by Wilbur Smith
‘That is the third time they have tried to kill you,’ Nicholas told her grimly. ‘So I am taking over now.’
He went out into the hospital waiting room and used the telephone there. The chief constable of the county was a personal friend, as was the hospital administator.
By the time he returned, Georgina had come round from the anaesthetic. Although still woozy she was comfortable as they wheeled her off to the private ward that Nicholas had arranged. The orthopaedic surgeon arrived a few minutes later.
‘Hello, Nick, what are you doing here?’ he greeted Nicholas. Royan was surprised how many people knew him.
Then he turned his attention to Georgina. ‘How are you feeling? We have got ourselves a nice little compound fracture. Looks like confetti in there. We’ve managed to put it all together again, but you’re going to be with us for ten days at the very least.’
‘Right you are, young lady,’ Nicholas told Royan as they left Georgina sleeping. ‘What more do you need to convince you? My housekeeper has made up a room for you at the Hall. I am not letting you wander around on your own any more. Otherwise, next time they try to cull you they may have a little more luck.’
She was still too shaken and upset to argue, and she climbed meekly into the front seat of the Range Rover and let him drive her first to have her stitches removed and then back to Quenton Park. As soon as they arrived, he sent her up to her bedroom.
‘The cook will send dinner up to you. Make sure you take the sleeping pill that the doc gave you. Somebody will fetch your gear from Brandsbury if you give the key to your mother’s cottage to Mrs Street. In the meantime my housekeeper has set out some nightclothes and a toothbrush in your room for you. I don’t want to hear from you again before tomorrow morning.’
It was good to have him take control of her life. For the first time since that terrible night at the oasis she felt secure and safe. Still, she made one last gesture of independence and self-reliance; she flushed the Mogadon sleeping tablet down the toilet.
The nightdress that was laid on her pillow was full-length sheer silk with finest Cambrai lace at the cuffs and throat. She had never worn anything so luxurious and sensual against her skin before. She realized that it must have belonged to his wife, and the knowledge stirred mixed emotions in her. She climbed up into the four-poster bed, but even that lonely expanse of over-soft mattress and her unfamiliar surroundings did not keep her too long from sleep.
In the morning a young housemaid woke her with a copy of The Times and a pot of Earl Grey tea, then returned a few minutes later with her holdall.
‘Sir Nicholas would like you to take breakfast with him in the dining room at eight-thirty.’
While she showered Royan inspected her naked body in the full-length mirror that covered one wall of the bathroom. Apart from the knife wound on her arm, which was still livid and only partially healed, there was a dark bruise on her thigh and another down her left flank and buttock, legacies of the car crash. Her shin was scraped raw, and gingerly she pulled a pair of slacks over the injury. She limped a little as she went down the main staircase to find the dining room.
‘Please help yourself.’ Nicholas looked up from his newspaper to greet her as she hesitated in the doorway. He waved at the display of breakfast dishes on the sideboard. As she spooned scrambled eggs on to her plate, she recognized the landscape on the wall in front of her as a Constable.
‘Did you sleep well?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but went on, ‘I have heard from the police. They found the MAN truck abandoned in a lay-by near Harrogate. They are going over it now but they don’t expect to find much. We seem to be dealing with someone who knows what he is doing.’
‘I must phone the hospital,’ she said.
‘I have already done so. Your mother had an easy night. I left a message that you would visit her this evening.’
‘This evening?’ She looked around sharply. ‘Why so late?’
‘I intend to keep you busy until then. I want to get my money’s worth out of you.’
He stood as she came to the table, and drew back her chair to seat her. She found the courtesy made her feel slightly uncomfortable, but she made no comment.
‘The first attack on you and Duraid at your villa in the oasis – we can draw no conclusions from that, apart from the fact that the assassins knew exactly what they were after, and where to look for it.’ She found the abrupt change of subject disconcerting. ‘However, let’s give some thought to the second attempt in Cairo. The hand grenade. Who knew you were going to the Ministry that afternoon, apart from the minister himself?’
