And then holding Balatta by the hand and leading her onward, he
came to it--a tremendous pit, obviously artificial, in the heart of
the plateau. Old history, the South Seas Sailing Directions,
scores of remembered data and connotations swift and furious,
surged through his brain. It was Mendana who had discovered the
islands and named them Solomon's, believing that he had found that
monarch's fabled mines. They had laughed at the old navigator's
child-like credulity; and yet here stood himself, Bassett, on the
rim of an excavation for all the world like the diamond pits of
South Africa.

But no diamond this that he gazed down upon. Rather was it a
pearl, with the depth of iridescence of a pearl; but of a size all
pearls of earth and time, welded into one, could not have totalled;
and of a colour undreamed of in any pearl, or of anything else, for
that matter, for it was the colour of the Red One. And the Red One
himself Bassett knew it to be on the instant. A perfect sphere,
full two hundred feet in diameter, the top of it was a hundred feet
below the level of the rim. He likened the colour quality of it to
lacquer. Indeed, he took it to be some sort of lacquer, applied by
man, but a lacquer too marvellously clever to have been
manufactured by the bush-folk. Brighter than bright cherry-red,
its richness of colour was as if it were red builded upon red. It
glowed and iridesced in the sunlight as if gleaming up from
underlay under underlay of red.

In vain Balatta strove to dissuade him from descending. She threw
herself in the dirt; but, when he continued down the trail that
spiralled the pit-wall, she followed, cringing and whimpering her
terror. That the red sphere had been dug out as a precious thing,