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A soft voice said, "Yes, sir" Bond heard the door close "Now then, guano" Pleydell-Smith tilted his chair back Bond prepared to be bored "As you know, it's bird dung Comes frorn the rear end of two birds, the uanay So far as Crab Key is concerned, it's only the guanay, otherwise known as the green coruanay is a uano They mostly eat anchovies Just to show you how much fish they eat, they've found up to seventy anchovies inside one bird!" Pleydell-Smith took out his pipe and pointed it impressively at Bond "The whole population of Peru eats four thousand tons of fish a year The sea birds of the country eat five hundred thousand tons!"

Bond pursed his lips to shoas impressed "Really"

"Well, now," continued the Colonial Secretary, "every day

each one of these hundreds of thousands of guanays eat a

pound or so of fish and deposit an ounce of guano on the

guanera-that's the guano island"

Bond interrupted, "Why don't they do it in the sea?"

"Don't know" Pleydell-Smith took the question and turned it over in his mind "Never occurred to me Anyway they don't They do it on the land and they've been doing it since before Genesis That -uanera Then, around 1850 soreatest natural fertilizer in the world-stuffed with nitrates and phosphates and what have you And the ships and the ed them for twenty years or more

It's a time known as the 'Saturnalia' in Peru It was like the Klondyke People fought over the muck, hi-jacked each other's ships, shot the workers, sold phoneyyou like And people made fortunes out of the stuff"

"Where does Crab Key coet down to cases

"That was the only hile guanera so far north It orked too, God knoho by But the stuff had a low nitrate content Water's not as rich round here as it is down along the Humboldt Current So the fish aren't so rich in cheot worked on and off when the price was high enough, but the whole industry went bust, with Crab Key and the other poor-quality deposits in the van, when the Germans invented artificial chemical manure By this time Peru had realized that she had squandered a fantastic capital asset and she set about organizing the reuanera She nationalized the industry and protected the birds, and slowly, very slowly, the supplies built up again Then people found that there were snags about the Geruano doesn't do, and gradually the price of guano iered back to its feet Now it's going fine, except that Peru keeps riculture And that here Crab Key caain"

"Ah"

"Yes," said Pleydell-S the his pipe-filling routine, "at the beginning of the war, this Chinaot the idea that he could uanera on Crab Key The price was about fifty dollars a ton on this side of the Atlantic and he bought the island froht in labour and got to work Been working it ever since Must have made a fortune He ships direct to Europe, to Antwerp They send him a ship once a month He's installed the latest crushers and separators Sweats his labour, I daresay To make a decent profit, he'd have to Particularly now Last year I heard he was only getting about thirty-eight to forty dollars a ton cif Antwerp God knohat he must pay his labour to make a profit at that price I've never been able to find out He runs that place like a fortress-sort of forced labour caets off it I've heard some funny rumours, but no one's ever complained It's his island, of course, and he can do what he likes on it"

Bond hunted for clues "Would it really be so valuable to him, this place? What do you suppose it's worth?"

'Pleydell-Suanay is the most valuable bird in the world Each pair produces about two dollars' worth of guano in a year without any expense to the owner Each fe Two broods a year Say they're worth fifteen dollars a pair, and say there are one hundred thousand birds on Crab Key, which is a reasonable guess on the old figures we have That makes his birds worth a million and a half dollars Pretty valuable property Add the value of the installations, say another ot a small fortune on that hideous little place Which reminds me," Pleydell-Smith pressed the bell, "what the hell has happened to those files? You'll find all the dope you want in them"

The door opened behind Bond