She reflected as she chewed and swallowed a mouthful of egg. ‘I am not sure. I think I told Duraid’s secretary, maybe one of the other research assistants.’
He frowned and shook his head. ‘So half the museum staff knew about your appointment?’
‘That is about it, yes. Sorry.’
He pondered a moment, ‘All right. Who knew you were leaving Cairo? Who knew you were staying at your mother’s cottage?’
‘One of the clerks from administration brought my slides out to the airport.’
‘Did you tell him what flight you were leaving on?’
‘No, definitely not.’
‘Did you tell anybody at all?’
‘No. That is—’ she hesitated.
‘Yes?’
‘I told the minister himself during our interview, when I asked for leave of absence. Not him – surely not?’ her expression reflected her horror at the thought.
Nicholas shrugged, ‘Some funny things happen. Of course, the minister knew all about the work that you and Duraid were doing on the seventh scroll?’
‘Not all the details, but – yes – in general terms he knew what we were up to.’
‘All right. Next question, tea or coffee?’ He poured coffee into her cup, and then went on, ‘You said that Duraid had a list of possible sponsors for an expedition. Might give us some ideas as to a short-list of suspects?’
‘The Getty Museum,’ she said, and he smiled.
‘Cross one from the list. They don’t go around tossing grenades in the streets of Cairo. Who else was there on the list?’
‘Gotthold Ernst von Schiller.’
‘Hamburg. Heavy industry. Metal and alloy refineries. Base mineral production.’ Nicholas nodded. ‘Who was the third name on the list?’
‘Peter Walsh,’ she said. ‘The Texan.’
‘That’s the one,’ he nodded. ‘Lives in Fort Worth. Fast-food franchising. Mail order retail.’ There were very few collectors with the substance to compete with the major institutions when it came to making significant acquisitions of antiquities or to financing archaeological exploration. Nicholas knew them all, for it was a mutually antagonistic circle of no more than a couple of dozen men. He had competed with each of them at one time or another on the auction floors of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, not to mention other less salubrious venues where ‘fresh’ antiquities were sold. The adjective ‘fresh’ was used in the context of ‘fresh out of the ground’.
‘Those are two beady-eyed bandits. They would probably eat their own children if they felt peckish. What would they do if they thought you stood in their way to the tomb of Mamose? Do you know if either of them contacted Duraid after the book was published, the way I did?’
‘I don’t know. They may have.’
‘I cannot imagine that either of those beauties would have missed such an easy trick. We must believe that they both know that Duraid had something going on. We will put their names on our list of suspects.’ Then he inspected her plate. ‘Enough? Another spoonful of egg? No? Very well, let’s go down to the museum and see what Mrs Street has found for us to work on.’
When they walked into his study, she was impressed by the amount of organization that he had accomplished in such a short time. He must have been busy at it all last night, turning the room into a military-type headquarters. In the centre of the room stood a large easel and bl
ackboard on which were pinned a set of overlapping satellite photographs. She went across to study them, and then glanced at the other material pinned on the board.
Along with a large-scale map covering the same area of south-western Ethiopia as the satellite photographs there were lists of names and addresses, lists of equipment and stores which he had obviously used on previous African expeditions, sheets of calculations of distance and what looked like a preliminary financial budget. At the top of the board was a schedule headed ‘Ethiopia – General Information’. There were five closely typed foolscap sheets, so she did not read through the entire schedule, but she was impressed by his thoroughness in preparation.
Royan determined to study all this material at the earliest opportunity, but now she crossed to one of the two chairs he had set up at a table facing the board. He stood at the board and picked up a silver-topped swagger stick from the table, brandishing it like a schoolmaster’s pointer.
‘Class will come to order.’ He rapped on the board. ‘The first thing you have to do is convince me that we will be able to pick up the spoor of Taita again after it has had several thousand years to cool. Let us first consider the geographical features of the Abbay gorge.’
