Treasure hunts

Dreaming of a gold Christmas

Benny Green

There has been a lot of talk recently about the virtues and vices of investing in gold; you may keep your krugerrands under your pillow and stay within the law, but to keep lumps of gold is illegal and piratical. Gold is one thing and gold coinage another, it seems, but in these days it is all bounty, and there are certain miscreants who fly in the teeth of the Biblical admonition and store up treasures for themselves on, or even in, the earth. Benny Green has been discovering some literary forebears.

Oft have I dreamed of being rich beyond the dreams of average, as the saying goes. Suppose, I sometimes think to myself, usually while shaving, suppose our cellar was to crumble and reveal half a million sovereigns packed away behind the laths, what then? Is it such 'an outlandish thought? After all, our cellar walls show every sign of crumbling, so the first part of the scenario at least is within the bounds of possibility. So what do I do once I lay hands on the gold?

The state, my accountant tells me, has most thoughtfully provided for such eventualities by cutting itself in for a substantial percentage. It would. But surely, I think to myself along those larcenous lines which became inbred into the English character on the day that Mr Gladstone finally gave up trying to abolish income tax, surely if the state isn't told, the state needn't know? I could melt the sovereigns down, for instance, mould them into cheap-looking artefacts and smuggle them out of the country, as in The Lavender Hill Mob. At this point in the fantasy I usually cut my chin, and the spoils in my cellar lie forgotten until the next time. But the dream is universal, turning up in literary generation after literary generation, from continent to continent and from culture to culture. The fundamental difference between, say, Silas Marner and Gott/finger is the difference between literature and hackery, but the dream is the same one, the dream of Midas garlanded with a circumstantial plot. What I had forgotten about Silas Marner is that it is one of the very few missing-loot books where the treasure hunt turns out in the end to be successful. If you remember, when they come to drain that pond near Silas's cottage, they

find not only the putrescent corpse of the villainous Dunstan but also the gold he stole.

Most treasure-hunt stories are less rewarding than that to their heroes if not to their readers, and for a reason which I fear must have a great deal to do with the mealy-mouthed puritan quackery that gold is a bad thing in itself, even though the capitalist society which nurtures the mealy-mouthed puritan quackery is built on the assumption that a _little yearning is anything but a dangerous thing.

I suppose this is why so many treasure-hunt stories exasperate me beyond endurance, for the author too often ends up by hedging his bets and not producing the treasure at all. This is disgraceful of him, for not only has he first tickled our fiduciary fancy and then withdrawn the means by which we may scratch it, but he has also implied that while it is ethical for an4 author to collect gold by writing about it, the reader is not to be allowed to collect it, even vicariously, by reading about it.

Now this injection of bogus morality into the treasure-hunt tale has had a most pernicious effect on its construction, for once you decree that your characters must not be allowed to enjoy the treasure, then there is no real need for there to be any treasure at all, but only a mysterious belief in its existence, which is altogether a different thing. Or if the treasure does exist, then it is seen to disperse on the winds of fortune, as it does literally in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, or goes up in smoke-dreams, as it does, again literally, when they cremate the body at the end of Ocean's Eleven. So why do we all go on dreaming and reading? I think the answer lies in the ending to Silas Marner which George Eliot didn't write. Suppose they had never drained that pond?

• Then Marner's gold would be lying there to this day, buried under the weeds, its presence unsuspected by the ironically penniless locals, And there you have one of the most tenacious beliefs of mankind, that all over the earth's surface, or rather just under it, there lie unclaimed caches of gold and jewels, and that all anyone requires to haul them up into the light of day is a hint. Already the bleached bones of the genre begin to form. If to inaccessible treasure and the hint of its whereabouts you add two groups of seekers, one sublimely good, the other incorrigibly bad, symbolised in modern fiction by Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, you can start sharpening your pencils.

I apologise for the fact that I appear to have set sail inadvertently for Treasure Island. It was inevitable, because Stevenson, who was childish enough to know how these things should be ordered, realised, as Edgar Allan Poe did, that the hint is usually more vital than the treasure it points out. Most of the memorable ingredients of Treasure Island were borrowed, as Stevenson so fulsomely acknowledged, the parrot from Crusoe, the skeleton from Poe, the stockade from Marryat, Billy Bones and the sea-chest from Washington Irving. But what Stevenson supplied as only he could was — the hint. And this hint took the form of a map, for Treasure Island is really no more than a map rendered in chapters and paragraphs, a topographical fancy whose nature is skilfully disguised by pantomime heroes and villains. Stevenson drew the map before he started to write the book, or even thought of starting to, write the book. As he pored over the completed map in the cottage at Braemar

the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unsuspected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on those few square inches of a flat projection.

But then Stevenson says a very curious thing. Having finished his tale he sends the manuscript to Cassell's, who accept the book but lose the map. There is nothing for it but the design of a new one, and as Stevenson sits down to compose it he makes the very good point that

It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it, and the map was drawn again in my father's office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships and my father's elaborately forged signature of Captain Flint and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never Treasure Island to me.

