The Seventh Scroll (Novels of Ancient Egypt)

by Wilbur Smith

  Boris paused at the head of the pathway, and looked out over that valley. For once even he seemed to be subdued and awed by the immensity of the drop and the rugged splendour of the gorge.

  “You will be passing into another land in another age,” he warned them in an uncharacteristically philosophical mood. “They say that this trail is two thousand years old, as old as Christ.” He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. “The old black priest in the church at Debra Maryam will tell you that the Virgin Mary passed this way when she fled from Israel after the crucifixion.” He shook his head. “But then these people will believe anything.” And he stepped out on to the pathway.

  It clung to the cliff, descending at such an angle that each pace was down a rock step so deep that it stretched the tendons and the sinews in their groins and knees, and jarred their spines. They were forced to use their hands to scramble the rougher and steeper sections, where it was almost as though they were descending a ladder.

  It seemed impossible that the mules under their heavy packs could follow them down. The plucky beasts lunged down each of the rock steps, landing heavily on their forelegs, then gathered themselves for the next drop. The trail was so narrow that the bulky packs scraped against the rock wall on one hand, while on the other hand the drop sucked at them giddily.

  When the path dog-legged and changed direction, the mules could not make the turn in one attempt. They were forced to back and fill, edging their way round the narrow trail, sweating with terror and their eyes rolling until the whites flashed. The drivers urged them on with wild cries and busy whips.

  At places the pathway entered the body of the mountain, passing behind butts and needles of rock that time and erosion had prised away from the cliff face. These rocky gateways were so narrow that the mules had to be unloaded and the packs carried through by the drivers, and then the mules were reloaded on the far side.

  “Look!” Royan cried in astonishment and pointed out into the void. A black vulture rose up out of the depths on widespread pinions and floated past them almost within arm’s length, turning its gruesome naked head of pink lappeted skin to stare at them with inscrutable black eyes before sailing away.

  “He is using the thermals of heated air from the valley for lift,” Nicholas explained to her. He pointed out along the cliff to an overhanging buttress on the same level as themselves. “There is one of their nests.” It was a shaggy mound of sticks piled on an inaccessible ledge. The excrement of the birds that had inhabited it over the ages had painted the cliff face below with streaks of brilliant white, and even at this distance they could catch whiffs of rotting offal and decaying flesh.

  All that day they clung to the precipitous track as they eased their way down that terrible wall. It was late afternoon, and they were only halfway down, when the trail turned back upon itself once more and they heard the rumble of the falls ahead. The sound grew louder and became a thunderous roar as they moved around the corner of another buttress and came in full sight of the falls.

  The wind created by the torrent tugged at them and forced them to clutch for handholds. The spray blew around them and wetted their upturned faces, but the Ethiopian guide led them straight on until it seemed that they must be washed away into the valley still hundreds of feet below.

  Then, miraculously, the waters parted and they stepped behind the great translucent curtain into a deep recess of moss-covered and gleaming wet rock, carved from the cliff by the force of water over the aeons. The only light in this gloomy place was filtered through the waterfall, green and mysterious like some undersea cavern.

  “This is where we sleep tonight,” Boris announced, obviously enjoying their astonishment. He pointed to bundles of firewood piled at the rear of the cave, and the smoke-blackened wall above the stone hearth. “The muleteers carrying food and supplies down to the priests in the monastery have used this place for centuries.”

  As they moved deeper into the cavern, the sound of falling water became muted to a dull background rumble and the rock underfoot was dry. Once the servants had lit the fire, it became a warm and comfortable, not to say romantic, lodging.

  With an old soldier’s eye for the most comfortable spot, Nicholas laid out his sleeping bag in a corner at the back of the cave, and quite naturally Royan unrolled hers beside his. They were both tired out by the unusual exertion of climbing down the cliff wall, and after supper they stretched out in their sleeping bags in companionable silence and watched the firelight playing on the roof of the cave.

