by Wilbur Smith
mummy from its sarcophagus.
"The seals on the gate of the tomb were intact," Royan pointed out
repeatedly.
"There is probably an explanation for that," Nicholas told her. "Taita
himself might have removed the treasure and the body. Many times in the
writing of the seventh scroll he laments the waste of such treasure. He
points out that it could have been much better spent in protecting and
nurturing the nation and its people."
"No, it does not make sense," Royan argued, "to go to such length as to
dam the river and tunnel under the pool, to build this elaborate tomb,
and then to remove and destroy the king's mummy. Taita was always a
logical person. In his own way he revered the gods of Egypt. It shows in
all his writings. He would never have flouted the religious traditions
in which he believed so strongly. Some thing about this tomb does not
ring true for me - the mysterious and almost offhanded disappearance of
the body, even the paintings and the inscriptions up on the walls."
"I agree with you about the missing corpse, but what do you find
illogical about the decorations?" Nicholas wanted to know.
"Well, the paintings first." She indicated the image of Isis with a wave
of her hand. "They are lovely, and they are the work of a competent
classical artist, but they are hackneyed and stylized in form and choice
of colour. The figures are stiff and wooden - they do not move and
dance.
They lack that spark of genius that we were shown in the tomb of Queen
Lostris where the original scrolls in their alabaster jars were hidden."
Nicholas considered the murals thoughtfully. I see what you mean. Even
the murals in the tomb of Tanus at the monastery are in a different
class from these."
"Exactly! she said forcefully. "Those were the paintings of Taita
himself These are not. They were done by one of his hacks." , "What
else is there about the inscriptions that you don't like?"
"Have you ever heard of another tomb that did not have the text of the
Book of the Dead inscribed upon its walls, or that did not depict the
dead person's journey through the seven pylons to reach the paradise
beyond?"
Nicholas looked startled; he had never considered that it fact. Without
replying he left her and went back down the long gallery, ostensibly to
supervise the packing of the sacred statues, but in reality to give
himself more time to consider what she had said.
Before leaving England Nicholas had seen to it that all of the more
vulnerable and breakable equipment that they had air-freighted into the
gorge had been packed in sturdy metal ammunition crates. All these
crates had waterproof rubber seals and strong lever fastenings. The
original contents had been padded and protected with olystyrene packing.
When they left Ethiopia the equipP
ment would be abandoned, but the crates, together with the packing
material, had been carefully preserved for iA transporting the treasures
that they might find in the tomb.
While six of the sacred statues fitted neatly into the crates, the
images of Hathor the cow and satanic Seth were too large. However,
Nicholas discovered that these had been carved in separate parts. The
heads were detachable, and the hoofed legs of Hathor were held into the
body by wooden pins that were rotted to dust. Broken down into their
separate parts, even these two larger statues could also be packed into
the metal cases.
Nicholas watched Hansith packing Seth's ferocious head of ebony and
black resin into one of the crates. Then after a while he went back to
where Royan was working on the inscriptions on the wall above the empty
sarcophagus.
"Very well. I agree. You are right about the lack of inscriptions from
the Book of the Dead. It does seem strange.
But what can we do about it, other than accepting it as a mystery which
we can never unravel?"
"Nicky, there is something more here. This is not everything. I feel it
in every fibre of my being. We are missing something."
"Who am I, a mere male, to question the veracity of a woman's
instincts."
"Stop being superior," she snapped. "How long do I have to work over the
inscriptions from the stele?"
"A week or two at the most. I have to set up an RV with Jannie. We have
to be there at Roseires airstrip when he comes in to pick us up. That's
one date we dare not reak., "Good Lord. I thought you would have
arranged that long ago. How will you contact Jannie from here?"
"Quite simple really." Nicholas smiled. "There is a public telephone at
the post office in Debra Maryam, Tessay can move freely anywhere in the
Goiam. She will go up the escarpment with an escort of monks and
telephone Geoffrey Tennant at the British Embassy in Addis. I have
already arranged it with Geoffrey. He will relay a message on to
Jannie."
"Will Tessay do it for you?"
He nodded. "She has agreed to go up to Debra Maryam tomorrow. Jannie
must have as much notice as possible to get himself prepared for the
flight out from Malta. It's going to need some firte timing for all of
us to arrive at the airstrip simultaneously. It will be asking for
trouble for one party to sit around waiting at Roseires for the others
to arrive."
awn on the first of April," Nicholas gave Tessay the message. "Tell
Jannie . we will be there on April Fools' Day! A nice easy one to
remember."
