by Wilbur Smith
or sprained something.
He was impressed with Royan's forbearance. She made no attempt to
question him about his discoveries in the bottom of the gorge, and
seemed genuinely more concerned with his well being than with the
progress of their exploration.
When she helped him to his feet and they started back towards camp, he
moved like an old man, lame and stiff. Every muscle and sinew in his
body ached. He knew that the lactic acid and nitrogen that had built up
in his tissues would take some time to be reabsorbed and dispersed.
Once they reached camp Royan led him to his hut and fussed over him as
she settled him under the mosquito net.
By this time he was feeling a lot better, but he neglected to inform her
of this fact. It was pleasant to have a woman caring for him again. She
brought him a couple of aspirin tablets and a steaming mug of tea, stiff
with sugar. He was putting it on a little when he asked weakly for a
second mugful.
Sitting beside his bed, she solicitously watched him drink it. "Better?"
she asked, when he had finished.
"The odds are two to one that I Will survive," he told her, and she
smiled.
"I can see that you are better. Your cheek is showing again. You gave me
an awful scare, you know."
"Anything to get your attention."
"Now that we have decided that you will live, tell me what happened.
What sort of trouble did you run into down there in the pool?"
"What you really want to know is what I found down there. Am I correct?"
"That too, she admitted.
Then he told her everything that he had discovered and how he had been
caught in the inflow of the underwater sink-hole. She listened without
interruption, and even when he had finished speaking she said nothing
for a while, but frowned with concentrated thought.
At last she looked up at him. "You mean that Taita was able to take
those stone niches right down to the very bottom of the pool, fifty feet
below the surface? and when he nodded, she was silent again. Then she
said, "How on earth did he accomplish that? What are your thoughts on
the subject?" -Tour thousand years ago the water level may have been
lower. There may have been a drought year when the river dried up, and
enabled him to get in there. How am I doing?"
"Not a bad try," she admitted, "but then why go to all the trouble of
building a scaffold? Why not just use the dry river bed as an access?
Then again, surely the attraction of the spot for Taita was the river.
If it was dry, then it would be just like a thousand other places in
this gorge.
No, I have a feeling that the fact that it was so inaccessible was the
main, if not the only, reason he chose to wo there."
"I suspect that you are correct," he agreed.
"So if the river was running, even at itS lowest level as it is now, how
on earth did he manage to carve those niches below the surface? And what
would be the point in having scaffolding under water?"
"Beats me. I have no idea he admitted.
"All right, let's leave that for the moment. Now lets go over your
description of the sink-hole that almost sucked you in. Did you form any
estimate of the size of the opening?"
He shook his head. "It is almost totally dark down there. I could not
see more than two or three feet in front of me."
"Was the entrance directly between the two tows of niches?"
"No, not directly," he said thoughtfully. "It was slightly to one side.
I hit the bottom of the pool with my feet, and was just about to push
off when it grabbed me."
"So it must be at the very bottom of the pool, and slightly downstream
from the scaffolding. You say that the entrance seemed to have a square
coping?"
"I am not absolutely sure of that - remember that I could see very
little. But that was the impression I received."
"It may have been another man-made structure, then perhaps some type of
adit shaft driven into the side of the pool?"
"It's possible," he agreed reluctantly. "But on the other hand it could
just as easily be a natural fault in the strata that the river is
draining into."
She stood up to leave, and he demanded, "Where are you going?"
"I won't be long. I am going to my hut to fetch my notes, and the
material from the stele. Back in a moment."
When she returned she sat on the floor beside his bed, with her legs
drawn up under her in that double-jointed feminine fashion. As she
spread her papers around her, he pulled up the edge of the mosquito net
and looked down at what she was doing.
"Yesterday, while you were busy building the gantry, I was able to
decipher most of the rest of the "spring" face of the stele." She moved
her notebook so that he was able to overlook the pages she had opened.
"These are my preliminary notes. You will see where I have inserted a
number of question marks - here and here, for instance. That is where I
am uncertain of the translation, or where Taita has used a new and
strange symbol. I will have to give more time and consideration to those
later."
I follow you," he said, and she went on.
"These sections that I have highlighted with green are quotations from
the standard version of the Book of the Dead. Take this one here: "The
universe is drawn in circles, the disc of the sun- god, Ra. The life of
man is a circle that begins in the womb and ends in the tomb. The circle
of the chariot wheel foreshadows the death of the serpent that it
crushes beneath its rim. "Yes, I recognize the quotation," he said.