I describe the remark as curious because Dr Daiches, in a book published last year called Robert Louis Stevenson and his World, reproduces the whales-and-ships map, the one that was "never Treasure Island," and suggests it was the map inspired by the one drawn at Braemar. Either that first drawing eventually turned up at Cassell's, or Dr Daiches knows what it looked like, or Stevenson was adding .one last romantic flourish to the story, whose most romantic twist of all was that, long after Treasure Island, its author should have seen out his days in the kind of islands and across the kind of oceans he had once daydreamed about, and having daydreamed, put on to paper — and into a map. Stevenson had the satisfaction of writing'the best-known treasure-hunt tale of all time, but his map, for all its fine draughtsmanship, is not the most ingenious hint ever concocted. That honour belongs to Poe, who, in The Gold Bug, contrived a Chinese-box arrangement of such intricacy as almost to be too complicated for its own good. There is a rock which reveals a tree which reveals a skull which reveals a cryptogram which reveals a latitude and a longitude

Which reveal nothing less than Captain Kidd's treasure. It is typical of Poe that almost alone of the treasure-hunters, he should have ignored the moral issues raised by the finding of the treasure and included instead a careful in • Yentory of the haul, which, he says, included

a hundred and eighteen diamonds; eighteen rubies of remarkable brilliancy, three hundred and ten emeralds and twenty one sapphires, with an opal; nearly two hundred massive finger-and-ear rings; rich chains — thirty three if I remember, eighty three Very large and heavy crucifixes; five gold censers of great value; a prodigious golden punch-bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine leaves and 13acchanalian figures; with two sword-handles exquisitely embossed; and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect.

After the flair of Treasure Island and The Gold Bug, most of the opposition begin to look like mere triflers. Neither of the smart alecks of the short story, 0. Henry and Saki, can do much More than frolic feebly around in the shallows of the cove from which the Hispaniola set sail for home with "the same colours flying that the Captain had flown and fought under at the Palisade." In Henry's Buried Treasure the hero Persists in his quest even though the map Showing the whereabouts of ten burra-loads of ancient gold and silver coins is found to have an 1898 watermark; obtuseness is rewarded, as if You didn't guess, when the gullible prospector stumbles on the girl of his dreams, who is so flattered because she thinks he has come looking for her, that she agrees to marry him.

Saki does even worse. In The Treasure Ship an avaricious peeress persuades a young scoundrel to test a new machine which she hopes will help her retrieve untold treasures from a nearby sunken galleon. The young scoundrel, in the course of testing the contraption, dredges up some unspecified evidence so incriminating to the peeress that he is able to live comfortably for the rest of his days on the Proceeds of blackmail and dismiss all thoughts Of galleons from his mind. In both cases the writers have used the threat of undiscovered treasure as a come-on to the hapless reader Who soon finds himself sold down the river holding the customary handful of beads and trinkets.

In a sense the best treasure-hunt among the Short story writers is in an early Wells tale called A Deal in Ostriches, Where a fabulous diamond disappears aboard ship and is believed to have been swallowed by one of six ostriches On board. The diamond's owner buys the ostriches from their keeper, one by one, and Slaughters them in the hope of retrieving his Jewel. But the true treasure-hunt is at the expense of the diamond-owner and not the osteiches, whose price rises in geometric Progression with each unavailing dismemberment, until in the end a confidence trick of some humour is revealed.

By a quirky coincidence, Wells's idea that as the odds shorten so the price rises in any self-respecting treasure-hunt, was echoed Many years later in, of all places, the Soviet Union, which came up with perhaps the best and certainly the wittiest treasure-hunt in Modern literature. The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov, is the story of how two post-Revolutionary rogues with markedly pre-Revolutionary tendencies, scour a continent to trace a set of chairs, one of whose upholstery conceals a priceless hoard of jewels. Eleven chairs are ripped open and found wanting, until at last the twelfth chair is located in the local Railway Workers' Social Club. But when the seekers rip it open, it is to discover — nothing. The real twelfth chair had been opened up years before, and when the frustrated hunter asks what happened to the contents, the caretaker replies, "Here they are. Wipe your eyes. The club was built with them, soldier boy. You see, it's the club, Central heating, checkers with clocks, a buffet, theatre." The grotesquely dialectical ending, which also includes the wholly gratuitous murder of one hunter by the other, is a potent argument against toeing the party line when concocting a literary treasure-hunt, but its phoney ending apart, The Twelve Chairs is so entertaining that I hope the wretched Hollywood wartime bowdlerisation, starring Fred Allen and called The Fifth Chair, had the grace to be ashamed of itself. That our own generation numbers among its inhabitants one or two writers who will concoct commercially viable gold-hunt stories I have no doubt at all. The genre is indestructible. One likely runner may be John Masters, whose Coromandel has the archetypal frustrated-treasure-hunt ending, one whose words echo down like a ukase to all aspiring prospectors:

You must make a map, boy, a better rnap.Make it and keep it. One day someone will reach Meru. You must leave wonders for other people as well as using the wonders others have left for you.

I cannot help appending a true story of my own seedy past, just in case anyone thinks that Masters is overdoing the desirability of maps.

There was once a double-bassist of our acquaintance who suddenly conceived a burning desire to work in .the Isle of Wight because of the buried treasure lying under its whimsically domesticated beaches. When the bassist arrived on the island, feeling like a flamboyant compromise between I< oussevitzsky and Long John Silver, he took a job in a holiday camp, where he kept begging the rest of the camp musicians to assist him in the digging. Cruelly they scorned his pleas, laughing at his crazy schemes and telling him that all he would ever find out on the sands were a few old Ice-cream cartons and perhaps some buckets and spades. But one day, towards the end of the season, the bassist, who was not so crazy that he did not understand human nature, drew a map and produced it in the bandroom. That night at midnight the entire orchestra could be seen excavating the Freshwater sands by moonlight. Don't ask me if they found

anything With treasure-hunts, such an inquiry smacks of the frivolous.