noon
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 . 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 .