by Wilbur Smith
"I am sorry, sir. I don't have that information." It took Nicholas forty
minutes to reach the hospital and almost as long again to trace Royan.
She was in the women's surgical ward, sitting beside her mother's bed.
Her mother had not yet come round from the anaesthetic.
She looked up when Nicholas stood over her. "Are you all right? What the
hell happened?"
"My mother - her leg is badly smashed up. The surgeon had to put a pin
in her thigh - the femur.
"How are you?"
"A few bruises and scrapes. Nothing serious., "How did it happen?"
"A truck - it pushed us off the road."
"Not deliberate?" Nicholas felt something inside him quail as he
remembered another truck on another road on another night.
I think so. The driver wore a mask, a balaclava. He crashed into us from
behind. It must have been deliberate."
"Did you tell the police?"
She nodded. "Apparently the truck was reported stolen early this
morning, long before the accident, while the driver was stopped at one
of those Little Chef cafes. He is German. Speaks no English."
"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 administrator.
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 '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 It. . A robe. 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.
ù the morning a young housemaid woke her with aù 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 socks 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 nso 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 of antiquities or to financing
archaeological acquisitions 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 ano& 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 blackboard 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 southwestern
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 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 cliff 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 waterp
falls."
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 thad' She stared at it in awe.
"Doesn't do justice to the splendid desolation down he told her. "From a
photographer's there in the gorge, gra 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 3; of ten knots or more."
"You navigated that?" she asked doubtfully.
"Not in t
he 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 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 bluffed 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 i 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 the re 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 down river. All I remember of the
monastery are the excavations in the cliff face high above the pool of