by Wilbur Smith
‘I am sure we will be able to work something out.’
She was suddenly aware of the men’s eyes watching her and drew away from him. ‘What kind of gas? And how did it get there? Was it another of Taita’s tricks, do you think, Nicky?’
‘One of the gases of decay, most probably,’ was his opinion. ‘Because it is trapped in the lower part of the passage, it must be a heavier-than-air type. I would guess that it is probably carbon dioxide, although it could be something like methane. I think methane is heavier than air, isn’t it?’
‘Did Taita do it deliberately?’ The colour was returning to her cheeks, and she was recovering swiftly.
‘I don’t know, but those baskets and jars are suspicious. I will be able to answer that question when we have had a chance to examine their contents.’ He touched her cheek tenderly. ‘How are you feeling? How is your headache?’
‘Better. What do we do now?’
‘Clear the gas from the chamber,’ he told her, ‘and as soon as possible.’
He used a candle from his emergency pack to test for the gas level in the shaft. With it burning in his right hand he went back down the steps, holding it low to the floor, descending a step at a time. The candle flame burned brightly, dancing to the movement of air as he went down. Then, abruptly on the sixth step above the floor level of the chamber, the flame turned yellow and snuffed out.
He marked the level on the wall in white chalk, and called up to Royan at the head of the shaft, ‘Well, at least it’s not methane. I am still here. Must be carbon dioxide.’
‘Pretty conclusive test,’ she laughed. ‘If it goes boom, it’s methane.’
‘Hansith, bring down the blower fan,’ Nicholas shouted to the big monk.
Holding his breath as though he were snorkelling under water, Nicholas carried the fan down the lower steps and set it up on the floor of the chamber. He set the fan speed at ‘High’ and immediately retreated up the shaft, drawing a huge breath as soon as he was above the chalk mark on the wall.
‘How long will it take to clear the gas?’ Royan asked anxiously, looking at her wrist-watch.
‘I will test with the candle every fifteen minutes.’
It was an hour before the gas had dispersed enough to enable him to reach the floor of the chamber again, and breathe the air down there. Then Nicholas ordered Hansith to bring down a bundle of firewood and build a fire in the centre of the stone floor, to heat and circulate the air more rapidly.
While he was doing this, Nicholas and Royan examined one of the baskets that stood against the wall.
‘The crafty old ruffian!’ Nicholas muttered half in exasperation and half in admiration. ‘It looks like a mixture of manure and grass and dead leaves, the same as a compost heap.’
They crossed the chamber, turned one of the pottery jars on its side, and studied the powder that spilled out of it. Nicholas took up a handful and rubbed it between his fingers, then sniffed it warily.
‘Crushed limestone!’ he muttered. ‘Although it has long ago dried out and lost any odour, Taita probably soaked it with some form of acid. Vinegar, perhaps, or even urine would have done the trick. As it broke down the limestone, it formed carbon dioxide.’
‘So it was another deliberate trap,’ Royan exclaimed.
‘Even so many thousands of years ago, Taita must have understood the processes of decay. He knew what gases those mixtures would produce. Amongst all the other accomplishments he boasts of, he must also have been a nifty chemist.’
‘Furthermore, he must have known that without a draught or any movement of air, these heavy inert gases would hang here in the bottom of the chamber indefinitely,’ she agreed. ‘I expect that this shaft is designed like a U-trap. I bet that the passage rises again—’ she pointed at the mysterious doorway in the far wall, ‘in fact I can see the first steps even from here.’
‘We will soon find out if you are right,’ he told her, ‘because that’s exactly where we are heading right now – up those steps.’
Sapper had placed cairns of stones at the water’s edge to monitor the river level. He watched them the way a stockbroker watches his ticker tape.
It had been six hours since the last rain squall had passed. The clouds over the valley had burned away in the hot, bright sunlight, although they still hung densely over the northern horizon. Their great dun-coloured thunder-heads reared to the heavens, menacing and ominous, forming their own mighty ranges that dwarfed the mountains beneath them. At any time the downpour might begin up there in the highlands. Once that happened, Sapper wondered how long it would take the flood waters to reach them here in the Abbay gorge.
