Simon D’Souza raised the brim of his slouch hat long enough to scratch at an imaginary itch.   Then, as if the 60-Degree Celsius temperature had stung him, he quickly dropped the hat back into place.   He looked across to where his wife of five months, Maryette, stood near their two-man tent a few metres away, crouching to enjoy the shade of the tent.   Although much less fatiguing than out in the open, the shaded area was still well over 40-Degrees.

Staring at Maryette, Simon wondered how she managed to look so fresh.   After two hours in the open, Simon’s T-shirt was plastered to his flesh by sweat and he was almost gagging from his own BO.   Although he hadn’t married her just for her looks, being a tall, beautiful honey-blonde with legs that went all the way up hadn’t exactly hurt.   Still he wondered how she managed to look so damn good in this stinking heat.

‘If I look half as bad as I feel, no wonder she’s keeping her distance,’ he thought, smiling at his own joke.

“If we don’t find it soon, I’m tempted to chuck the whole thing in,” said Simon.   He ran a hand across his sopping brow then shook the sweat away in disgust.

“Old Tickner will go spare,” warned Maryette.

“Rob Tickner can go to buggery,” said Simon.   He thought, ‘Actually he’d probably give us a medal.   Then he could claim a team of experts had carefully surveyed the Forbidden Rock area without finding any trace of a sealed cave, let alone any sight of Shi-Ni-Wei, or anyone else.’

“Forbidden Rock” itself was more a great red-brown mount than a rock.   Fifty metres high, two-hundred metres long, and forty metres wide, it was a single slab of granite.   A slab of granite which no one had paid much attention to until recently.   Until the North-Western New South Wales Mining Corporation (NWNSWM) had bought the mining rights to the area.   After finding gold and precious gems in other granite in the area, NWNSWM had announced they were going to mine Forbidden Rock.   At which point the local Aborigine tribe, the Nawawei, had used the Mabo Legislation to have the mining (at least) temporarily halted.   The Nawawei claimed the rock was one of their sacred sites.