May II, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
CHAYA 
19 
^ l^mance of the South Seas 
'By H. T>E VERB STAC POOLE 
Synopsis : Macquart, an adventurer who has spent most 
of his life at sea. finds himself in Sydney on his beam ends. 
He has a ivonderfut story of gold hidden up a river in New 
Guinea, and makes the acquaintance of Tillman, a sporting 
man about toien, fond of yachting and racing, and of Houghton, 
a well-educated Englishman out of a job. Through Tillman's 
influence he is introduced to a wealthy woolbroker , Screed, who, 
having heard Macquart's story, agrees to finance the enterprise. 
Screed purchases a yawl, the " Barracuda." Just before they 
leave Macquart encounters an old shipmate. Captain Hull, 
who is fully acquainted with his villainies. Hull gets in touch 
with Screed, who engages him and brings him aboard the yacht 
fust as they are about to sail. They arrive at New Guinea and 
anchor in a lagoon. They go by boat up a river where they 
make the acquaintance of a drunken Dutchman, Wiart, ihho 
is in charge of a rubber and camphor station. Here they 
meet a beautiful Dyak girl, Chaya. According to Macquart's 
story a man named Lant. xtiho had seized this treasure, sunk his 
ship and murdered his crew with the exception of one man, 
" Smith." Lant then settled here, buried the treasure, and married 
a Dyak woman, chief of her tribe. Lant was murdered by 
■' Smith," whom Captain Hull and the rest' make little doubt 
was no other than Macquart. Chaya, with whom Houghton 
has fallen in love, is Lant's half-caste daughter. Macquart 
guides them to a spot on the river-bank where he declares the 
cache to be. They dig but find nothing. Then he starts the 
surmise that the Dyaks have moved the treasure to a sacred 
grove in the jungle. Wiart is his authority He persuades 
his shipmates to go in search of it. The journey leads them 
through the Great Thorn Bush, which is a vast maze from which 
escape is impossible without a clue. Macquart and Wiart 
desert their companions. As night falls a woman's voice is 
heard calling, and Chaya, ansitering their cries, discovers 
them : through her help they at last escape from the maze, to find 
that Macquart and Wiart hare returned to the Barracuda. 
These two find the cache and unearth the gold. A huge kind of 
man-ape enters the yawl at this junctnre, and kills both Jacky, 
the native, and Wiart, leaving Macquart alone with the dead 
bodies and the gold. 
CHAPTER XXVII {continued) 
The Gold Fiend 
MACQUART stared at the sight before him. Then 
he tfied to get the corpse of Wiart overboard. 
It was a most terribly difficult business. Wiart 
did not seem to want to go in the least, once 
or twice when he slipped back on to the deck, just as Macquart 
had almost got him over the rail, his face in the full glare of 
the sun showed a grin as if he were deriding the efforts of 
the other. The injury to the eye gave him the appearance of 
having just fought with someone, his clothes were in disorder, 
his collar half off, and his necktie all askew. From a distance 
as Macquart recommenced the business of trying to get him 
over, it looked as though a drunken man were being ejected 
from the Barracuda. This time Macquart was successful, 
and the body went over and floated off on the current that 
flowed riverwards past the yawl. 
It was an hour after noon now and Macquart, who had 
not eaten since dawn, felt faint from his exertions and from 
want of food. Leaving aside this feeling, he was afflicted 
with a shght confusion of thought, or rather want of power in 
co-ordinating his thoughts. 
He went into the galley and found the remains of the 
food left by Jacky that morning. In the locker on the right 
hand side there was plenty more food. Biscuit tins and 
cans of preserved meat and vegetables, condensed milk and 
so forth. 
Macquart ate, and as he ate his eyes roamed about 
hither and thither. He read the Libby and Armour labels on 
the meat cans, and the measure of his extraordinary position 
might ha\e been taken from the feeling of incongruity and 
strangeness with which these commonplace labels filled his 
mind. 
