“I should have imagined that sago grew on a stalk like rice or wheat.”

“Or Topsy!”

She laughed.  A difficult situation had passed without undue effort.  Unhappily the man reopened it.  Whilst using a crowbar as a wedge he endeavored to put matters on a straightforward footing.

“A little while ago,” he said, “you seemed to imply that I had assumed the name of Jenks.”

But Miss Deane’s confidential mood had gone.  “Nothing of the kind,” she said, coldly.  “I think Jenks is an excellent name.”

She regretted the words even as they fell from her lips.  The sailor gave a mighty wrench with the bar, splitting the log to its clustering leaves.

“You are right,” he said.  “It is distinctive, brief, dogmatic.  I cling to it passionately.”

Soon afterwards, leaving Iris to the manufacture of sago, he went to the leeward side of the island, a search for turtles being his ostensible object.  When the trees hid him he quickened his pace and turned to the left, in order to explore the cavity marked on the tin with a skull and cross-bones.  To his surprise he hit upon the remnants of a roadway—­that is, a line through the wood where there were no well-grown trees, where the ground bore traces of humanity in the shape of a wrinkled and mildewed pair of Chinese boots, a wooden sandal, even the decayed remains of a palki, or litter.

At last he reached the edge of the pit, and the sight that met his eyes held him spellbound.

The labor of many hands had torn a chasm, a quarry, out of the side of the hill.  Roughly circular in shape, it had a diameter of perhaps a hundred feet, and at its deepest part, towards the cliff, it ran to a depth of forty feet.  On the lower side, where the sailor stood, it descended rapidly for some fifteen feet.

Grasses, shrubs, plants of every variety, grew in profusion down the steep slopes, wherever seeds could find precarious nurture, until a point was reached about ten or eleven feet from the bottom.  There all vegetation ceased as if forbidden to cross a magic circle.

Below this belt the place was a charnel-house.  The bones of men and animals mingled in weird confusion.  Most were mere skeletons.  A few bodies—­nine the sailor counted—­yet preserved some resemblance of humanity.  These latter were scattered among the older relics.  They wore the clothes of Dyaks.  Characteristic hats and weapons denoted their nationality.  The others, the first harvest of this modern Golgotha, might have been Chinese coolies.  When the sailor’s fascinated vision could register details he distinguished yokes, baskets, odd-looking spades and picks strewed amidst the bones.  The animals were all of one type, small, lanky, with long pointed skulls.  At last he spied a withered hoof.  They were pigs.

Over all lay a thick coating of fine sand, deposited from the eddying winds that could never reach the silent depths.  The place was gruesome, horribly depressing.  Jenks broke out into a clammy perspiration.  He seemed to be looking at the secrets of the grave.