"On the other hand, these parts of the text that I have highlighted in
yellow are original Taita writings, or at least are not quotations from
the Book of the Dead or any other source that I am aware of This
paragraph here in particular is the one that I wanted to bring to your
attention."
She traced a section with her forefinger as she read it aloud, "'The
daughter of the goddess has conceived. She has been impregnated by the
one who is without seed. She has begotten her own twin sister. The fetus
lies forever -coiled in her own womb. Her twin shall never be born. She
will never see the light of day. She will five for ever in the darkness.
In the womb of the sister her bridegroom claims her in eternal marriage.
The unborn twin becomes the bride of the god, who was a man Their
destinies are intertwined. They shall live for ever. They Sul not
perish."'
She looked up from the notebook. "When I first read it, I was satisfied
that the daughter of the goddess was the Dandera river, as we had
already agreed. I was also pretty sure that the god that was once a man
must be Pharaoh.
Mamose was only deified on his ascension to the throne of Egypt. Before
that he was a man."
Nicholas nodded. !The seedless one is obviously Taita himself. He makes
repeated references to the fact that he was a eunuch. But now,' he
suggested, "if you have some new ideas about the mysterious twin sister,
let's hear them."
The twin of
the river would most likely be a branch, or a fork of the
stream, wouldn't it?"
"Ah, I see what you are driving at, You are suggesting that the
sink-hole is the twin. Down there in the gorge it will never see the
Llight of day. Taita, the seedless one, claims paternity, So he is
telling us that he is the architect."
"Exactly, and he has married the twin of the river to Pharaoh Mamose for
all eternity. Putting that all together, I have come to the conclusion
that we will never find the location of Pharaoh Mamose's tomb until we
explore thoroughly that sink-hole that nearly drowned you."
"How do you suggest we do that?" he asked, and she shrugged.
"I am not the engineer, Nicky. I leave that to you to arrange. All I
know is that Taita devised some way of doing it - not only of getting
there but of working down there. If our interpretation of the stele is
correct, then he carried out extensive mining operations at the bottom
of the pool.
If he could do it, then there is no reason why you can't do it also."
"Ah!" he dernurred. "Taita was a genius. He says so repeatedly. I am
just an old plodder."
"I have got all my bets on you, Nicky. You won't let me down, will you?"
There was no call for intensive bushcraft to follow this spoor. His
quarry had taken very few anti-tracking precautions. Quite openly they
were following the main trail down the Abbay gorge, heading directly
westwards towards the Sudanese border.
Mek Nimmur was on his way back to his own stronghold.
Boris estimated that he had between fifteen and twenty men with him. It
was difficult to be certain, for the tracks on the pathway overlapped
each other, and of course he would have scouts on the'point ahead of him
and sweeping his flanks. There would also be a rear guard dragging the
trail behind him.
They were making good time, but such a large party would not be able to
outpace a single pursuer. He was sure he was gaining on them. He
reckoned that he had started four hours behind them, but judging by
recent signs he was now less than two hours adrift.
Without breaking his trot, he stooped to pick thing up from the path. As
he ran on he examined it. It was a twig, the soft tip shoot of a
kusagga-sagga plant that grew beside the track. One of the men ahead of
him had brushed against it as he passed, and snapped it off the main
branch. It gave Boris a fairly accurate gauge of how far he was behind.
Even in the heat of the gorge, the tender shoot had barely begun to
wilt. He was even closer than he had estimated.
He slowed down., a little as he considered his next move. He knew this
part of the valley fairly well. The previous year he had hunted over
much of this terrain with an American client, who had been looking for a
trophy Walia ibex. They had spent almost a month combing these same
gullies and wooded ravines before they had brought down a huge old ram,
black with age and carrying a pair of curled, back-sweeping horns that
ranked as the tenth largest ever in the Rowland Ward record book.
He knew that two or three miles ahead the Nile began another oxbow loop
out to the south, and that it then doubled back upon itself. The main
trail followed the river, because a series of sheer and formidable
cliffs guarded the high groupd in the centre of the loop of the river.
It was, however, possible to cut the corner. Boris had'done it before,
while following the wounded ibex.
The American hunter had not killed cleanly his bullet had struck the ram
too far back, missing the heartlung cavity and piercing the gut. The
stricken wild goat had taken to the high ground, following one of its
secret paths up amongst the crags. Boris and the American had followed
it up and over the mountain. Boris remembered how dangerous and
treacherous the path had been, but when it descended the far side of the
mountain it had cut off nearly ten miles.
