Concluding Richard Boyle's series on 'The Quest for the Hyacinth'

Treasure at Dead Man's Rock

Last week's

The story so far: In 1848, Ezekiel Trenoweth travels from Bristol to Bom- bay to obtain a letter written by his deceased father in which there are directions for finding the Great Ruby of Ceylon. He arrives in the island and proceeds, as instructed, to Sri Pada. Beneath a stone head he discovers a gold buckle engraved with further directions, but is disturbed in the act by the mysterious Colliver. Ezekiel sails for England to collect a key to continue the quest and finds that Colliver is among the ship's crew. Part of the buckle is dropped by Ezekiel and picked up by Colliver. A mutiny breaks out, and the captain and all the passengers apart from Ezekiel are killed.

Barricaded inside a cabin aboard the Belle Fortune, with a fierce storm raging outside, Ezekiel awaits Colliver's final assault. But the Belle Fortune is driven on to some coastal rocks before the mutineers can act. While abandoning ship, Ezekiel is stabbed to death by Colliver's sidekick, John Railton, who steals a packet containing one part of the gold buckle and Ezekiel's journal. Colliver and Railton, the sole survivors, then separately make for the shore, the former desperate to get his hands on Ezekiel's part of the buckle.

Up to this point, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Dead Man's Rock: A Romance(1887) is a gripping adventure story. The narrative is taut. There is plenty of action, mystery, and a surprising amount of violence. And it is written in an accessible and engaging style that belies its age. Unfortunately, though, I have to report that the latter part of the novel is marred by a series of unbelievable coincidences, as well as the appearance of a surfeit of melodrama and a very Victorian love-element, the Romance of the title.

The first in the long list of absurd coincidences is that the ship just happens to be wrecked within sight of Ezekiel's house on the Cornish coast. During the storm, Ezekiel's son, 8-year-old Jasper, hears the screams of the shipwrecked. Next morning he goes down to the bay - which is dominated by the prominence called Dead Man's Rock - to investigate. He comes across John Railton, who is being pursued by the murderous Colliver for the other part of the gold buckle. Railton hurriedly gives Jasper his father's packet without telling him its contents. Colliver appears, stabs Railton to death and is about to kill Jasper and steal the packet when villagers arrive on the beach. Jasper is too terrified of Colliver to tell the villagers of the murder he has just witnessed, or protest when, at the inquest of the ship's crew, the murderer passes himself off as a Greek sailor. Afterwards Colliver disappears, and then Ezekiel's body is washed ashore with a knife blade embedded in his back. Jasper remembers the packet, and opens it to find the gold buckle and his father's journal. In it he reads of what happened to his father in India and Ceylon, of his father's fears regarding Colliver, and of the bloody mutiny on the voyage home. Although he has the key, without the other part of the buckle he is unable to continue the quest started by his father.

Fourteen years elapse. Jasper, now an adult, moves to London with his friend, Tom. They are so impecunious that one day they decide to pool what little money is left and set out for a gambling den. When they lose all their cash, Jasper pulls out his gold buckle, which is accepted as a stake by the proprietress. Their luck quickly changes and soon they have won a small fortune. As they leave the gambling den they are waylaid. Jasper is attacked with a knife, but is saved when it is deflected by the gold buckle in his chest pocket. Tom becomes a playwright, while Jasper falls in love with a girl called Claire. She is an actress by profession, but does not reveal this to Jasper. Tom's debut play is to open in the West End and during rehearsals he informs Jasper that he is in love with the leading lady, Clarissa Lambert. At the first night, Jasper discovers to his dismay that Clarissa Lambert is in fact Claire, and so Tom has fallen for his fiancee.

During the interval, a troubled Jasper meets by chance the proprietress of the gambling den, and obliges when she asks if she may examine the buckle that proved to be so lucky. But luck runs out for Tom when he is stabbed to death while walking home with Jasper after the performance. Even though it is dark, Jasper recognises the assailant. It is Colliver. And Jasper realises the knife had been meant for him.

The credibility of the plot is further strained when, at Tom's funeral, Claire reveals by accident that Colliver is her hated, absent stepfather, and the proprietress of the gambling den is his mother. Jasper produces the gold buckle and Claire remembers Colliver showing her its companion piece in her childhood. Jasper then reluctantly informs her that Colliver has reappeared and that he has murdered not only Tom but another man called John Railton in his attempt to gain possession of the other part of the buckle. A shocked Claire replies that Railton was her natural father.

Claire is unable to assimilate these revelations and commits suicide during a performance of Tom's play. A distraught Jasper decides to follow suit. Taking with him the buckle and key that seem to have blighted his life, he rows a dinghy out on the River Thames to drown himself. But his resolve melts as the result of another bizarre coincidence. While preparing to jump overboard he hears the voices of Colliver and Claire's mother coming from an anchored boat nearby. Jasper clambers silently aboard and listens as Colliver demands money from his estranged wife.

But Jasper gives away his presence, falls down a ladder and is knocked unconscious. He recovers to find himself Colliver's prisoner, and his adversary holding the buckle and key. Colliver triumphantly informs him that with the united buckle, the complete directions, and a cryptic message engraved on the key, he has calculated that the treasure, including the Great Ruby of Ceylon, is buried under the sand at Dead Man's Rock. Colliver tells Jasper how he came to be involved in the quest for the Great Ruby. His father had been Jasper's grandfather's partner. After years of searching, the pair had found an old Buddhist monk at Sri Pada who was in possession of the gem. Overcome by greed, Jasper's grandfather had stabbed Colliver's father. Colliver knows this for sure because his mother (now the proprietress of the gambling den) was looking on. Jasper's grandfather had compelled the monk to carve a headstone in Colliver's likeness and then had killed the monk as well. Theirs were the two skeletons buried beneath the headstone.

