The Seventh Scroll

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘The picture of devastation,’ Royan whispered as she looked around her, ‘untamed and untamable. No wonder Taita chose this place. It repels all intruders.’

  They were both silent for a while, awed by the wild grandeur of the scene, but as soon as they had recovered from the exertion of the climb their enthusiasm resurfaced.

  ‘Now you can get a good picture of it.’ Nicholas pointed down into the valley below them. ‘There is a clear divide at the fork of the valley. You can see the natural fall of the ground. There, from that side of the gorge to that point below us, is the narrowest part. It is a neck where the river squeezes through – the natural site for a dam.’ He swivelled and pointed down to the left of where they sat. ‘It would not take much to spill the river into the valley. Once he had finished whatever he was up to in the chasm, it would taken even less to break down the wall of the dam and let the river resume its natural course again.’

  Tamre watched their faces eagerly, turning his head to each speaker in turn, uncomprehending, but aping Royan’s expression like a mirror. If she nodded he nodded, when she frowned he did the same, and when she smiled he giggled happily.

  ‘It’s a big river.’ Royan shook her head, while Tamre wagged his from side to side in sympathy and looked wise. ‘What method would he have used? An earthen dam? Surely not?’

  ‘The Egyptians used earthen canals and dams for a great many of their irrigation works,’ Nicholas mused. ‘On the other hand, when they had rock available to work with they used it extensively. They were expert masons. You have stood in the quarries at Aswan.’

  ‘Not much topsoil here in the gorge,’ she pointed out. ‘But on the other hand, there is plenty of rock. It’s like a geological museum. Every type of rock that you could wish for.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Rather than an earthen wall, Taita would most probably have used a masonry and rock fill. That is the type of dam the ancients built in Egypt, long before his time. If that is the case, there is a chance that traces of it have survived.’

  ‘Okay. Let’s work on that hypothesis. Taita built a dam of rock slabs, and then he breached it again. Where would we find the remains of it?’

  ‘We would have to start searching on the actual site,’ he answered. ‘There at the neck of the gorge. Then we would have to search downstream from there.’

  They scrambled down the slope again, with Tamre picking out the easiest route for Royan, stopping to beckon her whenever she faltered or paused for breath. They came out in the neck of the valley and stood on the rocky bank of the river, looking about them.

  ‘How high would the wall have been?’ Royan asked.

  ‘Not too high. Again, I can’t give you a precise answer until I have shot the levels.’ He climbed a little way up the side of the wall. There he squatted and turned his head back and forth, looking first down the length of the valley and then towards the lip of the waterfall that dropped into the mouth of the chasm.

  Three times he changed his position, on each occasion moving a few paces higher up the slope. The cliff became steeper the higher he climbed. In the end he was clinging precariously to the side of it, but he seemed satisfied. Then he called down to her.

  ‘I would say this is about it, where I am now. This would be the height of the dam wall. It looks about fifteen feet high to me.’

  Royan was still standing on the bank, and now she turned and stared across at the far bank of the river, estimating the distance to the limestone cliff rising above it.

  ‘Roughly a hundred feet across,’ she shouted up to him.

  ‘About that,’ he agreed. ‘A lot of work, but not impossible.’

  ‘Taita was never one to be daunted by size or difficulty.’ She cupped her hands around her mouth to shout up to him. ‘While you are up there, can you see any sign of works? Taita would have had to pin the dam wall into the cliff.’

  He scrambled along the cliff, keeping to the same level, until he was almost directly above the falls and could go no further. Then he slid down to where Royan and Tamre waited.

  ‘Nothing?’ she anticipated, and he shook his head.

  ‘No, but you can’t really expect that there would be anything left after nearly four thousand years. These cliffs have been exposed to wind and weather for all that time. I think our best bet will be to look for any surviving blocks from the dam wall that might have been carried away when Taita breached it to flood the chasm again.’