If he could find the beginning of the goat path again, there was every
chance that he would be able to get ahead of Mek Nimmur and be lying in
wait for him on the far side. That would give him an enormous advantage.
The guerrilla leader would be expecting pursuit, not ambush.
He would be covering his back trail, and it was highly unlikely that
Boris would be able to slip past the rear guard without alerting his
intended victims. On the other hand, once he was ahead of them he would
be in control. Then he could choose his own killing ground.
As the trail and the main flow of the Nile started to turn away towards
the south, he kept watching the high ground above it, seeking a familiar
landmark. He had not gone another half-mile before he found it. Here
there was a break in the line of dark cliffs, a heavily forested
reentrant, that cut into the wall of basalt.
He stopped and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. "Too much
vodka," he grunted, "you are getting soft." His shirt was as sodden as
though he had plunged in the river.
He changed the slin of the rifle to his other shoulder, lifted his
binoculars and swept the sides of the wooded gully. They appeared sheer
and unscalable, but then he picked out the stunted shape of a small tree
that grew out of a narrow crack in the face. It looked like a Japanese
bonsai, with a twisted, malformed trunk and tortured branches.
The Walia ibex had been standing on the ledge just above that tree when
the American had fired. In his mind's eye Boris could still see the way
in which the wild goat had hunched its back as the bullet struck, and
then spun around and raced away up the cliff. He panned the glasses
upwards gently, and could just make out the inclination of the narrow
ledge as it angled up the face.
"Da, da. This is the spot." He was thinking in his mother tongue again.
It was a relief after these last days of having to struggle in French
and English.
Before he began the climb, he left the trail and scrambled down the
boulder-strewn slope to the river. He knelt at the edge of the Nile and
splashed double handfuls over himself, soaking his cropped head and
sluicing the sweat from his face and neck. He drained and refilled his
water bottle, then drank until his belly was painfully full.
Then he rinsed out the bottle and refilled it. There was no water on the
mountain. Finally he dipped his bush hat in the river and placed it back
on his head, sodden and streaming water down his neck and face.
He climbed back to the main trail and followed it for another hundred
paces, moving slowly and studying the "ground. At one place there was a
rock boulder almost blocking the path. The men ahead of him had been
forced to step over this obstruction, on to a patch of talcum-fine dust
beyond it. They had left perfect impressions of their footprints for him
to read.
Most of the men were wearing Israeli-style para boots with a
zigzag-patterned sole, and those coming up from behind had overtrodden
the spoor of the leaders. He had to go down on one knee to examine the
signs minutely before he could pick out the imprint o
f a much smaller
and more delicately formed foot, a lighter, unmistakably feminine tread.
It was partially obliterated by other larger masculine footprints, but
the outline of the toe was clear, and the pattern was that of a smooth
rubber-soled Bata tennis shoe. He would have recognized it from ten
thousand others.
He was relieved to find that Tessay was still with the group, and that
she and her lover had not left and taken another path. Mek Nimmur was a
sly one, and cunning.
He had escaped from Boris's clutches once before. But not this time! The
Russian shook his head vehemently: not this time.
He gave his full attention to the female footprint once again. It gave
him a pang to look at it. His anger returned in full force. He did not
consider his feelings for the woman. Love and desire did not enter into
the equation.
She was his chattel, and she had been stolen from him. It was only the
insult that had significance for him. She had rejected and humiliated
him, and for that she was going to die.
He felt the old thrill run through his blood at the thought of the kill.
Killing had always been his trade and his vocation, but no matter how
often he exercised his craft the thrill was never blunted, the pleasure
never satiated. Perhaps it was the only true pleasure left to him, pure
and unjaded - not even the vodka could weaken and dilute it as it had
the physical act of copulation. He would enjoy killing her even more
than he had once enjoyed coupling with her.
These past few years he had hunted only the lower animals, but he had
never forgotten what it was like to hunt down and to kill a human being,
more especially a woman. He wanted Mek Nimmur, but he wanted the woman
more.
In the days of President Mengistu, when he had been the head of
counter-intelligence, -his men had known his tastes and had picked the
pretty ones for him. He had only one regret now, and that was that this
time he would have to do it swiftly. There could be no question of
drawing it i out and savouring the pleasure. Not like some of the other
experiences, which had lasted for hours, sometimes for days.
"Bitch," he mouthed, and kicked at the dust, stamping on the faint
outline of her footprint, obliterating it just as he would do to her.
"Black fomicating bitch."