Colliver knocks out Jasper, throws him into the river to drown, and hurries off to Cornwall. Jasper is rescued by Claire's mother and sets off in pursuit. Late at night, Jasper catches up with Colliver and watches as he digs a hole in the sand at the foot of Dead Man's Rock. Eventually Colliver comes across a chest which he unlocks with the stolen key. Jasper creeps closer as Colliver throws open the chest to reveal a tray filled with sumptuous gemstones:

"In the corner of this was a small space of about four inches square, covered with an iron lid. As we gazed with straining eyes, Colliver drew one more sigh of satisfied avarice, and lifted this smaller lid. Instantly a full rich flood of crimson light welled up, serene and glorious, with luminous shafts of splendour, that met and concentrated in one glowing heart of flame, met in one translucent, ineffable depth of purple-red. Calm and radiant it lay there, as though no curse lay in its deep hollows, no passion had ever fed its flames with blood; stronger than the centuries, imperishably and triumphantly cruel the Great Ruby of Ceylon.

"Into its red heart I have looked once, and this was what I read: - of treachery, lust and rapine: of battle and murder and sudden death; of midnight outcries, and poison in the guest-cup; of a curse that said, 'Even as the Heart of the Ruby is Blood and its Eyes a Flaming Fire, so shall it be for them that would possess it: Fire shall be their portion, and Blood their inheritance for ever.'As Colliver reaches out his hand to grasp the Great Ruby, Jasper catches him by the wrist. But Colliver is too quick for Jasper and whips his hand behind his back:

"He thrust me back with his left palm, and, with a sweep of his right, hurled the great jewel far out into the sea. I saw it rise and curve in one long, sparkling arch of flame, then fall with a dropping line of fire down into the billows. A splash- a jet of light, and it was gone. There, for aught I know, it lies today, and there, for aught I care, beneath the waters it shall treasure its infernal loveliness for ever." As the action takes place at night, this passage infers that the ruby was self-luminous. In Ruby and Sapphire (1996), Richard W. Hughes claims that: "Ruby has long had the reputation of being self-luminous." Hughes continues by quoting the 13th century Chinese writer Chau Ju-Kua, who wrote of the king of Ceylon: "He holds in his hand a jewel five inches in diameter, which cannot be burned by fire, and which shines in the night like a torch." Hughes relates: "This gigantic luminous gem was also believed to possess the virtues of an elixir of youth, for we are told that the king rubbed his face with it daily and by this means would retain his youthful looks even should he live more than ninety years."

The famous Portuguese physician, Garcia de Orta, who lived in Goa from 1534 to 1564, published a classic work on the medicinal products of India in which he wrote of self-luminous rubies: "A lapidary told me that he counted on a table a few very fine rubies from Ceylon, very small, such as we call score rubies, because they are sold at twenty the vintem. One got between the folds of the table, and at night, in the dark, the table seemed to have a spark of fire, so that it was like a candle. A very small ruby was found, and when it was taken up the spark no longer appeared on the table." However, Sir James Emerson Tennent was not only sceptical of the authenticity of the Great Ruby, but also the luminosity of rubies in general. He gave his own explanation of why the Great Ruby glowed in the dark: "If this resplendent object really exhibited the dimensions assigned to it, the probability is that it was not a gem at all", he wrote, "but one of those counterfeits of glass, in producing which Strabo relates that the artists of Alexandria attained the highest possible perfection. Its luminosity at night is of course a fiction, unless, indeed, like the emerald pillar in the temple of Hercules at Tyre, which Herodutus describes as "shining brightly by night," it was a hollow cylinder into which a lamp could be introduced". The story of Dead Man's Rock ends with Colliver going insane, believing that Jasper is the ghost of Ezekiel Trenoweth. As for Jasper, he is left with the rest of his grandfather's treasure and the knowledge that the curse of the Great Ruby has taken away his father, his best friend and his only love. "My soul shall lie for ever under the curse, engulfed and hidden as deeply as the Great Ruby beneath the shadow of Dead Man's Rock."

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, or Q, was a prolific writer of fiction, poetry and literary criticism. Helene Hanff has done more than most to introduce him to modern readers. She confesses in her book, 84 Charing Cross Road (1981): "I'm so unstudious I never even went to college, I just happen to have a peculiar taste in books, thanks to a Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch, known as Q, whom I fell over in a library when I was 17."

But it is in Hanff's Q's Legacy (1985), that she details this peculiar literary taste. Q's Legacy is a celebration of Hanff's self-directed path through a curriculum plotted by Q, whose essays provided her with an entre into English literature.

It so happens that in 1979, long before I had heard of Quiller-Couch or Dead Man's Rock, I wrote a treatment for a family adventure movie called The Quest for the Hyacinth. Set principally at Galle during the 1930's, the story concerns a Sinhalese boy who relives an experience of a previous incarnation as a novice Buddhist monk, in which the Hyacinth, or Great Ruby, is secreted in a cave. I supposed, as had Quiller-Couch, that the Hyacinth remained for centuries under the secret guardianship of the Sangha.

My story was based on the same historical references to the Hyacinth used by Quiller-Couch, which are gathered together most comprehensively in Sir James Emerson Tennent's Ceylon (1869). I think it reasonable to assume that Quiller-Couch had read this work - which was a huge best-seller of its time - not only for the historical references, but also the descriptions of Sri Pada and its ascent contained therein. Perhaps Tennent's book inspired Quiller-Couch to write a story about the quest for the legendary Hyacinth, just as it had inspired me to do so some 90 years later.

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