  They started down the valley, where Royan came upon a chunk of stone that seemed to be of a different type from the surrounding country rock. It was the size of an old-fashioned cabin trunk. Although it was half-covered by undergrowth, the uppermost end – the one that was exposed – had a definite right-angled corner to it. She called Nicholas across to her.

  ‘Look at that.’ Royan patted it proudly. ‘What do you think of that?’

  He climbed down beside her and ran his hands over the exposed surface of the slab. ‘Possible,’ he repeated. ‘But to be certain we would have to find the chisel marks where the old masons started the fracture. As you know, they chiselled a hole into the stone, and then wedged it open until it split.’

  Both of them went over the exposed surface carefully, and although Royan found an indentation that she declared was a weathered chisel mark, Nicholas gave her only four out of ten on the scale of probability.

  ‘We are running out of time,’ he said, enticing her away from her find, ‘and we still have a lot of ground to cover.’

  They searched the valley floor for half a kilometre further, and then Nicholas called it off. ‘Even in the heaviest flood it is unlikely that any blocks would have been carried down this far. Let’s go back and see if anything was washed over the falls into the mouth of the chasm.’

  They returned to the bank of the Dandera and worked their way down as far as the falls. Nicholas peered over.

  ‘It’s not as deep here as it is further down,’ he estimated. ‘I would guess that it is less than a hundred feet.’

  ‘Do you think you could get down there?’ she asked dubiously. Spray blew back out of the depths into their faces, and they had to shout at each other to make themselves heard over the thunder of the waters.

  ‘Not without a rope, and some muscle men to haul me back out of there.’ He perched himself on the brink and focused the binoculars down into the bowl. There was a jumble of loose rock down there – small, rounded boulders, and one or two very much larger. Some of them were angular, and some with a little imagination could be called rectangular. However, their surfaces had been smoothed by the rushing waters, and were gleaming wet. All of them seemed partially submerged or obscured by spray.

  ‘I don’t think we can decide anything from up here, and to tell the truth I don’t fancy going down there – not this evening anyway.’

  Royan sat down beside him and hugged her knees to her chest. She was dispirited. ‘So there is nothing we can be certain about. Did Taita dam the river, or didn’t he?’

  Quite naturally he placed his arm around her shoulders to console her, and after a moment she relaxed and leaned against him. They stared down into the chasm in silence. At last she drew back from him gently, and stood up.

  ‘I suppose we should start back to camp. How long will it take us?’

  ‘At least three hours.’ He stood up beside her. ‘You are right. It will be dark before we get back, and there is no moon tonight.’

  ‘Funny how tired you feel after a disappointment,’ she said, and stretched. ‘I could lie down and sleep right here on one of Taita’s stone blocks.’ She broke off and stared at him. ‘Nicky, where did he get them?’

  ‘Where did he get what?’ He looked puzzled.

  ‘Don’t you see! We are going at it from the wrong end. We have been trying to find out what happened to the blocks. This morning you mentioned the quarries at Aswan. Shouldn’t we consider where Taita found the blocks for his dam, rather than what happened to them afterwards?’

  ‘The quarry!�
�� Nicholas exclaimed. ‘My word, you are right. The beginning, not the end. We should be looking for the quarry, not the remnants of the dam wall.’

  ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘I hoped you were going to tell me.’ He laughed out loud, and immediately Tamre bubbled with sympathetic laughter. They both looked at the boy.

  ‘I think we should start with Tamre, our faithful guide,’ she said, and took his hand. ‘Listen to me, Tamre. Listen very carefully!’ Obediently he cocked his head and stared at her face, summoning all his errant concentration.

  ‘We are looking for a place where the square stones come from.’ He looked mystified, so she tried again. ‘Long ago there were men who cut the rock from the mountains. Somewhere near here, they left a big hole. Perhaps there are still square blocks of stone lying in the hole?’

  Suddenly the boy’s face cleared and split into a beatific smile. ‘The Jesus stone!’ he cried happily.

  He sprang to his feet without relinquishing his grip on her hand. ‘I show you my Jesus stone.’ He dragged her after him as he bounded away down the valley.

