The Island Treasure

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Wide horizontal engraving of a man sprawled on floating wreckage at dawn, a smuggling tartane pulling alongside to rescue him. — They pulled him from the wreckage before dawn and asked no questions his eyes did not care to answer.

Intimate copperplate engraving of a lone sailor standing motionless in a low granite cave, surrounded by stacked gold ingots, cut gems and ancient coins, lit only by hatch-density glow from a cleft above. — He stood among the fortune with his hands at his sides; the only sound was the pulse of a man who had at last been handed the lever by which the world may be moved.

Mid-shot engraving of a lone man kneeling in a dark cave, sorting gold ingots and coins into weighted bundles by the light of a single sputtering flare. — By dawn he had moved a kingdom of gold; what remained was not joy but oil for the machinery, ink for the new names.

The smugglers' tartane found him clinging to the wreckage of the Jeune-Amélie like a piece of flotsam the sea had not quite finished with. They pulled him aboard in the grey hour before dawn, gave him water from a cracked pitcher and a crust that tasted of the previous voyage, and asked no questions a man with eyes like his did not care to answer. In exchange he gave them what he could: a sailor's back, a knowledge of knots learned at a master's knee, and the useful silence of a man who has lost everything and therefore fears very little. He called himself Sinbad the Sailor — a name suitable to the exotic derelict they imagined him to be — and he kept to it through every illicit port they touched along that jagged coast. When they went ashore in the blue dusk to discharge their contraband into willing hands, he remained aboard and slept like a man whose dreams had been emptied and quietly refilled with a different purpose. He did not hurry. He had been given years by the cell at the Château d'If; he could spare months to the sea. When at last the captain mentioned, over a ration of coarse brandy, that they might lie off a certain lonely island known only to himself and God, Edmond felt the world tilt very gently on its axis, as a clock tilts when the weight at last begins its long unhurried descent.

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The island rose from the water like a rumor of granite, dark and uninviting, a place the cartographers marked with a small unhurried question rather than a name. Edmond walked its rocks with the patience of a man reading a letter he has already committed to memory — letter by letter, comma by comma. The angle of the cleft in the western cliff, the bleached color of the stone in the afternoon sun, the particular lean of the lone pine on the eastern shoulder — each detail matched, exactly and without remainder, the dying description of a madman in a cell who had loved him like a son. He found the fissure. He found the crevice behind it. He found the hollow that opened like a stone throat when the right block was pressed in the right order. And there, in a chamber the smugglers themselves had not known existed beneath their own provisioning ground, the Spada treasure waited as it had waited through a hundred and fifty years of patient darkness. Gold ingots stacked like the bricks of some fantastic house. Cut stones from Florence and from farther east, their facets still carrying the slow indifferent light of another age. Roman coins, Saracen sequins, Spanish doubloons, French pistoles — the whole glittering, breathing weight of a prince's hoarded ransom, enough to buy a duchy outright and the conscience that goes with it. Edmond did not weep. He did not laugh. He stood among the fortune with his hands at his sides and his breathing slow, and the only sound in the cave was the patient pulse of a man who has at last been handed the lever by which the world may be moved.

He worked through the night by the light of a small flare, sorting, counting, dividing the burden into portions a single man might carry without suspicion. By dawn he had moved a kingdom of gold from the island's bones to a hiding place no customs officer in any port would think to rifle. By the next sunset he had arranged passage to the mainland under one of his assumed names, leaving the smugglers with the story they preferred to believe — that their strange sailor had stumbled, in some private wandering, upon a treasure of his own making. They drank to his fortune, grinning, none of them yet aware that they were celebrating their own dismissal. He drank to theirs, courteous to the last, a blade sheathed in the perfect manners of gratitude. From that night forward, the penniless drowned sailor who had crawled from the sea ceased to exist in any legal or living sense. In his place stood something older and more dangerous: a man with unlimited means and a memory so precise it could replay, at will, every signature on the little paper that had buried him alive. The wealth was not joy; it had never been meant to be. It was the oil for the machinery, the ink for the new names, the horse that would carry him wherever a reckoning waited. He could be anyone now. He could go anywhere. He could, with the patience he had learned in prison and the treasure he had learned in the cave, reach at last the men who had signed his death warrant in a sunny drawing-room in Marseille — Fernand, Danglars, Villefort, and the woman who had written nothing and arranged everything — and require each of them, in the coin of his choosing, to answer for what had been done. The island fell away behind the stern into the smudge of dusk. The Count of Monte Cristo had not yet been born, but in every particular that mattered, he was already complete.