They watched Tessay set off along the trail with her escort of monks and
Royan asked Mek Nimmur quietly, "Don't you worry about her going off
like this on her own?"
"She is a very competent person, and she is well known and liked
throughout the Gojam- She is as safe as any person can be in a dangerous
land." Mek watched Tessay's slim figure in shamnw and jodhpur pants
becoming smaller with distance. "I wish I could go with her, but-' Mek
shrugged.
Suddenly Royan exclaimed, "There is something that I forgot to ask her."
She left Nicholas and Mek standing, and ran down the trail calling after
the other woman. Her voice floated back to where Nicholas stood watching
her.
"Tessay! Wait! Come back!'
Tessay turned and waited for Royan to catch up with her. While the two
women stood talking together, Nicholas lost interest and turned to study
the distant silhouette of the escarpment-With a sinking feeling in the
pit of his stomach he saw that the thunderheads on the mountain tops
were denser and more ominous than they had been only days before. The
rains were building up swiftly now.
He wondered if they really had as long as they hoed before the dam was
threatened and they were driven out of the gorge by the rising waters.
All, He looked back down the path just in time to see Royan pass
something to Tessay, who nodded and pushed it into the pocket of her
jodhpurs. Then at last the two women embraced warmly, and Tessay turned
away. Royan stood in the middle of the trail, watching until a bend in
the valley hid Tessay from her. Th
en she walked slowly back to where
Nicholas waited.
"What was all that about?"he wanted to know, and she smiled
mysteriously.
"Girls' secrets. There are some things that it's best you brutish
males'don't know about." But when Nicholas raised an eyebrow at her, she
relented and told him, "Tessay will ask Geoffrey Tennant to send a
message to Mummy, just to let her know that I am all right. I don't want
her to worry about me."
As they climbed back down the scaffolding to where the fly camp had been
set up on the rock ledge beside Taita's pool, Nicholas thought how
fortuitous it was that Royan had her mother's phone number already
written down to hand to Tessay, and he wondered at this sudden
(I urge of Royan's to report her whereabouts to her mother.
wonder what she is really up to?" he mused. "I will try and wheedle it
out of Tessay when she returns."
Royan would have preferred to camp in the tomb itself, so as to be in
the midst of the inscriptions on which she was working, but Nicholas had
insisted that they sleep in the open air, and the ledge was as close as
they could get to their workplace. "The musty air in the tomb is very
probably unhealthy," he told her. "Cave disease is a real danger in
these old enclosed places. They say that is what killed some of Howard
Carter's people working in the tomb of Tutankhamen."
"The fungus spores that cause cave disease breed in bat dung," she
pointed out. "There are no bats in Mamose's tomb. Taita sealed it up too
tightly."
"Humour me," he begged. "You cannot work in there for days on end. I
want you at least to get out of the tomb for a few hours each day."
She shrugged. "Only as a special favour to you," she agreed, but as they
reached the foot of the scaffolding she gave her new sleeping quarters
only a perfunctory glance and then headed for the coffer dam and the
entrance to the approach tunnel.
They had converted the landing at the top of the staircase, outside the
plaster-seated entrance to the tomb, into their workshop. Royan spread
her drawings and photographs and reference books on the rough table of
handhewn planks that Hansith made for her. Sapper had placed one of the
floodlamps above this crude desk so that she had good light to work by.
Against one wall of the landing they had stacked the ammunition crates
which contained the eight sacred statues. Nicholas had insisted on
storing all their discoveries where he could safeguard them adequately.
Mek's armed men still kept a twenty-four-hour guard on the causeway over
the sink-hole.
While Nicholas completed his photographic record of the walls of the
long gallery and the empty burial chamber, Royan sat at her table and
pored over her papers for hours at a time, scribbling notes and
calculations from them into her notebooks. Now and then she would jump
up from her desk and dart through the hatch in the white plaster doorway
into the long gallery to study a detail on the decorated walls.
Whenever this happened, Nicholas straightened up from his camera tripod
and watched her with a fond and indulgent expression. So intent was she
that she seemed completely oblivious of him and everybody else about
her.
Nicholas had never seen her in this mood, and the depth of her powers of
concentration impressed him.
When she had worked for fifteen hours without a break he went out on to
the landing to rescue her and to lead her, protesting, back down the
tunnel to the pool where there was a hot meal waiting for them. After
she had eaten he led her to her hut and insisted that she lie down on
her inflatable mattress.
"You are going to sleep now, Royan," he ordered.
He woke to hear her creeping stealthily out of the hut next door to his,
back along the ledge to the entrance to the tomb. He checked his watch
and grunted with disbelief when he realized that they had slept for only
three and a half hours. He shaved quickly and bolted back a slab of
toasted injera bread and a cup of tea before following her into the
tomb.
