oars that moved the heavy ship perhaps a mile a day! Bond stood in the bows and watched the flying-fish squirt from beneath the hull as the blue-black of the sea slowly mottled into the brown and white and green of deep shoal. How wonderful that he would soon be walking and swimming again instead of just sitting and lying down. How wonderful to have a few hours’ solitude – a few hours away from Mr Milton Krest!
They anchored outside the reef in ten fathoms and Fidele Barbey took them through the opening in the speed-boat. In every detail Chagrin was the prototype coral island. It was about twenty acres of sand and dead coral and low scrub surrounded, after fifty yards of shallow lagoon, by a necklace of reef on which the quiet, long swell broke with a soft hiss. Clouds of birds rose when they landed – terns, boobies, men-of-war, frigates – but quickly settled again. There was a strong ammoniac smell of guano, and the scrub was white with it. The only other living things were the land-crabs that scuttled and scraped among the
The glare from the white sand was dazzling and there was no shade. Mr Krest ordered a tent to be erected and sat in it smoking a cigar while gear of various kinds was ferried ashore. Mrs Krest swam and picked up sea-shells while Bond and Fidele Barbey put on masks and, swimming in opposite directions, began systematically to comb the reef all the way round the island.
When you are looking for one particular species underwater – shell or fish or seaweed or coral formation – you have to keep your brain and your eyes focused for that one individual pattern. The riot of colour and movement and the endless variety of light and shadow fight your concentration all the time. Bond trudged slowly along through the wonderland with only one picture in his mind – a six-inch pink fish with black stripes and big eyes – the second such fish man had ever seen. ‘If you see it,’ Mr Krest had enjoined, ‘just you let out a yell and stay with it. I’ll do the rest. I got a little something in the tent that’s just the dandiest thing for catching fish you ever saw.’
