There's two stories appearing this week on the BBC's feed. Someone's been photographing the hyenas that live in an abandoned diamond-mine town in Namibia. The other article is about a different mine in a completely different country that the Nazis were using to hide looted artwork.
Yeah, that's a central image right there. A ghost town haunted by memories of old wars and potentially dangerous current wildlife, and somewhere below, in a maze of shafts barely propped up by rotting wood, are priceless art masterpieces.
I've said this before. Writing an archaeological adventure series? The BBC has a plot germ at least once a week.
EDIT: and it continues! Not the BBC this time, but researching a nice "ominous black car" for the current book and while reading about hummers discovered the Northwest Passage Drive Expeditions, including brightly-colored humvees refitted with tracks to use as a test bed for potential Mars rovers. Which is amusing enough already, but connects to the Haughton-Mars Project and their sort-of Mars base on an ancient impact crater on Devon Island, which also has a nice history of failed colonialist attempts, 5,000 year old archaic Innuit settlements, and the first place where traces of HMS Terror was found (the Franklin Expedition).
And just the topping on this "hoo boy" cake, the one above is named the Okarian. After what, you might ask? The Okar nation of the frozen north of Barsoom.
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