  “Just think!” Royan whispered. “Tomorrow we will be retracing the footsteps of old Taita himself.”

  “To say nothing of the Virgin Mary,” Nicholas smiled.

  “You are a horrid old cynic,” she sighed. “And what is more, you probably snore.”

  “You are about to find out the hard way,” he told her, but she was asleep before him. Her breathing was gentle and even, and he could just hear it above the sound of the water. It was a long time since he had had a lovely woman lying at his side. When he was sure she was deeply under, he reached across and touched her cheek gently.

  “Pleasant dreams, little one,” he whispered tenderly. “You have had a busy day.” That was the way he had often bid his younger daughter sleep.

  * * *

  The muleteers were stirring long before the dawn, and the whole party was on the pathway again as soon as the light was strong enough to reveal their footing. When the early sun struck the upper walls of the cliff face, they were still high enough above the valley floor to have an aerial view of the terrain. Nicholas drew Royan aside and they let the rest of the caravan go on down ahead of them.

  He found a place to sit and unrolled the satellite photograph between them. Picking out the major peaks and features of the scene, they orientated themselves and began to make some order out of the cataclysmic landscape that rioted below them.

  “We can’t see the Abbay river from here,” Nicholas pointed out. “It’s still deep in the sub-gorge. We will probably only get our first glimpse of it from almost directly above.”

  “If we have identified our present position accurately, then the river will make two ox-bow bends around that bluff over there.”

  “Yes, and the confluence of the Dandera river with the Abbay is over there, below those cliffs.” He used his thumb knuckle as a rough scale measure. “About fifteen miles from here.”

  “It looks as though the Dandera has changed its course many times over the centuries. I can see at least two gullies that look like ancient river beds.” She pointed down: “There, and there. They are all choked with jungle now.” She looked crestfallen, “Oh, Nicholas, it is such a huge and confused area. How are we ever going to find the single entrance to a tomb hidden in all that?”

  “Tomb? What tomb is this?” Boris demanded with interest. He had come back up the trail to find them. They had not heard his approach, and now he stood over them. “What tomb are you talking about?”

  “Why, the tomb of St. Frumentius, of course,” Nicholas told him smoothly, showing no concern at having been overheard.

  “Isn’t the monastery dedicated to the saint?” Royan asked as smoothly, as she rolled up the photograph.

  “Da.” He nodded, looking disappointed, as though he expected something of more interest. “Yes, St. Frumentius. But they will not let you visit the tomb. They will not let you into the inner part of the monastery. Only the priests are allowed in there.”

  He removed his cap and scratched the short, stiff bristles that covered his scalp. They rasped like wire under his fingernails. “This week is the ceremony of Timkat, the Blessing of the Tabot. There will be a great deal of excitement down there. You will find it very interesting, but you will not be able to enter the Holy of Holies, nor will you be able to see the actual tomb. I have never met any white man who has seen it.”

  He squinted up at the sun. “We must get on. It looks close, but it will take us two more days to reach the Abbay. It is bad ground down there.
A long march, even for a famous dik-dik hunter.” He laughed delightedly at his own joke, and turned away down the path.

  As they approached the bottom of the cliff, the gradient of the trail smoothed out and the steps became shallower and further apart. The going became easier and their progress swifter, but the air had changed in quality and taste. It was no longer cool, bracing mountain air but the languid, enervating air of the equator, with the smell and taste of the encroaching jungle.

  “Hot!” said Royan, shrugging out of the woollen shawl.

  “Ten degrees hotter, at least,” Nicholas agreed. He pulled his old army jersey over his head, leaving his hair in curly disarray. “And we can expect it to get hotter before we reach the Abbay. We still have to descend another three thousand feet.”

  Now the path followed the Dandera river for a while. Sometimes they were several hundred feet above it, and shortly afterwards they splashed waist-deep through a ford, hanging on to the panniers of the mules to keep themselves from being swept away on the flood.