He dismounted stiffly from the tractor, and went down the bank to inspect his stone markers. The water level had fallen almost a foot in the past hour. He forced himself not to let his optimism bubble over – after all, it had taken only fifteen minutes for the river to rise the same amount. The final outcome was inevitable. The rains would come. The river would spate. The dam would burst. He looked downstream at the dam wall, and shook his head with resignation.
He had done as much as possible to delay that moment. He had raised the level of the dam wall almost four feet, and packed in another buttress behind the wall to strengthen it. There was nothing further for him to do, and he could only wait.
Climbing up the bank, he leaned wearily against the yellow steel of his machine and looked across at his team of Buffaloes, strewn along the bank like casualties on a battlefield. They had worked for two days to hold back the waters, and now they were exhausted. He knew that he could not call on them for another effort; the next time the river attacked, it would overwhelm them.
He saw some of the men stir and sit up, and their faces turned upstream. He heard their voices faint on the wind. Something was exciting their interest. He climbed up on to the tractor and shaded his eyes. The unmistakable figure of Mek Nimmur was coming down the trail from the direction of the escarpment, stocky and powerful in his camo fatigues, his gait determined. He was accompanied by two of his company commanders.
Mek hailed Sapper from a distance. ‘How is your dam holding?’ he called in Arabic, which Sapper did not understand. ‘Soon it will rain on the mountains. You won’t be able to hold out here much longer.’ But his gestures towards sky and river were immediately intelligible to Sapper.
Sapper jumped down from the machine to greet him, and they shook hands cordially. They had recognized in each other the qualities of strength and professionalism that they both admired.
Mek seized his company commander, who spoke English, by the arm, and the man fell into his by now familiar role of interpreter.
‘It is not only the weather that troubles me,’ Mek confided in a low voice, and the interpreter relayed the information to Sapper. ‘I have reports that the government troops are moving into position to attack us. My intelligence is that they have a full battalion moving down this way from Debra Maryam, and another force below the monastery at St Frumentius, moving up the Abbay river.’
‘Pincer movement, hey?’ said Sapper.
Mek listened to the translation and nodded gravely. ‘I am heavily outnumbered and I don’t know how long I will be able to hold them when they attack. My men are guerrillas. It is not our role to fight set-piece battles. It is the war of the flea for us. Hit and run. I came to warn you to be ready to pull out at short notice.’
‘Don’t worry too much about me,’ Sapper grunted. ‘I am a sprinter. Hundred yards dash is my speciality. It’s Nicholas and Royan you should be thinking of, them in that ruddy rabbit warren of theirs.’
‘I am on my way to them now, but I wanted to arrange a fall-back position. If we get cut off from each other in the fighting, Nicholas has cached the boats at the monastery. That is where we will assemble.’
‘Okay, Mek—’ Sapper stopped speaking and all three of them looked up the trail, where there was a fresh disturbance amongst the men along the bank. ‘What’s going on?’
‘One of my p
atrols coming in,’ Mek narrowed his eyes. ‘There must be some new development.’ He stopped speaking as he realized that Sapper could not understand him, and then his expression changed as he recognized the small, slim figure that was being carried on a rough litter by the men of his patrol.
Tessay saw him running towards her and sat up weakly on the litter. The men lowered her to the ground and Mek went down on his knees beside the litter and placed both his arms around her. They held each other in silence for a long moment. Then Mek gently cupped her face in his hands and examined her swollen and scarred features. Some of the burns had become infected, and her eyes were slits beneath the bloated lids.
‘Who did this to you?’ he asked softly.
She mumbled incoherently through her black-scabbed lips. ‘They made me—’
‘No! Don’t try to talk.’ He changed his mind as her lower lip cracked open and a droplet of fresh blood welled up and glistened like a ruby on her skin.
