by Wilbur Smith
Immediately the solemn mood of the devout company changed. They broke out in smiles and laughter, and the abbot looked expectantly at Boris.
“The holy abbot says it has been a thirsty journey,” Tessay translated.
“The old devil loves his brandy,” Boris explained, and shouted to the camp butler. With some ceremony a bottle of brandy was brought and placed on the camp table in front of the abbot, shoulder to shoulder with the bottle of vodka in front of Boris. They toasted each other, and the abbot tossed back a dram that made his good eye weep with tears, and his voice husky as he directed a question at Royan.
“He asks you, Woizero Royan, where do you come from, daughter, that you follow the true path of Christ the Saviour of man?”
“I am an Egyptian, of the old religion,” Royan replied. The abbot and all his priests nodded and beamed with approval.
“We are all brothers and sisters in Christ, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians,” the abbot told her. “Even the word Coptic derives from the Greek for Egyptian. For over sixteen hundred years the Abuna, the bishop, of Ethiopia was always appointed by the Patriarch in Cairo. Only the Emperor Haile Selassie changed that in 1959, but we still follow the true road to Christ. You are welcome, my daughter.”
His debtera poured another dram of brandy and the old man swallowed it at a gulp. Even Boris looked impressed. “Where does the skinny old black tortoise put it?” he wondered aloud. Tessay did not translate, but she lowered her eyes and the hurt she felt for the insult to the holy man showed on her madonna features.
Jali Hora turned to Nicholas. “He wants to know what animals you have come to hunt here in his valley,” Tessay told him.
Nicholas steeled himself and then replied carefully. There was a long moment of disbelief, then the abbot cackled happily and the assembled priests shouted with incredulous mirth.
“A dik-dik! You have come to hunt a dik-dik! But there is no meat on an animal that size.”
Nicholas let them get over the first shock, and then produced a photograph of the mounted specimen of Moquoda harperii from the museum. He placed it on the table in front of Jali Hora.
“This is no ordinary dik-dik. It is a holy dik-dik,” he told them in portentous tones, nodding at Tessay for the translation. “Let me recount the legend.” They were silenced by the prospect of a good story with religious overtones. Even the abbot arrested the glass on its way to his lips and replaced it on the table. His one eye swivelled from the photograph to Nicholas’s face.
“When John the Baptist was dying of starvation in the desert,” Nicholas began, and a few of the priests crossed themselves at the mention of the saint’s name, “he had been thirty days and thirty nights without a morsel passing his lips—” Nicholas spun out the yarn for a while, dwelling on the extremities of hunger endured by the saint, details savoured by his audience who liked their holy men to suffer in the name of righteousness.
“In the end the Lord took mercy on his servant and placed a small antelope in a thicket of acacia, held fast by the thorns. He said unto the saint: ‘I have prepared a meal for you that you shall not die. Take of this meat and eat.’ Where John the Baptist touched the small creature, the marks of his thumb and fingers were imprinted upon its back for all time, and all generations to come.” They were silent and impressed.
Nicholas passed the photograph to the abbot. “See the prints of the saint’s fingers upon it.”
The old man studied the print avidly, holding it up to his single eye, and at last he exclaimed, “It is true. The marks of the saint’s fingers are clear to see.”
He passed it to his deacons. Encouraged by the abbot’s endorsement, they exclaimed and wondered over the picture of the insignificant creature in its coat of striped fur.
“Have any of your men ever laid eyes upon one of these animals?” Nicholas demanded, and one after the other they shook their heads. The photograph completed the circle and was passed to the rank of squatting acolytes.
Suddenly one of them leaped to his feet prancing, brandishing the photograph and gibbering with excitement.
“I have seen this holy creature! With my very own eyes, I have seen it.” He was a young boy, barely adolescent.
There were cries of derision and disbelief from the others. One of them snatched the print from the boy’s grasp and waved it out of his reach, taunting him with it.
“The child is soft in the head, and often possessed by demons and fits,” Jali Hora explained sorrowfully. “Take no notice of him, poor Tamre!”
Tamre’s eyes were wild as he ran down the rank of acolytes, trying desperately to recapture the photograph. But they passed it back and forth, keeping it just out of his reach, teasing him and jeering at his antics.
Nicholas rose to his feet to intervene. He found this taunting of a weak-minded lad offensive, but at that moment something tripped in the boy’s mind, and he fell to the ground as though struck down by a club. His back arched and his limbs twitched and jerked uncontrollably, his eyes rolled back into his skull until only the whites showed, and white froth creamed on his lips that were drawn back in a grinning rictus.
Before Nicholas could go to him, four of his peers picked him up bodily and carried him away. Their laughter dwindled into the night. The others acted as though this was nothing out of the ordinary, and Jali Hora nodded to his debtera to refill his glass.
It was late when at last Jali Hora took his leave and was helped into the palanquin by his deacons. He took the remains of the brandy with him, clutching the half-empty bottle in one clawed hand and tossing out benedictions with the other.
“You made a good impression, Milord English,” Boris told him. “He liked your story of John the Baptist, but he liked your money even more.”
