When The Diffident And Ineffectual Derek Mann Loses His Teaching Job In A Girls Grammar School And Drifts From One Temporary Post To Another, One Of His Precocious Pupils Gives Him Her Grandfathers Wartime Diary With A Mission To Return To Apartheid South Africa And Find The Opal Mine She Believes To Be Her Rightful Inheritance. Intrigue And Violence Bedevil The Quest, Which Ends In A Desert Under The Southern Cross. The Wry, Often Laconic Style Gives Full Reign To The Characters Latent Sexuality.