Experts said grave diggers might be looking for even more precious treasures – steel plating made before the nuclear testing era, which filled the atmosphere with radiation.
Nicholls reveals in the novel's very first paragraph that the siblings are successful in finding the jewellery, and so really the search is for something more precious than materialistic wealth.
Other vessels have incised patterns that cleverly mimic basket weaves, like the chevrons on a large redware bowl from 3100-3000 B.C. Also here are examples of faience, a blue-green paste made from crushed quartz or sand and often substituted for the more precious turquoise or lapis lazuli.
But the Karroo's most significant bird was the flightless ostrich, which piqued the curiosity of the apprentice ornithologist, as did the decrepit Karroo town of Oudtshoorn, former site of the fabulously lucrative trade in ostrich feathers, which a few generations earlier had yielded a product "ounce for ounce, more precious than gold".
As a cold twinge creeps into the weekly forecasts, the 550xi S2 begins to make a lot of sense to the owner who would forego a badge for a more precious commodity: usability.
But for generations of immigrants who first found their way in this country as cabbies, the medallions have stood for something far more precious: the chance to work for themselves and perhaps clamber up a few rungs in the economic ladder.
The new rush is for something far more precious: lithium.
We can postpone for a few more precious years the move to economy class where we really belong.
Not that he lost, or will ever lose, his talent for underreaction: a more precious commodity than ever, in the epoch of the overblown.
But I know that I'm deeply grateful to my patient, aware that she has graciously provided me a front-row seat for a moment more precious than any of us among the living can envision.
