Introduction

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Sabina Fazli
original text and the “empire” of the diamond are both discarded in the same
moment. The Rajah’s Diamond, too, is unlikely to be recovered as its exact position
in the Seine is unknown (Stevenson, “Rajah’s” 131).
Both the Rajah’s Diamond and the Great Mogul of the Agra treasure cannot
be recovered from the rivers. While this on the surface denotes their ‘destruction’,
this happens without touching their integrity and destroying their identity. At the
bottom of the rivers they thus continue their existence as mnemonics, which is a
more threatening prospect than the actual destruction of their identity through
cutting. It is noteworthy that both texts emphasise the impossibility to recover the
diamonds so that they will have an continuing presence. Both the Thames and the
Seine are gateways of imperial cities to their overseas colonies. The interrelatedness
of metropolis and colony through the transportation of goods and people
takes place through this connection (Keep and Randall 217).
Repressed colonial history also informs the description of the Moonstone. The
appearance of its lustre as unfathomable depth links it to the Shivering Sands, the
close site of repression in the Yorkshire landscape. Rosanna Spearman feels drawn
to the quicksand, which has “laid a spell on [her]” (Collins, Moonstone 34) and exercises
an irrational power. It literally functions as a place of suppression when
Rosanna destroys evidence of Franklin Blake’s guilt by throwing the stained nightgown
in the quicksand.
Moreover, the Shivering Sands visualise colonial violence. The anthropomorphic
description of the quicksand as a “broad brown face” (35) alludes to the racial
Other. Rosanna further describes the Shivering Sands as concealing “hundreds
of suffocating people under it – all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking
lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!” (35). The suffocating and amorphous
multitude represents colonial upheaval (Mehta 625) and can be related to the
Black Hole of Calcutta, the Well of Cawnpore and the Mutiny, or Morant Bay
(Mehta 623; GoGwilt 67). Yet the image is ambiguous enough to merely suggest
violent subversive turmoil suspended before the outbreak. The indistinct movements
are half hidden with an intact surface concealing their true nature. The repressed
still stays in place but shows that repression is precarious. The presence of
the Shivering Sands close to the Verinders country house reveals the proximity of
the perceived Other. The quicksand is furthermore situated between land and sea
and at high tide lies underwater (Collins, Moonstone 49). The tidelands are a liminal
landscape only temporarily exposed and a threshold between land and sea. Franklin
travels to such a place when he camps “on the borders of a desert” (292).
These “borders” are a similarly indefinable landscape between civilisation and
wilderness. Both sites then suggest the theme of possible transgression.
Catherine Wynne traces a whole sequence of such instances of “unstable
grounds” (76) in Doyle’s works 27 which are, or so she contends, an image of the
27 The bog in Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, another story of a troubled imperial inheritance,
also belongs to this category.