  Then the gorge of the Dandera river was too deep and steep to follow any longer, as sheer cliffs dropped into dark pools. So they left the river and followed the track that squirmed like a dying snake amongst eroded hills and tall red stone bluffs.

  A mile or two further downstream they rejoined the river in a different mood as it rippled through dense forest. The dangling lianas swept the surface and tree moss brushed their heads as they passed, straggling and unkempt as the beard of the old priest at Debra Maryam. Vervet monkeys chattered at them from the treetops and ducked their heads in wide-eyed outrage at the human intrusion into these secret places. Once a large animal crashed away through the undergrowth, and Nicholas glanced across at Boris.

  The Russian shook his head, laughing. “No, English, not dik-dik. Only kudu.”

  On the hillside above them the kudu paused to look back. He was a large bull with full twists to his wide corkscrew horns, a magnificent beast with a maned dewlap and pricked ears shaped like trumpets. He stared at them with huge, startled eyes. Boris whistled softly and his attitude changed abruptly.

  “Those horns are over fifty inches. They would get a place right at the top of Rowland Ward.” He was referring to the register of big game which was the Bible of the trophy hunter. “Don’t you want to take him, English?” He ran to the nearest mule and pulled the Rigby rifle from its slip case, then ran back and offered it to Nicholas.

  “Let him go.” Nicholas shook his head. “Only dik-dik for me.”

  With a flirt of his white powder-puff tail, the bull was gone over the ridge. Boris shook his head disgustedly and spat into the river.

  “Why did he try to insist that you kill it?” Royan demanded as they went on.

  “A photograph of a record pair of horns like that would look good on his advertising brochure. Suck in more clients.”

  All day they followed the winding trail, and in the late afternoon they camped in a clearing above the river where it was evident that other caravans had camped many times before them. It seemed obvious that this road was divided into time-honoured stages: every traveller took three full days from the top of the falls to reach the monastery, and they all camped at the same sites.

  “Sorry. No shower here,” Boris told his clients. “If you want to wash, there is a safe pool around the first bend upstream.”

  Royan looked appealingly at Nicholas. “I am so hot and sweaty. Please won’t you stand guard for me, where you can hear me call if I need you?”

  So he lay on the mossy bank just below the bend, out of sight but close enough to hear her splash and squeal at the cold embrace of the water. Once when he turned his head he realized that the current must have drifted her downstream, for through the trees he caught a flash of a naked back, and the curve of a buttock, creamy and glistening wet with water. He looked away again guiltily, but he was startled by the intensity of his physical arousal brought on by that brief glimpse of lambent skin dappled with the late sunlight through the trees.

  When she came downstream along the bank, singing softly, towelling her wet hair, she called to him, “Your turn. Do you want me to stand guard for you?”

  “I am a big boy now.” He shook his head, but as she passed him he noticed the saucy glint in her eye, and he wondered suddenly if she had been fully aware of just how far downstream she had swum, and how much he had seen. He was titillated by the thought.

  He went upstream to the pool alone, and as he stripped he looked down at himself and felt guilty when he saw how she had moved him. Since Rosalind, no other woman had had this effect on him.

  “A nice cold plunge won’t do you any harm, my lad.” He threw his jeans over a bush, and dived into the pool.

  * * *

  As they sat at the campfire after the evening meal, Nicholas looked up suddenly and cocked his head.

  “Am I hearing things?” he wondered.

  “No,” Tessay laughed. “That is singing you hear. The priests from the monastery are coming to welcome us.”

  They saw the torches then, winding up the hillside in procession, flickering through the trees as they approached the camp. The muleteers and the servants crowded forward, singing and clapping rhythmically to greet the deputation from the monastery.

  The deep male voices soared and then dropped away, almost to a whisper, then rose again in descant, haunting and beautiful, the sound of Africa in the night. It drove icy thrills down Nicholas’s spine, so that he shivered involuntarily.