‘I have to tell you,’ she insisted in a broken whisper. ‘They made me tell them everything. The numbers of your men. What you and Nicholas are doing here. Everything. I am sorry, Mek. I betrayed you.’
‘Who was it? Who did this to you?’
‘Nogo and the American, Helm,’ she said, and although he embraced her as gently as a father with his infant in his arms, his eyes were terrible.
The lower chamber of the tunnel was cleared of gas at last. Hansith’s fire burned bright and steady in the middle of the floor, the rising hot air wafting away the noxious vapours and dispersing them through the upper levels of the maze, where they mingled with the cleaner oxygen-rich air and lost their toxicity. By this time Royan had fully recovered from the physical effects of the gassing, but her confidence was shaken, and she allowed Nicholas to lead the way up the steps that rose from the far side of the chamber.
‘It’s the perfect gas trap,’ Nicholas pointed out to her as they climbed cautiously. ‘No doubt at all that Taita knew exactly what he was doing when he built this section of the tunnel.’
‘Surely he must have expected any interloper of his period to have either succumbed to his hellish devices, lost his way in the maze, or given up and turned back by now,’ she reasoned.
‘Are you trying to convince me that this was Taita’s last line of defence, and that he has no more tricks in store for us? Is that it?’ Nicholas asked as he took another step upwards.
‘No. Actually I was trying to convince myself, and not having much success. I just don’t trust him one little bit any more. I have come to expect the worst from him. I expect the roof to collapse on me at any moment, or the floor to open and drop us into a fiery furnace or something worse.’
They had descended forty steps down into the chamber, and the staircase they were now climbing was a mirror image of that. It rose at the same angle and the tread of each step was the same depth and width. As their heads rose above the fortieth step, Nicholas played the beam of the lamp down the spacious, level arcade that opened before them, and they were dazzled by a riot of colour and pattern, bright and lovely as a field of desert blooms after rain. The paintings covered the walls and ceiling of the arcade, stunning in their profusion, wondrous in their execution.
‘Taita!’ Royan cried in a voice that quivered and broke. ‘These are his paintings. There is no other artist like him, I could never mistake it. I would know his work anywhere.’
They stood on the top step and gazed around in wonder. When compared to these, the murals in the long gallery seemed pale and stilted, the tawdry sham that they really were. This was the work of a great master, a timeless genius, whose art could enchant and enrapture now just as readily as it had four thousand years ago.
They moved forward slowly, almost involuntarily, down the arcade. It was lined on each side with small chambers, like the stalls in an oriental bazaar. The entrance to each was guarded by tall columns that reached up to the roof. Each column was a carved statue of one member of the pantheon of gods. Between them they held the high-vaulted ceiling suspended.
As they drew level with the first two stalls, Nicholas stopped and squeezed her arm.
‘The treasure chambers of Pharaoh,’ he whispered.
The stalls were packed from floor to ceiling with wonderful and beautiful things.
‘The furniture store.’ Royan’s voice was as reverential as his as she recognized the shapes of chairs and stools and beds and divans. She went to the nearest chamber and touched a royal throne. The arms were twining serpents of bronze and lapis lazuli. The legs were those of lions with claws of gold. The seat and back were chased with scenes of the hunt, and wings of gold surmounted the high back.
Stacked behind the throne was a great profusion of other furniture. They recognized a screened divan, its sides enclosed in an exquisite lacework of ebony and ivory. But there were dozens of other items besides, most of them broken down into their separate parts so that it was not possible to guess what they were. They gleamed with precious metals and coloured stones in such confusion and variety that it was too much to take in in a single glance. Both the alcoves on either side of the arcade were stuffed with these marvellous collections. Royan shook her head in wonder, and Nicholas led her on. The walls that separated the alcoves were decorated with panels illustrating the Book of the Dead, and the journey of Pharaoh through the pylons, the dangers and the trials, the demons and the monsters that awaited him along the way.
‘These are the paintings that were missing from the mock tomb in the long gallery,’ Royan told him. ‘But just look upon the face of the king. You can see he was a real person. Those are perfect royal portraits.’