Nicholas described the course of the river on the satellite photograph with his pointer. ‘Along this section the river has cut its way through the flood basalt plateaux. In places the cliffs of the sub-gorge are sheer, as high as four or five hundred feet on each side. Where there are intrusive strata of harder igneous schists the river has not been able to erode them. They form a series of gigantic steps in the course of the river. I think you are correct in your assumption that Taita’s “steps” are actually waterfalls.’
He came to the table and picked out a photograph from amongst the bundles of papers that covered it. ‘I took this in the gorge during the Armed Forces Expedition in 1976. It will give you an idea of what some of those falls are like.’
He passed her a black and white riverscape of towering cliffs on either hand and a cascade of water that seemed to fall from the heavens to dwarf the tiny figures of half-naked men and boats in the foreground.
‘I had no idea it was like that!’ She stared at it in awe.
‘Doesn’t do justice to the splendid desolation down there in the gorge,’ he told her. ‘From a photographer’s point of view there is no place to stand from which you can get it all into perspective. But at least you can see how that waterfall would halt a party of Egyptians coming upriver on foot, or at least with pack horses. There is usually some sort of path alongside the cataracts made by elephant and other wild game over the ages. However, there is simply no way to bypass waterfalls such as this one, and to get around those cliffs.’
She nodded, and he went on, ‘Even coming downstream we had to lower the boats and all our equipment down each set of waterfalls on ropes. It wasn’t easy.’
‘Let us agree that it was a waterfall that stopped them going further – the second waterfall from the westerly approaches,’ she conceded.
Nicholas picked up the swagger stick and on the satellite photograph traced the course of the river up from the dark wedge shape of the Roseires dam in central Sudan. ‘The escarpment rises on the Ethiopian side of the border, that is where the gorge proper begins. No roads or towns in there, and only two bridges far upstream. Nothing for five hundred miles except racing Nile waters and savage black basalt rock.’ He paused to let that sink in.
‘It is one of the last true wildernesses on earth, with an evil reputation as the haunt of wild animals and even wilder men. I have marked the main falls that show in the gut of the gorge here on the satellite photo.’ With the pointer he picked them out, each circled neatly in red marker pen.
‘Here is waterfall number two, about a hundred and twenty miles upstream from the Sudanese border. However, there are a number of factors we have to consider, not least the fact that the river may have altered its course during the last four thousand years since our friend, Taita, visited it.’
‘Surely it could not have escaped from such a deep canyon, four thousand feet,’ she protested. ‘Even the Nile must be held captive by that?’
‘Yes, but it would certainly have altered the existing bed. In the flood season the volume and force of the river exceeds my ability to describe it to you. The river rises twenty metres up the side walls and bores through at speeds of ten knots or more.’
‘You navigated that?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘Not in the flood season. Nothing could survive that.’
They both stared at the photograph in silence for a minute, imagining the terrors of that mighty stretch of water in its full fury.
Then she reminded him, ‘The second waterfall?’
‘Here it is, where one of the tributary rivers enters the main flow of the Abbay. The tributary is the Dandera river and it rises at twelve thousand feet altitude, below the peak of Sancai Mountain in the Choke range, here about a hundred miles north of the gorge.’
‘Do you remember the spot where it joins the Abbay from when you were there?’
‘It was over twenty years ago, and even then we had been almost a month down there in the gorge, so it all seemed to merge into a single nightmare. The memory blurred with the monotonous surroundings of the cliffs and the dense jungle of the walls, and our senses were dulled by the heat and the insects and the roar of water and the repetitive, unremitting toil at the oars. But, strangely, I do remember the confluence of the Dandera and the Abbay for two reasons.’
‘Yes?’ She sat forward eagerly, but he shook his head.
‘We lost a man there. The only casualty on the second expedition. Rope parted and he fell a hundred feet. Landed on his back across a spur of rock.’
‘I am sorry. But what was the other reason you remember the spot.’
‘There is a Coptic Christian monastery there, built into the rock face about four hundred feet above the surface of the river.’
