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as he felt for the stone within the caul. We, he and I, had a momentary
vision of a large, lustrous round pearl. But the next instant she was
gone, jumped clean out of his fishy slithery hands back into the sea,
her native element.
How
he felt and how I felt does not matter here, but can be imagined. What
he did does matter. He promptly sang out a series of orders to the
crew. An additional anchor was run out in double quick time from the
bows, and the number one diver, who was still luckily in his dress,
minus the helmet, got ready at once to go over the side.
The
boss rapidly told the diver what had happened and indicated as nearly
as possible where he was to look for the pearl. Was there ever a more
hopeless-seeming task? The proverbial needle in a haystack, I thought,
would present less of a task to a blind man than this absurd attempt to
wrest a small object like a loose pearl from the ocean bed. For I knew
that the floor of the ocean is like a tropical jungle for density of
growth, and not the shelf of Sahara sand many people imagine it to be.
The
Japanese diver, however, went over the side as though it were all in
the day's work and disappeared from sight. He was not down long. In
less than five minutes from the time the lead had dragged him down came
his signal to be hauled up. When he arose out of the sea, in his
clenched right fist was the lost pearl!
He
had sighted her almost at once as she lay, for luckily she had fallen
on a patch of clean sandy ground. Through the enlarging medium of the
water and in that place she had looked to him as big as a billiard ball.
No,
I did not get her after all, for she was such a rare gem that my friend
the pearler decided to have all the pearl-buyers ashore compete for
her, and then her price was far more than I could pay.
This
was in Broome, where I had all my early experience in pearl-fishing.
Circumstances drove me thence, and at length, deviously, I was led to
the glamorous isles of Sulu, at the southernmost point of the
Philippine archipelago. How I