The place where he was seemed remote from the ordinary 
world as Sirius. 
He could hear a faint chuckle now and then as the lagoon 
water lapped the planks, and occasionally a faint groan from 
the rudder. There were all sorts of little facts about the 
lagoon that spoke in all sorts of little ways only to be dis- 
tinguished and interpreted by a person who had nothing to do 
but listen. 
Thus the drift of the current was unequal in rapidity, 
sometimes a fairly strong swirl would lip the bow and swing 
the ruddi r to starboard a few inches, or a log would come 
along half-submerged and rub itself against the planking, or a 
faint bubbling sound would tell of a spring blowing off its 
superfluous water in the lagoon floor. 
The Lagoon, seemingly so dead and inert, was, in reality, 
always at work, fetching in driftwood from the river, expelling 
it again, raising or lowering its level in some mysterious way 
independent of the sea tide or river flow, stopping up old well 
heads on its floor, opening new ones, getting rid of all the 
detritus that a tropical forest hands to the water. 
Macquart sat for a while after he had finished eating, 
hstening to these vague and indeterminate voices, then though 
the gold was always in his mind, the recollection of the two 
baskets of treasure left on the bank came to him for the first 
time. 
He left the galley, landed, and seized the basket that 
Jacky had laid down before going to his death. Then 
struggling on board with it he stood undecided as to what 
he should do. 
It was impossible to store an3rthing in the cabin. He 
could not go down to that place again. There remained the 
hold and the fo'c'sle. He had never explor«d the httle hold, 
but he knew the fo'c'sle ; he came to the fo'c'sle hatch, paused 
a moment, and then, just as a person shoots coal into a cellar, 
he emptied the contents of the bag down it. He had no time 
to waste stowing this cargo whose horrible proportions in 
relation to his puny efforts were ever looming before him. It 
was like being in front of a great golden mountain that had 
to be removed piece by piece and in pocketfuls. Added 
to this fantastic labour would come — on its completion — the 
problem of escape from the lagoon in the Barracuda single- 
handed ; added to this the terrible problem of the disposal of 
Jacky's remains. 
No man outside of Nightmare-land was ever confronted 
with such a position as that which faced Macquart urged on by 
gold lust. 
In the grasp and under the whip of the gold demon all 
the powers of his mind were subservient to the main desire. 
He turned now with the empty basket in his hand, re- 
gained the shore and came back with the other full basket, 
shot the contents down the fo'c'sle hatch, listened till the 
jingle of the last rolling coin ceased, and then flushed, 
breathing hard and full of new life and energy, 
started off, with both baskets rolled up under his arm, for 
the cache. 
Here, with one of the mattocks, he cleared the earth 
carefully away from the next treasure box, and then working 
with his hands, began to extract it. Work as carefully as he 
might, the rotten wood of the box sides broke to pieces and 
the coins fell about loose ; he had no one to hold the basket 
open and he spent ten minutes in fruitless attempts to devise 
some method to keep the thing erect and yawning. 
Failing in this he was condemned to hold it open with 
his left hand and fill it as best he could with his right. 
He succeeded finely in this way as long as the coins were 
in mass, but when it came to the last few hundred scattered 
loose, ah ! then the real trouble began. Every coin had to be 
picked up. His task-master saw to that. To leave one single 
golden coin ungathered was a physical impossibility, and it 
was during the picking up of these that Haste kept crying to 
^■— " speed," and imagination kept painting the awful 
him 
labours still before him. Every last coin of all that cache 
had to be removed, for each of these terrible things had a 
power as great as the mass. Each was a sovereign or a 
Louis. 
Each represented four dollars or five dollars, and five 
dollars to Macquart, who had always known poverty, five 
dollars dressed in gold in the form of a sovereign, constituted 
a power against which there was no appeal. 
He whimpered as he picked amongst the soil, whimpered 
like a woman in distress. 
The heat of -the day was great and the sun struck heavy 