  Then they saw the white robes of the priests, flitting like moths in the torchlight as they wound along the trail. The camp servants fell on their knees as the first of the holy men entered the perimeter of the camp. They were young acolytes, bare-headed and bare-footed. They were followed by the monks, wearing long robes and tall turbans. Their ranks wheeled aside and opened up, an honour guard for the phalanx of deacons and fully ordained priests in their gaudy embroidered robes and vestments.

  Each of them carried a heavy Coptic cross, set on a tall staff and intricately chased and worked in native silver. They in turn opened into two ranks, still chanting, and allowed the canopied palanquin to be carried forward by four hefty young acolytes and placed in the centre of the camp. The crimson and yellow silk curtains shimmered in the light of the camp lanterns and the torches of the procession.

  “We must go forward to welcome the abbot,” Boris told Nicholas in a stage whisper. “His name is Jali Hora.” As they stepped up to the litter, the curtains were drawn dramatically aside and a tall figure stepped down to earth.

  Both Tessay and Royan sank to their knees respectfully, and clasped their hands at the breast. However, Nicholas and Boris remained on their feet, and Nicholas inspected the abbot with interest.

  Jali Hora was skeletally thin. Beneath the skirts of his robe his legs were like sticks of cured tobacco, tar-black and twisted, with desiccated sinew and stringy muscle. His robe was green and gold, worked with gold thread that glittered in the firelight. On his head he wore a tall hat with a flat top embroidered with a pattern of crosses and stars.

  The abbot’s face was dead sooty black, the skin wrinkled and riven with the deep etchings of age. There were few teeth behind his puckered lips, and even those were yellowed and askew. His beard was startling silver white, breaking like storm surf on the old bones of his jaw. One eye was opaque blue and blinded with tropical ophthalmia, but the other eye glistened like that of a hunting leopard.

  He began to speak in a high, quavering voice. “A blessing,” Boris warned Nicholas, and they both bowed their heads respectfully. The assembled priests came in with the chanted response each time the old man paused.

  When at last he had finished giving his blessing Jali Hora made the sign of the cross in four directions, rotating slowly towards each point of the compass, while two altar boys swung their silver censers vigorously, deluging the night with pungent clouds of incense smoke.

  After the blessing the two women came forward to kneel before the abb
ot. He stooped over them and struck them lightly on each cheek with his silver cross, chanting a falsetto blessing over them.

  “They say the old man is over a hundred years old,” Boris whispered to Nicholas.

  Two white-robed debteras brought forward a stool of African ebony, so beautifully carved that Nicholas eyed it acquisitively. He guessed that it was probably centuries old, and would have made a handsome addition to the museum collection. The two debteras took Jali Hora’s elbows and gently seated him on the stool. Then the rest of the company sank to the earth in a congregation around him, their black faces lifted towards him attentively.

  Tessay sat at his feet, and when her husband spoke she translated quietly for him into Amharic. “It is a great pleasure and an honour for me to greet you again, Holy Father.”

  The old man nodded, and Boris went on, “I have brought an English nobleman of royal blood to visit the monastery of St. Frumentius.”

  “I say, steady on, old boy!” Nicholas protested, but all the congregation studied him with expectant interest.

  “What do I do now?” he asked Boris out of the corner of his mouth.

  “What do you think he came all this way for?” Boris grinned maliciously. “He wants a gift. Money.”

  “Maria Theresa dollars?” he enquired, referring to the centuries-old traditional currency of Ethiopia.

  “Not necessarily. Times have changed. Jali Hora will be happy to take Yankee green-backs.”

  “How much?”

  “You are a nobleman of royal blood. You will be hunting in his valley. Five hundred dollars at least.”

  Nicholas winced and went to fetch his bag from one of the mule panniers. When he came back he bowed to the abbot and placed the sheaf of currency in his outstretched, pink-palmed claw. The abbot smiled, exposing the yellow stumps of his teeth, and spoke briefly.

  Tessay translated for him. “He says, ‘Welcome to the monastery of St. Frumentius and the season of Timkat.’ He wishes you good hunting on the banks of the Abbay river.”