* * *
When they set out the next morning, the path followed the river for a while. But within a mile the waters quickened their pace, and then raced through the narrow opening between high red cliffs and plunged over another waterfall.
Nicholas left the well-trodden trail and went down to the brink of the falls. He looked down two hundred feet into a deep cleft in the rock, only just wide enough to allow the angry river to squeeze through. He could have thrown a stone across the gap. There was no path nor foothold in that chasm, and he turned back and rejoined the rest of the caravan as it detoured away from the river and into another thickly wooded valley.
“This was probably once the course of the Dandera river, before it cut a fresh bed for itself through the chasm.” Royan pointed to the high ground on each side of the path, and then to the water-worn boulders that littered the trail.
“I think you are right,” Nicholas agreed. “These cliffs seem to be an intrusion of limestone through the basalt and sandstone. The whole area has been severely faulted and cut up by erosion and the ever-changing river. You can be certain that those limestone cliffs are riddled with caves and springs.”
Now the trail descended rapidly towards the Blue Nile, falling away almost fifteen hundred feet in altitude in the last few miles. The sides of thé valley were heavily covered with vegetation and at many places small springs of water oozed from the limestone and trickled down the old river bed.
The heat built up steadily as they went down, and soon even Royan’s khaki shirt was stained with dark patches of sweat between her shoulder blades.
At one stage a freshet of clear water gushed from an area of dense bush high up the hillside and swelled the stream into a small river. Then they turned a corner of the valley and found that they and the stream had rejoined the main flow of the Dandera river. Looking back up the gorge, they could see where the river had emerged from the chasm through a narrow archway in the cliff. The rock surrounding the cleft was a peculiar pink in colour, smooth and polished, folded back upon itself, so that it resembled the mucous membrane on the inside of a pair of human lips.
The rock was of such an unusual colour and texture that they were both struck by it. They turned aside to study it while the mule
s went on downwards, the clatter of their receding hoofbeats and the voices of the men echoing and reverberating weirdly in this confined and unearthly place.
“It looks like some monstrous gargoyle, gushing water through its mouth,” Royan whispered, looking up at the cleft and at those strange rock formations. “I can imagine how the ancient Egyptians, led by Taita and Prince Memnon, would have been moved if they had ever reached this place. What mystical connotations would they have attributed to such a natural phenomenon!”
Nicholas was silent, studying her face. Her eyes were dark with awe, and her expression solemn. In this setting she reminded him strongly of a portrait that he had in his collection at Quenton Park. It was a fragment of a fresco from the Valley of the Kings, depicting a Ramessidian princess.
“Why should that surprise you?” he asked himself. “The very same blood runs in her veins.”
She turned to face him. “Give me hope, Nicky. Tell me that I have not dreamed all this. Tell me that we are going to find what we are looking for, and that we are going to vindicate Duraid’s death.”
Her face was up-turned to his, and it seemed to glow under the light dew of perspiration and the strength of her commitment. He was seized by an almost overwhelming urge to take her up in his arms and kiss those moistly parted lips, but instead he turned away and started down the trail.
He dared not look back at her until he had himself fully under control. After a while he heard her quick, light tread on the rock behind him. They went on down in silence, and he was so preoccupied that he was unprepared for the sudden stunning vista that opened abruptly before them.
They stood high on a ledge above the sub-gorge of the Nile. Below them was a mighty cauldron of red rock five hundred feet deep. The main flow of the legendary river plunged in a green torrent into the shadowy abyss. It was so deep that the sunlight did not reach down into it. Beside them the sparser waters of the Dandera river took the same leap, falling white as an egret’s feather, twisting and blowing in the false wind of the gorge. In the depths the waters mingled, churning and roiling together in a welter of foam, turning upon themselves like a great wheel, weighty and viscous as oil, until at last they found the exit gorge and tore away down it with irresistible force and power.
“You sailed through that in a boat?” Royan asked, with awe in her voice.
“We were young and foolish, then,” Nicholas said with a sad little smile that was haunted by old memories.
They were silent for a long while. Then Royan said softly, “One can see how this would have stopped Taita and his prince as they came upstream.” She looked about her, and then pointed down the gorge towards the west. “They certainly could never have come up the sub-gorge itself. They must have followed the line of the top of the cliffs, right along here where we are standing.” Her voice took on an edge of excitement at the thought.
“Unless they came up the other side of the river,” Nicholas suggested to tease her, and her face fell.
“I hadn’t thought of that. Of course it’s possible. How would we ever cross over, if we find no evidence on this side?”
“Let’s consider that only when it’s forced upon us. We have enough to contend with as it is, without looking for more hardships.”
Again they were silent, both of them considering the magnitude and uncertainty of the task that they had taken on. Then Royan roused herself.
“Where is the monastery? I can see no sign of it.”
“It’s in the cliff right under our feet.”
“Will we camp down there?”
“I doubt it. Let’s catch up with Boris and find out what he intends to do.”
They followed the trail along the edge of the cauldron, and came up with the mule caravan at a spot where the track forked. One branch turned away from the river into a wooded depression, while the other still hugged the rim-rock.
Boris was waiting for them, and he indicated the track that led away from the river. “There is a good campsite up there in the trees where I stayed last time I hunted down here.”