The mural beside them depicted the great god Osiris leading Pharaoh by the hand, protecting him from the monsters that crowded close on either hand, waiting their chance to devour him. It showed the face of the king as he must truly have been, a man with a kind and gentle, if rather weak, face.
‘Look at the figures,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘They are not stiff wooden dolls always stepping forward with the right foot. These are real men and women. They are anatomically correct. The artist understood perspective and had studied the human body.’
They came to the next pair of alcoves, and paused to peer into them.
‘Weapons,’ said Nicholas. ‘Just look at that chariot!’
The panels of the chariot were covered with a skin of gold leaf, so that it dazzled the eye. The harness and traces seemed only to await the horses that would draw it into battle, and the quivers strapped to the side panels behind each tall wheel bulged with arrows and javelins. The cartouche of Mamose was emblazoned on the side panels.
Piled beside this magnificent vehicle were war bows whose stocks were bound with wire of electrum and bronze and gold. There were arrays of daggers with ivory handles and swords with blades of glistening bronze. There were racks of spears and pikes. There were shields of bronze, the targets decorated with scenes of war and the name of the divine Mamose. There were helmets and breastplates made from the skin of the crocodile, and the uniforms and regalia of the famous regiments of Egypt dressed the life-sized wooden statues of the king that stood in rows against the walls of the alcoves.
They walked on down the aisle, between more paintings and murals depicting the life and the death of the king. They saw him playing with his daughters and dandling his infant son. They saw him fishing and hunting and hawking, in council with his ministers and his nomarches, dallying with his wives and concubines, and feasting with the priests of the temple.
‘What a chronicle of life in ancient times,’ Royan breathed with awe. ‘There has never been a discovery remotely like this before.’
Each of the persons in the panels had obviously been drawn from life. They were real breathing living men and women, every face and every expression different, captured with the keen eye, the humour and the great humanity of the artist.
‘That must be Taita himself.’ Royan pointed out the self-portrait of the eunuch in one of the central panels.
‘I wonder if he took poetic licence, or was he truly so noble and beautiful?’
They paused to admire the face of Taita, their adversary, and looked into his searching, intelligent eyes. Such was the skill of the artist that he watched them as keenly as they studied him. A small, enigmatic smile played on Taita’s lips. The painting had been varnished, so that it was perfectly preserved, as if it had been painted the day before. Taita’s lips seemed moist and his eyes gleamed softly with life.
‘His complexion is fair and his eyes are blue!’ Royan exclaimed. ‘Although that red hair is almost certainly dyed with henna.’
‘It is weird to think that, although he lived so long ago, he almost succeeded in killing us,’ Nicholas said softly.
‘In what land was he born? He never tells us that in the scrolls. Was it Greece or Italy? Was he from one of the Germanic tribes, or was he of Viking stock? We will never know, for he himself probably did not know his own origins.’
‘There he is again in the next panel.’ Nicholas pointed down the arcade to where the unmistakable face of the eunuch appeared in the throng that knelt in homage before the throne on which sat Pharaoh and his queen. ‘Like Hitchcock, he seems to like to appear in his own creations.’
They went on past the treasure stalls in which were stored plates and goblets and bowls of alabaster and bronze chased with silver and gold, polished bronze mirrors and rolls of precious silk and linen and woollen cloth that had long ago rotted to shaggy black amorphous heaps. On the walls that divided these from the next set of stalls they saw re-enacted the battle with the Hyksos in which Pharaoh had been struck down, the arrow shot by the Hyksos king lodged in his breast. Then in the next panel Taita, the surgeon, bent over him with the surgical instruments in his hands, removing the blood-smeared barb from deep in his flesh.
Now they came to alcoves in which were stacked hundreds of cedarwood chests. The boxes were painted with the royal cartouche of Mamose, and with scenes of the king at his toilet: lining his eyes with kohl, painting his face with white antimony and scarlet rouge, being shaved by his barbers and dressed by his valets.