English · Chapter 9
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Herbert George Wells (1866 to 1946) was an English writer who is best remembered as one of the founders of modern science fiction, the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. He also wrote a great many realistic and adventure short stories, and "The Treasure in the Forest" is one of these. It first appeared in 1894 and was collected in The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895). The story is a short, tightly built adventure tale with a sting in its tail: two treasure hunters who have murdered for a map discover that the gold they seek has been protected in a way they never imagined.
The story opens at sea. Two Englishmen, Evans and Hooker, are paddling a canoe towards a tropical shore. A gap in the white surf of the reef shows where a small river meets the sea, the dark green of virgin forest runs down the slope of a hill, and beyond it rise cloud-like mountains. Hooker holds a rough map drawn on a scrap of yellowed paper: it shows the bay, the stream, the forest and a marked spot near the river where a treasure lies buried. Hooker matches the features on the shore, one by one, with the map.
Evans, exhausted, dozes in the canoe, and through his dream we learn how the two men came by the map. In a jungle camp, by the light of a fire, a Chinese man named Chang-hi had described a treasure: gold from a wrecked Spanish galleon which Chang-hi and his companions had recovered and hidden in the forest. Evans and Hooker had wanted the gold for themselves. They had attacked Chang-hi, and in the struggle they killed him and took the map from his body. What haunts Evans in the dream is not the killing itself but Chang-hi's face: a strange, sly, knowing grin that the dying man had turned on them, as if he understood something they did not. Evans wakes as the canoe grinds onto the beach.
The two men drag the canoe ashore and set off along the bank of the stream into the forest. Following the map, they push through the hot, dense trees towards the marked spot and come upon a clearing that has been disturbed. A man lies face down among the ferns and undergrowth. He is Chinese, one of Chang-hi's companions, and he has been dead for some days. His body is swollen and discoloured, and Hooker, examining him, cannot at first tell what killed him. Close by is a shallow pit, half dug, with spades lying about, and in it and around it are heaped bars of dull yellow metal: the gold ingots.