He found her standing in the long gallery before the empty niche in the
shrine where the statuette of Osiris had stood. She was so preoccupied
that she did not hear him come up behind her, and she started violently
when he touched her arm.
"You startled me," she scolded him.
"What are you staring at?" he asked. "What have you discovered?"
"Nothing," she denied swiftly, and then after a moment, "I don't know.
It's just an idea."
"Come on! What are you up to?"
"It's easier for me to show you." She led him back to her table on the
stone landing, and rearranged her notebooks carefully before she spoke
again.
"What I have been doing these last few days is going through the
material on the stele of Tanus's tomb, picking out all the quotations
that I recognize from the classical books of mystery, the Book of
Breathings, the Book of the Pylons and -the Book of Thoth, and setting
those on one side." She showed him fifteen pages in her neat small
script.
"All this is ancient material, none of it original compositions by
Taita. I have discarded it for the time being."
She set the first notebook aside and picked up the next. "All this is
from the fourth face of the stele. It's nothing that I recognize, but
seems to be only long lists of numbers and figures. Some sort of code,
perhaps? I am not sure, but I do have some ideas on it that I will come
to later.
Now this here," she showed him the next book, "this is all fresh
material that I don't remember reading in any of the ancient classics.
Much of it, if not all of it, must be original Taita writings. If he has
left any more clues for us, I believe they will be here, in these
sections."
He grinned, "Like that marvelous quotation describing the pink and
private parts of the goddess. Is that what you are referring to?"
"Trust you not to forget that." She flushed lightly and refused to look
up from her notebook. "Look at this quotation from the head of the third
face of the stele, the side Taita has headed "autumn". It's the very
first one that caught my attention."
Nicholas leaned forward and read the hieroglyphics aloud: "'The great
god Osiris makes the opening coup with deference to the protocol of the
four bulls. At the first pylon he bears full testimony to the immutable
law of the board."' He looked up at her. "Yes, I remember that
quotation. Taita is referring to bao, the game that the old devil loved
so passionately."
"That's right." Royan looked slightly embarrassed. "But do you also
remember that I told you about a dream that I had in which I saw Du raid
again in one of the chambers of the tomb?"
"I remember." He chuckled at her discomfort. "He said I of the four
bulls. Now
4 something to you about the protoco we are going in to the, realm of
divination by dreams, are we?"
She looked annoyed by his levity. "All I am suggesting is that my
answer, which it put into the mouth of Duraid in the dream. Can't you be
serious just for one moment?
"Sorry." He was contrite. "Remind me what you heard Duraid say."
"In the dream he told me, "Remember the protocol of the four bulls -
Start at the beginning."'
"I am no expert on the game of bao. What did he mean?"
"The rules and subtleties of the game have been lost in the mists of
antiquity. But as you know, we have found examples of the bao board
amongst the grave goods in the tombs of the eleventh to the seventeenth
dynasties, and we can only guess that it was an early form of chess."
She began to sketch for him on one of the blank pages at the back of her
notebook.
"The wooden board was laid out like a chessboard, eight rows of cups
wide and eight rows deep. Like this." She drew it in with quick, deft
strokes of her ballpoint pen.
"The pieces were coloured stones that moved in a prescribed fashion. I
won't go into all the details, but the protocol of the four bulls was an
opening gambit in the game favoured by grand masters of Taita's calibre.
It consisted of making sacrifices to mass the highest-ranking stones in
the first cup from where they could dominate the important centraffiles
of the board."
"I am not sure where we are going, but lead on. I am listening."Nicholas
tried not to look too mystified.
"The first cup of the board." She indicated it on her sketch, as though
instructing a backward child. "The beginning, Duraid said, "Start at the
beginning" Taita said, "The great god Osiris makes the opening coup."'
"I still don't follow you. "Nicholas shook his head.
"Come with me." Carrying the notebooks, she led him through the hatch in
the white plaster doorway and stood beside him at the shrine of Osiris.
"The opening coup. The beginning."
She turned and faced down the gallery. "This is the first shrine. How
many shrines are there altogetherr
"Three for the trinity, then Seth, Thoth, Anubis, Hathor and Ra," he
listed. "Eight altogether."
"Glory be!" She laughed. "The lad can count! How many cups in the files
of the bao board?"
"Eight across, and eight down-' he broke off and stated at her, "You
think-?"
She did not answer, but opened the notebook. "All of these numbers and
extraneous symbols - they spell no coherent words. They do not relate to