The novel is narrated by Martin Legatt, a young man at the start of his career with the Forest Corporation, an international logging concern.

Crowther shows Legatt a small bag of trinkets that he has been given for safekeeping by his local Burmese 'wife', and tells him that he will never see her or their daughter again as he has decided to leave Burma and make a name for himself in London.

In Ceylon, Legatt bumps into a friend of his from London, Imogen Cloud, who has just purchased that very sapphire, now mounted as a pendant, from a local dealer.

Having sold on the stone once, the thieves decide to repeat the exercise, and when Imogen visits the local beauty spot of Adam's Peak she is attacked and avoids being thrown off the mountainside only by Leggat's quick reactions.

Crowther catches up with the thieves at Colombo, and discovers that they had sold the sapphire on again to another dealer, from whom it has been bought by a Robin Colhoun for his companion Jill Leslie.

Jill refuses to sell the pendant, and Imogen advises Crowther to rely on her generosity and to ask for it as a gift once she fully understands his religious motivation for wanting it.

The novel incorporates Mason's memories of his elder brother, Charles, who had left home under a cloud and became a pilot on the Hooghly River in India, where he formed an attachment with a local girl.

[2] He felt that after a slow and rather episodic start, the novel held the reader's interest until the end, demonstrating Mason's "unflagging skill in the realm of adventure stories".