Death is Forever

she went on to the next map. “The land is nearly flat. Sand and sandstone. No permanent water.”
    “What else?”
    There was a long silence while she sifted through the maps again. Finally she looked up at him. “That’s it.”
    “Think about it, Erin. Thousands of square miles, and you’ve summed up man’s knowledge of it in less than three minutes.”
    She made a startled sound.
    “You could call the station owners pioneers and you wouldn’t be wrong,” he said. “The twentieth century is only a rumor out in the Kimberley. Western Australia is a different place, a different land, a different time. Civilization is whatever you can carry in on your back.”
    After a moment she asked, “How old was Abe?”
    “Had to be eighty, at least, when he died.”
    “What was his health like?”
    “He could walk most men into the ground. He could drink the rest right under, including me.”
    She frowned. “Then there’s no place on Abe’s cattle station or on his claims that he was too old to prospect?”
    “Doubt it. Not when I knew him, anyway. And he discovered his jewel box before I knew him.”
    “All right, what about Sleeping Dog One, Sleeping Dog Two, and all the rest?” she asked. “What makes you so certain those mines are worthless?”
    “I’ve been in Dog One. It’s a pipe mine, pure and simple, and not much of one at that. Nearly all bort. The diamonds in that tin box came from a placer mine with a high percentage of gem-quality stones.”
    “What’s bort?”
    “Industrial diamonds,” he said, “useful only for abrasives or drill bits.”
    “No gemstones at all?” she asked.
    “Nothing like your diamonds. His were all sharp edges, flaws, and yellow to brown.”
    “Are all Abe’s mines like that?”
    Cole smiled at the disappointment in Erin’s voice. “I’m afraid so, honey. Not one of them is located on or near a modern river course, either, which means the Dog mines just aren’t a likely source of placer diamonds.”
    With a gloomy expression she looked at the maps. “What did you mean, modern rivers? What other kind of river is there?”
    Absently Cole’s fingertips smoothed over the paper as he thought about the passage of time over the face of the land, time transforming everything it touched, wearing down old mountains and building new ones.
    “Paleo-rivers,” he said finally. “Old as the hills. Older.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “The Kimberley Plateau has spent a billion and a half years above sea level. That makes it the oldest land surface on earth. Almost every bit of the rest of the Australian continent—and the other continents too—have been recycled top to bottom in one way or another in the last billion and a half years. Not the Kimberley.”
    Cole leaned away from Erin for a moment, pulled a big opaque map of Australia from the bottom of the pile, and spread it out on top.
    “Look here,” he said. “Australia is the flattest inhabited continent on earth. The driest, too. The Kimberley Plateau is about the only thing west of Ayers Rock that’s high enough to make a decent hill anywhere else in the world.”
    She made a startled sound and looked at the map again.
    “In the center of Australia,” he said, “the land is so flat that rain collects in circles like dew on a gigantic picnic table.” His long index finger traced the shallow rise of the Kimberley Plateau. “This area stayed high and dry, but the rest of Australia, the flat center and the even flatter southwest, have been underwater more than above. There are huge limestone and sandstone beds covering those areas to prove it.”
    When Cole looked up he found that Erin was focused on the map with an intensity and intelligence that was almost tangible.
    “At the edge of the Kimberley the land rumples a bit,” he continued. “The locals call them mountains. Anyone else would call them hills. They’re what’s left of a limestone reef that was buried and then resurrected by erosion.”
    “‘A dead sea’s bones,’” she quoted softly, remembering a phrase from Abe’s poetry.
    Cole’s eyes narrowed. He pushed the continental map aside and pulled out the map of the Kimberley Plateau. He traced the line of the Napier Range and the other limestone ranges that ring the Kimberley today, as the living reefs once ringed the Kimberley long ago. Seven of Crazy Abe’s claims straddled limestone outcroppings. Three of them were within the boundaries of the station itself. None was near