Explore "The Caves of Shend" by David Hennessey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I HAD returned on a visit to Australia from England after an absence of about forty years. As I had come on business, and my visit was likely to be brief, I was staying at the big hotel in Castlereagh Street, when one morning I received an urgent invitation from an old friend I had well-nigh forgotten named Dr Strong, a wealthy bachelor who was living in the south-eastern suburbs of Sydney. So, having a few days to spare before the sailing of the mail steamer by which I was returning, I availed myself of his hospitality and the opportunity to repair an old Australian friendship.
I should mention that the newspapers of the previous day had given prominence to a weird discovery which had made something of a sensation in the suburb referred to. Some navvies working on a new sewerage scheme, when blasting their way through limestone at a considerable depth, had broken into a vault or cave under the foundations of an old ruined mansion, and there had discovered two chained skeletons and something like five thousand pounds in old gold coinage. The supposition was that the skeletons were those of convicts and the gold a hoard of stolen treasure connected with some unsolved criminal mystery of the early days of the colony.