The Katrina came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands that issued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it. The small boats were put out and sections of the cargo were sent to rickety wharves where white men and brown islanders took charge of it and carried it away into the fringe of the lush vegetation. Hugo, looking at those islands, was moved to smile. The place where broken men hid from civilization, where the derelicts of the world gathered to drown their shame in a verdant paradise that had no particular position in the white man’s scheme of the earth.

At one of the smaller islands an accident to the engine forced the Katrina to linger for two weeks. It was during those two weeks, in a rather extraordinary manner, that Hugo Danner laid the first foundation of the fortune that he accumulated in his later life. One day, idling away a leave on shore in the shade of a mighty tree, he saw the outriggers of the natives file away for the oyster beds, and, out of pure curiosity, he followed them. For a whole day he watched the men plunge under the surface in search of pearls. The next day he came back and dove with one of them.

On the bizarre floor of the ocean, among the colossal fronds of its flora, the two men swam. They were invaders from the brilliance above the surface, shooting like fish, horizontally, through the murk and shadow, and the denizens of that world resented their coming. Great fish shot past them with malevolent eyes, and the vises of giant clams shut swiftly in attempts to trap their moving limbs. Hugo was entranced. He watched the other man as he found the oyster bed and commenced to fill his basket with frantic haste. When his lungs stung and he could bear the agony no longer, he turned and forged toward the upper air. Then they went down again.

Hugo’s blood, designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greater density fitted him naturally for the work. The pressure did not make him suffer and the few moments granted to the divers beneath the forbidding element stretched to a longer time for him.

On the second day of diving he went alone. His amateur attempt had been surprisingly fruitful. Standing erect in the immense solitude, he searched the hills and valleys. At length, finding a promising cluster of shellfish, he began to examine them one by one, pulling them loose, feeling in their pulpy interior for the precious jewels. He occupied himself determinedly while the Katrina was waiting in Apia, and at the end of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great value and two hundred of moderate worth.