There were several tall wild fig trees throwing shade across this glade, and a spring of fresh water at the head. To minimize the loads, Boris had not carried tents down into the gorge. So as soon as the mules were unloaded he set his men to building three small thatched huts for their accommodation, and to digging a pit latrine well away from the spring.
While this work was going on, Nicholas beckoned to Royan and Tessay, and the three of them set off to explore the monastery. Where the trail forked, Tessay led them along the path that skirted the cliff top, and soon they came to a broad rock staircase that descended the cliff face.
There was a party of white-robed monks coming up the stone stairway, and Tessay stopped briefly to chat to them. As they went on she told Nicholas and Royan, “Today is Katera, the eve of the festival of Timkat, which begins tomorrow. They are very excited. It is one of the major events of the religious year.”
“What does the festival celebrate?” Royan asked. “It is not part of the Church calendar in Egypt.”
“It’s the Ethiopian Epiphany, celebrating the baptism of Christ,” Tessay explained. “During the ceremony the tabot will be taken down to the river to be rededicated and revitalized, and the acolytes will receive baptism, as did Jesus Christ at the hand of the Baptist.”
They followed the staircase down the sheer cliff face. The treads of the steps had been dished by the passage of bare feet over the centuries. Down they went, with the great cauldron of the Nile boiling and hissing and steaming with spray hundreds of feet below them.
Suddenly they came out on to a wide terrace that had been hewn by man’s hand from the living rock. The red rock overhung it, forming a roof to the cloister with arches of stone left in place by the ancient builders to support it. The interior wall of the long covered terrace was riddled with the entrances to the catacombs beyond. Over the ages the cliff face had been mined and burrowed to form the halls and cells, the vestibules, churches and shrines of the monastic community which had inhabited them for well over a thousand years.
There were groups of monks seated along the length of the terrace. Some of them were listening to one of the deacons reading aloud from an illuminated copy of the scriptures.
“So many of them are illiterate,” Tessay sighed. “The Bible must be read and explained to even the monks, for most of them are unable to read it for themselves.”
“This was what the Church of Constantine was like, the Church of Byzantium,” Nicholas pointed out quietly. “It remains the Church of cross and book, of elaborate and sumptuous ritual in a predominantly illiterate world today.”
As they wandered slowly down the cloister they passed other seated groups who, under the direction of a precentor, were chanting and singing the Amharic psalms and hymns. From the interior of the cells and caves there came the hum of voices raised in prayer or supplication, and the air was thick with the smell of human occupation that had taken place over hundreds of years.
It was the smell of wood smoke and incense, of stale food and excrement, of sweat and piety, of suffering and of sickness. Amongst the groups of monks were the pilgrims who had made the journey, or been carried by their relatives, down into the gorge to make petition to the saint, or to seek from him a cure for their disease and suffering.
There were blind children weeping in their mothers’ arms, and lepers with the flesh rotting and falling from their bones, and still others in the coma of sleeping sickness or some other terrible tropical affliction. Their whines and moans of agony blended with the chanting of the monks, and with the distant clamour of the Nile as it cascaded into the cauldron.
They came at last to the entrance to the cavern cathedral of St. Frumentius. It was a circular opening like the mouth of a fish, but the surrounds of the portals were painted with a dense border of stars and crosses, and of saintly heads. The portraits were primitive, and rendered in ochre and soft earthy tones that were all the more appealing for their c
hildlike simplicity. The eyes of the saints were huge and outlined in charcoal, their expressions tranquil and benign.
A deacon in a grubby green velvet robe guarded the entrance, but when Tessay spoke to him he smiled and nodded and gestured for them to enter. The lintel was low and Nicholas had to duck his head to pass under it, but on the far side he raised it again to look about him in amazement.
The roof of the cavern was so high that it was lost in the gloom. The rock walls were covered with murals, a celestial host of angels and archangels who flickered and wavered in the light of the candles and oil lamps. They were partially obscured by the long tapestry banners that hung down the walls, grimy with incense soot, their fringes frayed and tattered. On one of these St. Michael rode a prancing white horse, on another the Virgin knelt at the foot of the cross, while above her the pale body of Christ bled from the wound of the Roman spear in his side.
This was the outer nave of the church. In the far wall the doorway to the middle chamber was guarded by a massive pair of wooden doors that stood open. The three of them crossed the stone floor, picking their way between the kneeling petitioners and pilgrims in their rags and tatters, in their misery and their religious ecstasy. In the feeble light of the lamps and the blue haze of incense smoke they seemed lost souls languishing eternally in the outer darkness of purgatory.
The visitors reached the set of three stone steps that led up to the inner doors, but their way was blocked at the threshold by two robed deacons in tall, flat-topped hats. One of these addressed Tessay sternly.
“They will not even let us enter the qiddist, the middle chamber,” Tessay told them regretfully. “Beyond that lies the maqdas, the Holy of Holies.”
They peered past the guards, and in the gloom of the qiddist could just make out the door to the inner sanctum.
“Only the ordained priests are allowed to enter the maqdas, for it contains the tabot and the entrance to the tomb of the saint.”