With a flick the new knife was open in his hand and the blade pressed with all his strength against the hull of the _Vulture_. He was crowded into a corner as far as possible from the advancing row of torches and shouting men. Frantic rats, terrified by the flames of the torches and the reverberating noise, scampered over Chris's feet or ran up over his bending back and shoulders, but he did not move. The blade whirled in the stout wooden side of the _Vulture_, but it seemed no time before the flicker and wavering red of the nearest torches sent their flares over him from a distance. Chris could make out the silhouette of hunting figures as the first black trickle of sea water pierced through the side of the ship and stained the dry planks. Still the boy pushed the knife on a moment more until the water was a steady spurt, wetting his hand with its coolness. Then, as the torches sent their flames moving into the obscure corner where he had been, a fly soared up and out, over an empty metal plate and four dead rats, over the stooped screaming figure of a humpback, and a scattered line of searching men, out to the freshness of the night and the open sea. Only Osterbridge Hawsey, curious at the torches and the shouting, looked out the cabin door in time to see a tiny boat scud past, back toward Tahiti. And only in his befuddled dreams did he puzzle over how the small craft could sail against the wind, or wonder how it could sail so well, when it seemed to be made of rope. CHAPTER 28 Chris and Amos lay belly down in a low clump of pine scrub at the top of a precipitous rocky pinnacle. Below them in the blistering noon lay the palace walls of the Lord of the Seven Seas, Descendant of the Sun and the Moon, Overlord of the Mountains and the Plains, Prince of all the Isles, Father of Plenty, and Brilliance-Before-Which-All-Cast-Down-Their-Eyes, the Emperor of China. The two boys were uninterested in titles. Somewhere within that city-within-a-city, inside the enormous spread of the palace walls that were surrounded in their turn by the city of Peking, lay the goal they had come so far to seek, the Jewel Tree of the Princess of China. Now, like a general planning his campaign, Chris lay looking down at the high angular walls, thinking of how he would gain entry. On regaining the _Mirabelle_ in a boat made from the magic rope, Chris had reappeared among his friends, "recovered" from his fever. He had given much thought to what he considered would be the last dangerous section of the journey, and after listening to what his master said through the shell, was permitted to take Amos on this stage of the voyage. It was reasoned if something happened to Chris, Amos might be able to carry out their mission by himself.