It was a strange story which Charles Turold heard by that grey Cornish sea--a story touched with the glitter of adventurous fortune in the sombre setting of a trachytic island, where wine-dark breakers beat monotonously on a black beach of volcanic sand strewn with driftwood, kelp, dead shells, and the squirming forms of blindworms tossed up from the bowels of a dead sea.

It was there in the spell of solitude thirty years before that Robert Turold's soul had yielded to temptation at the beck of his monstrous ambition.
That, however, was the end--or what Robert Turold imagined to be the end--of the story.

The listener was first invited to contemplate a scene in human progress when men gathered from the four corners of the earth and underwent incredible hardships of hunger, thirst, disease, lived like beasts and died like vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth.
Thalassa brought up before the young man's eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period--a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling street, knee-deep in sand, swarming with vermin and scorpions, almost waterless, crowded with a mongrel, ever-increasing lot of needy adventurers brought from all parts of the world by reports of diamonds which could be picked out with a penknife from the dunes and sandy shingle which formed the background of the villainous "town." In the great waves and ridges of sand which stretched everywhere as far as the eye could reach, runaway scoundrels of every shade of colour wormed on their bellies with the terrible pertinacity of ants, sweating and groping in that choking dust for the glittering crystals so rarely found.
Thalassa had been infected by the diamond fever like so many more.

Like other young men he wanted plenty of money for women and grog--what else, he asked, could a man get for money that was worth having?
In those days he was a sailor before the mast, lacking the capital for such delights.

So he deserted his timber tramp when she touched at Port Elizabeth, and set out for the diamond fields with another runaway--the ship's cook, who had an ambition to have his meals cooked for him for the rest of his life, instead of cooking meals for other people.
The fields were far to the north.