Summary
A schooner glides through opal swells toward a spit of land erased from most charts, carrying three men who look like the first draft of civilization’s epitaph: Bruce Chalmers, ink-stained Chicago scribe chasing a mythic scoop; an Australian whose bloodstream is ninety-proof gin; and a silk-smooth Cantonese investor whose purse strings clink like manacles. They expect oysters fat with ghost-white pearls; instead they meet Leila, a sun-amber castaway whose father mapped the lagoon’s floor, then vanished into its blue lungs. She trusts the color of their skin, spills a chamois sack of moonlit nacre across the sand, and the island—pulsing with breadfruit shadows and the salt hiss of unseen reefs—suddenly shrinks to the size of avarice. The gin-soaked rover and the wily financier knit a silent covenant; Chalmers, nauseated by his own reflection in their pupils, becomes the sole bulwark between a girl who remembers pianos and predators who remember only price per grain. What follows is not a duel but a slow vivisection of loyalty, each tide hauling another layer of pretense into the deep until the lagoon itself seems to breathe through their wounds.
Synopsis
The tale is that of a curious expedition to a pearl lagoon off the South Sea Islands in search of untold treasures. The members of the party are a newspaper reporter, a degenerate Australian, who is literally seeped in gin, and a cunning Chinese, who supplies the money to fit out the vessel. When they arrive at the island, they find only a girl, Leila, who was shipwrecked with her father long before. Leila is so glad to see white men again that she eagerly shows them a bag of beautiful pearls brought up from the ocean bed by her father, who disappeared shortly afterward. The pearls are so tempting to the Australian and the Chinese that they form a combination against Leila and the reporter, Bruce Chalmers, when the latter refuses to aid them in robbing the girl. The struggle which follows for the possession of the pearls and the lagoon is very realistic.
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