Hammond Innes · 1973 · survival

Hammond Innes's 1973 adventure. Ruined in England, Alec Falls runs to Western Australia with a stolen sample and a lie, and buys into the derelict Golden Soak mine in the Pilbara. Hunting the reef that beggared its owners, he is drawn out past Nullagine into the Gibson Desert, on the track of an old prospector's journal and a secret the country has already killed for.

1. 1
   Perth

   Bankrupt and running from a fire he cannot explain, the Cornishman Alec Falls arrives in Perth with a stolen ore sample and a story he cannot afford to have checked, looking for backers and a new life in the west.

2. 2
   Nullagine

   North to Nullagine in the Pilbara, a hard little township at the edge of the outback, where cattle stations run to the horizon and everyone remembers what the old mine did to the family that owned it.

3. 3
   Golden Soak

   At the abandoned workings of the Golden Soak, timbers rotting and shafts falling in, Falls gambles on a lost reef of gold - and on the journal of a prospector who walked out into the desert long ago and came back changed.

4. 4
   The Gibson Desert

   Following the journal east into the Gibson Desert, in country that has killed better men, Falls finds what the old prospector found - and learns that the lie he told in Perth has followed him all the way out into the sand.