  ‘Wait, Tamre!’ she pleaded. ‘Not so fast.’ But in vain. Tamre kept up the pace and burst into an Amharic hymn as he ran. Nicholas followed at a more sedate pace, and caught up with them a quarter of a mile down the valley.

  There he found Tamre on his knees, pressing his forehead against the rock wall of the valley, his eyes shut tightly as he prayed. He had dragged Royan down beside him.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Nicholas demanded, as he came up.

  ‘We are praying,’ she told him primly. ‘Tamre’s instructions. We have to pray before we can go to the Jesus stone.’

  She turned away from Nicholas, closed her eyes and clasped her hands in front of her eyes, then began to pray softly.

  Nicholas found a seat on a boulder a little way from them. ‘I don’t suppose it can do any harm,’ he consoled himself, as he settled down to wait.

  Abruptly Tamre sprang to his feet and performed a giddy little dance, flapping his arms and whirling around until he raised the dust. Then he stopped and chanted. ‘It is done. We can go in to the Jesus stone.’

  Once again he seized Royan’s hand and led her to the rock wall. In front of Nicholas’s eyes the two of them seemed to vanish, and he stood up in mild alarm.

  ‘Royan!’ he called. ‘Where are you? What’s going on?’

  ‘This way, Nicky. Come this way!’

  He went to the wall and exclaimed with astonishment, ‘My oath! We would never have found this in a year of searching.’

  The cliff face was folded back upon itself, forming a concealed entrance. He walked through the opening, gazing up the vertical sides, and within thirty paces came out into an open amphitheatre that was at least a hundred yards across and open to the sky. The walls were of solid rock, and he could see at a glance that it was the same micaceous schist as the block which Royan had found lying on the floor of the valley.

  It was apparent that the bowl had been quarried out of the living rock, leaving tiers rising up to the top of the walls. The recesses from which the blocks had been hacked were still plain to see and had left deep steps with right-angled profiles. Some scrub and undergrowth had found a precarious foothold in the cracks, but the open quarry was not choked with this growth and Nicholas could see that a stockpile of finished granite blocks remained scattered about the bottom of the excavation. He was so awed by the discovery that he could find no words to express himself. He stood just inside the entrance, his head slowly turning from side to side as he tried to take it all in.

  Tamre had led Royan to the centre of the quarry where one large slab lay on its own. It was obvious that the ancients had been on the point of removing it and transporting it up the valley, for it was finished and dressed into a perfect rectangle.

  ‘The Jesus stone!’ Tamre chanted, kneeling before the slab and pulling Royan down beside him. ‘Jesus led me here. The first time I came here I saw him standing on the stone. He had a long white beard and eyes that were kind and sad.’ He crossed himself and began to recite one of the psalms, swaying and bobbing to the rhythm.

  As Nicholas moved up quietly behind them he saw the evidence that Tamre had visited this sacred place of his regularly. The Jesus stone was his own private altar, and his pathetic little offerings were lying where he had laid them. There were old tej flasks and baked clay pots, most of them cracked and broken. In them stood bunches of wild flowers that had long ago wilted and dried out. There were other treasures that he had gathered and placed upon his altar – tortoise shells and porcupine quills, a cross that had been hand-carved from wood and decorated with scraps of coloured cloth, necklaces of lucky beans, and models of animals and birds moulded from blue river clay.

  Nicholas stood and watched the two of them kneeling and praying together in front of the primitive altar. He felt deeply moved by this evidence of the boy’s faith, and by his childlike trust in bringing them to this place.

  At last Royan stood up and came to join him. Together she and Nicholas began to make a slow circuit of the quarry floor. They spoke little, and then only in whispers as though they were in a cathedral or some holy place. She touched his arm and pointed. A number of the square blocks still lay in their original positions in the quarry walls. They had not been completely freed from the mother rock, like a foetus attached by an umbilical cord which had never been severed by the ancient masons.