‘Down there in the depths of the gorge?’ She sounded incredulous. ‘Why would they build a monastery there?’
‘Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian countries on earth. It has over nine thousand churches and monasteries, a great many of them in similarly remote and almost inaccessible places in the mountains. This one at the Dandera river is the reputed burial site of St Frumentius, the saint who introduced Christianity to Ethiopia from the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople in the early third century. Legend has it that he was shipwrecked on the Red Sea shore and taken to Aksum, where he converted the Emperor Ezana.’
‘Did you visit the monastery?’
‘Hell, no!’ he laughed. ‘We were too busy just surviving, too eager to escape from the hell of the gorge to have any time for sightseeing. We descended the falls and kept on downriver. All I remember of the monastery are the excavations in the cliff face high above the pool of the river, and the distant figures of the troglodytic monks in their white robes lining the parapet of the caves to watch impassively as we passed. Some of us waved up to them, and felt quite rebuffed when they made no response.’
‘How would we ever reach that spot again, without a full-scale river expedition?’ she wondered aloud, staring disconsolately at the board.
‘Discouraged already?’ He grinned at her. ‘Wait until you meet some of the mosquitoes that live down there. They pick you up and fly with you to their lairs before they eat you.’
‘Be serious,’ she entreated him. ‘How would we ever get down there?’
‘The monks are fed by the villagers who live up on the highlands above the gorge. Apparently, there is a goat track down the wall. They told us that it takes three days to get down that track into the gut of the gorge from the rim.’
‘Could you find your way down?’
‘No, but I have a few ideas on the subject. We will come to that later. Firstly, we must decide what we expect to find down there after four thousand years.’ He looked at her expectantly. ‘Your turn now. Convince me.’ He handed her the silv
er-headed pointer, dropped into the chair beside her and folded his arms.
‘First you have to go back to the book.’ She exchanged the pointer for the copy of River God. ‘You remember the character of Tanus from the story?’
‘Of course. He was the commander of the Egyptian armies under Queen Lostris, with the title of Great Lion of Egypt. He led the exodus from Egypt, when they were driven out by the Hyksos.’
‘He was also the Queen’s secret lover and, if we are to believe Taita, the father of Prince Memnon, her eldest son,’ she agreed.
‘Tanus was killed during a punitive expedition against an Ethiopian chief named Arkoun in the high mountains, and his body was mummified and brought back to the Queen by Taita,’ Nicholas expanded the story.
‘Precisely.’ She nodded. ‘This leads me on to the other clue that Duraid and I winkled out.’
‘From the seventh scroll?’ He unfolded his arms and sat forward in his seat.
‘No, not from the scrolls, but from the inscriptions in the tomb of Queen Lostris.’ She reached into her bag and brought out another photograph. ‘This is an enlargement of a section of the murals from the burial chamber, that part of the wall that later fell away and was lost when the alabaster jars were revealed. Duraid and I believe that the fact that Taita placed this inscription in the place of honour, over the hiding-place of the scrolls, was significant.’ She passed the photograph to him, and he picked up a magnifying glass from the table to study it.
While he puzzled over the hieroglyphics Royan went on, ‘You will recall from the book how Taita loved riddles and word games, how he boasts so often that he is the greatest of all bao players?’
Nicholas looked up from the magnifying glass, ‘I remember that. I go along with the theory that bao was the forerunner of the game of chess. I have a dozen or so boards in the museum collection, some from Egypt and others from further south in Africa.’
‘Yes, I would also subscribe to that theory. Both games have many of the same objects and rules, but bao is a more rudimentary form of the game. It is played with coloured stones of different rank, instead of chess men. Well, I believe that Taita was not able to resist the temptation to display his riddling skills and his cleverness to posterity. I believe that he was so conceited that he deliberately left clues to the location of the Pharaoh’s tomb, both in the scrolls and amongst the murals that he tells us he painted with his own hands in the tomb of his beloved Queen.’