Death is Forever

wet air and climbed to a thousand feet. Ten minutes later they descended near an irregular depression. Gradually Erin realized that the hole was man-made rather than natural. A tunnel gaped off to the side.
    “Dog One,” Cole said laconically.
    As soon as he turned off the engine, heat wrapped around them in a thick, invisible shroud. He peeled off his bush shirt and dropped it behind the seat. She plucked at her own top, trying to create a breeze.
    “Take it off,” he suggested. “We’re the only people in a hundred miles.”
    She shot him a sideways look. “I’ll survive.”
    “Suit yourself.”
    He bent and reached behind her seat. She looked everywhere but at the swirling masculine patterns of hair that covered his chest. When he straightened, he was holding a large canteen. He unscrewed the top and handed it to her.
    “Drink.”
    The water was warm and a bit stale. She quickly drank her fill and handed the canteen back to him. He shook his head.
    “More,” he said. “You’re used to Alaska. Until your body gets used to the Kimberley, you’ll have to drink much more water than you think you need.”
    When she’d drunk enough for his satisfaction, he took the canteen and drank. Only then did he get out and walk toward the hole in the ground that was the only sign of Sleeping Dog One’s existence. He didn’t look behind to see if Erin was following.
    She yanked off her harness, grabbed her camera case, and dropped to the sunstruck ground. Instantly beads of sweat gathered all over her skin. She felt like she had just stepped into a pizza oven filled with wet socks.
    There were no signs, no stakes, no fences to show that the land held anything but the random debris of a failed mining effort. Dog One had been worked, but never in an organized way. A rusty wheelbarrow stood on its pitted wheel beside the entrance. A pick and shovel had been discarded in the spinifex. The ore dump was so close it had eroded into the mine’s entrance, threatening to seal it.
    “Doesn’t look like much,” she said.
    “It isn’t.”
    Inside the tunnel mouth, out of the sun, the air was a bit cooler. She took off her sunglasses and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. When she turned and looked back toward the entrance, the violent contrast of sunlight and the black outlines of the roughly hewn mine fascinated her. She dug her camera out of the bag and went to work, trying to capture the elemental difference between dense velvet shade and a sun that made her believe in hell.
    In Alaska light and darkness had been divided into huge, nearly seamless blocks of time. In Australia, time was shards left over from a primordial explosion. The difference fascinated her in a way she could express only through photographs.
    Lost to everything else, she looked at the black and incandescent world through the camera lens.
    After going farther into the tunnel Cole turned to see what was keeping Erin. When he realized what she was doing, he switched on the electric lantern he’d brought and gave his attention to the tunnel wall itself. The shoring was rude but still effective. With mining, if with nothing else, Abe had been a careful man.
    Satisfied that the tunnel was reasonably safe, Cole went farther in, descending with each step. Here Abe had followed the lamproite sill to a point where it spread out in a lateral dike. There Abe had stopped.
    Nothing had changed since Cole’s last visit to Dog One. The walls were still dull lamproite except where Abe had misjudged the slope of the ore and had had to backtrack. The tunnel ended abruptly where Abe had lost the lamproite dike and given up, for the quality of the diamonds simply hadn’t repaid the work of digging them out. Only gem diamonds repaid the cost of mining.
    As Cole retreated, he studied each dead end where the tunnel strayed from the line of the lamproite intrusion. He examined the walls of these failed tunnel offshoots carefully, looking for any sign that Abe had accidentally cut across a paleo-streambed, a paleo-beach, or any stratum that might have been laid down by moving water.
    Cole didn’t find anything to raise his heart rate.
    Erin’s voice floated back through the darkness. He shined the light on his watch, saw that an hour had passed, and shook his head in amusement as it occurred to him that he’d finally found a woman who wouldn’t be bored on a prospecting expedition.
    “I’m coming,” he called. He flashed the light back the way he’d come and