  It was a perfect illustration of the quarrying methods used by the ancients. Work could be seen in progress in all the various stages, from the marking out of the blocks by the master craftsman, the drilling of the tap holes, the wedging of the cleavage lines, right up to the finished product lifted out of the wall and ready for transport to the dam site.

  The sun had set and it was almost dark by the time they came round to the entrance of the quarry again. They sat together on one of the finished blocks, with Tamre sitting at their feet like a puppy, looking up at Royan’s face.

  ‘If he had a tail he would wag it,’ Nicholas smiled.

  ‘We can never betray his trust, and desecrate this place in any way. He has made it his own temple. I don’t think he has ever brought another living soul here. Will you promise me that we will always respect it, no matter what?’

  ‘That is the very least I can do,’ he agreed. Then, turning to Tamre, he said, ‘You have done a very good thing by bringing us here to your Jesus stone. I am very pleased with you. The lady is very pleased with you.’

  ‘We should start back to camp now,’ Royan suggested, looking up at the patch of sky above them. Already it was purple and indigo, shot through with the last rays of the sunset.

  ‘I don’t think that would be very wise,’ he disagreed. ‘Because it is a moonless night one of us could very easily break a leg in the dark. That is something not to be recommended out here. It might take a week to get back to any adequate medical attention.’

  ‘You plan to sleep here?’ she asked, with surprise.

  ‘Why not? I can whip up a fire in no time and I also have a pack of survival rations for dinner – I have done this kind of thing before, you know! And you have your chaperon with you, so your honour is safe. So why not?’

  ‘Why not, indeed?’ she laughed. ‘We will be able to make a more detailed inspection of the quarry tomorrow early.’

  He stood up to start gathering firewood, but then stopped and looked up at the sky. She heard it too, that now familiar fluttering whistle in the air.

  ‘The Pegasus helicopter once again,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘I wonder what the hell they are up to at this time of day?’

  They both stared up into the gathering darkness and watched the navigational lights of the aircraft pass a thousand feet overhead, flashing red and green and white as it headed southwards in the direction of the monastery.

  Nicholas built a small fire in the corner of the quarry nearest the entrance, and as they sat around it he divided the pack of dry survival rati
ons into three parts. They nibbled them, and washed down the sweet and sticky concentrated tablets with water from his bottle.

  The fire threw ghostly reflections up the side of the quarry wall, and enhanced the moving shadows. When a nightjar uttered its warbling cry from a niche high up the wall, it was so eerie and evocative that Royan shivered and moved a little closer to Nicholas.

  ‘I wonder if somewhere on the other side Taita is aware of our progress,’ she said. ‘I get the feeling that we have him a little worried by now. We have untangled the first part of the conundrum that he set for us, and I’ll bet he never expected anybody to do that well.’

  ‘The next step will be to get to the bottom of his pool. That will be really one up on the old devil. What do you hope we might find down there?’

  ‘I hesitate to put it into words,’ she replied. ‘I might talk it away, and put a jinx on us.’

  ‘I am not superstitious. Well, not much anyway. Shall I say it for you?’ he offered, and she laughed and nodded. He went on, ‘We hope to find the entrance to the tomb of Pharaoh Mamose. No more hints and riddles and red herrings. The veritable tomb.’

  She crossed her fingers. ‘From your lips to God’s ear!’ Then she grew serious. ‘What do you think of our chances? I mean of finding the tomb intact?’

  He shrugged. ‘I will answer that once we get to the bottom of the pool.’

  ‘How are we going to do that? You have ruled out the use of an aqualung.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘At this stage I just don’t know. Perhaps we might be able to get in there with full-helmeted diving suits.’

  She was silent as she considered the seeming impossibility of the task ahead.

  ‘Cheer up!’ He put his arm around her shoulders, and she made no move to pull away from him. ‘There is one consolation. If Taita has made it so tough for us, he has also made it tough for anyone else to have got in there ahead of us. I think that if the tomb is really down there, no other grave robbers have beaten us to it.’