seemed to
suggest that it was being used as a kitchen. There they found a young
Indian woman bending over a fire and preparing a savoury mess of some
sort; and it was not without difficulty that they at length made her
understand she was a prisoner, and must abandon her cookery and
accompany them. In like manner they visited all the remaining houses of
the settlement, collecting altogether two white women and some twenty
blacks, as well as a priest, the whole of whom, together with their
other prisoners, they unceremoniously marched to the little church,
locking them therein, and so making prisoners of every soul in the
settlement. Then, having posted half a dozen men round the church, to
see that nobody broke out, George led the way to the big shed, which was
the most conspicuous building in the settlement. Entering it, he found
that it was divided into two unequal compartments, the smaller of which
contained a few casks of wine, a few bales of cloth of different kinds,
and a miscellaneous assortment of goods, evidently intended for the use
of the settlers. Then, passing from this into the larger compartment,
he at once became aware of a faint suggestion of the same peculiar and
offensive odour that had assailed his nostrils while walking up from the
beach, and, looking more closely, he found that it proceeded from an
enormous heap of something piled high against the further wall, which,
upon investigation, he found to be a kind of oyster-shell, the interior
of which was more or less thickly coated with a beautiful white,
iridescent substance. At once he understood the meaning of everything.
Those shells were shells of the pearl oyster; the settlement was a
subsidiary pearl-fishing station; and the odour which had so offended
him was the odour of decaying oysters laid out to rot in the sun in
order that the pearls might be extracted without injury from the dead
fish. And it had apparently dawned upon somebody that the shells, as
well as the pearls, possessed a market value, and this was where they
were being stored after being cleansed from the decayed fish.

But if that enormous heap consisted entirely of pearl oyster-shells, as
it unquestionably did, where were the pearls that had been extracted
from them? George glanced round the sombre interior, lighted by only
one open aperture guarded by a heavily framed shutter, and saw two large
boxes dimly revealed in one shadowy corner of the store. He strode
across