by Wilbur Smith
‘Ask any Englishman,’ she smiled to herself. ‘There is no such thing as upper-class privilege any longer, nor is there an old-boy network that runs the country.’
While he was away, she went off with the shopping list he had given her. Even walking the streets of the safest capital city in the world she found herself looking back over her shoulder, and ducking in and out of ladies’ rooms and tube stations to make certain that she was not being followed.
‘You are acting like a terrified child without its daddy,’ she scolded herself.
However, she felt a quite disproportionate sense of relief each evening when she heard his key in the street door of the empty house where she waited, and she had to control herself so as not to rush down the stairs to welcome him.
On Saturday morning, when a taxi cab deposited them at the departures level of Heathrow Terminal Four, Nicholas surveyed their combined luggage with approval. She had only a single soft canvas bag, no larger than his, and her sling bag over her shoulder. His hunting rifle was cased in travel-worn leather, with his initials embossed on the lid. A hundred rounds of ammunition was packed in a separate brass-bound magazine and he carried a leather briefcase that looked like a Victorian antique.
‘Travelling light is one of the great virtues. Lord save us from women with mountains of luggage,’ he told her, refusing the services of a porter and throwing it all on to a trolley, which he pushed himself.
She had to step out to keep up with him as he strode through the crowded departures hall. Miraculously the throng opened before him. He tilted the brim of his panama hat over one eye and grinned at the girl at the check-in counter, so that she came over all girlish and flustered.
It was the same once they were aboard the aircraft. The two stewardesses giggled at everything he said, plied him with champagne and fussed over him outrageously, to the obvious irritation of the other passengers, including Royan herself. But she ignored him and them and settled back to enjoy the unaccustomed luxury of the reclining first-class seat and her own miniature video screen. She tried to concentrate on the screen images of Richard Gere, but found her attention wandering to other images of wild canyons and ancient stelae.
Only when Nicholas nudged her did she look around at him a little haughtily. He had set up a tiny travelling chessboard on the arm of the seat between them, and now he lifted an eyebrow at her and inclined his head in invitation.
When they landed at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Kenya they were still locked in combat. They were level at two games each, but she was a bishop and two pawns up in the final deciding game. She felt quite pleased with herself.
At the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi he had booked a pair of garden bungalows, one for each of them. Within ten minutes of her flopping down on the bed, he called her from next door on the house phone.
‘We are going to dinner with the British High Commissioner tonight. He is an old chum. Dress informal. Can you be ready at eight?’
One did not have to rough it too onerously when travelling around the world in this man’s company, she thought.
It was a relatively short haul from Nairobi up to Addis Ababa, and the landscape below them unfolded in fascinating sequences that kept her glued to the cabin window of the Air Kenya flight. The hoary summit of Mount Kenya was for once free of cloud, and the snow-clad double peaks glistened in the high sunlight.
The bleak brown deserts of the Northern Frontier District were relieved only by the green hills that surrounded the oasis of Marsabit and, far out on the port side, the flashing waters of Lake Turkana, formerly Lake Rudolf. The desert finally gave way to the highlands of the great central plateau of the ancient land of Ethiopia.
‘In Africa only the Egyptians go back further than this civilization,’ Nicholas remarked as they watched it together. ‘They were a cultured race when we peoples of northern climes were still dressing in untanned skins and living in caves. They were Christians when Europeans were still pagans, worshipping the old gods, Pan and Diana.’
‘They were a civilized people when Taita passed this way nearly four thousand years ago,’ she agreed. ‘In his scrolls he writes of them as almost his cultural equals, which was rare for him. He disparaged all the other nations of the old world as his inferiors in every way.’
From the air Addis was like so many other African cities, a mixture of the old and the new, of traditional and exotic architectural styles, thatched roofs alongside galvanized iron and baked tiles. The rounded walls of the old tukuls built with mud and wattle contrasted with the rectangular shapes and geometrical planes of the brick-built multi-storeyed buildings, the blocks of flats and the villas of the affluent, the government buildings and the grandiose, flag-bedecked headquarters of the Organization of African Unity.
The distinguishing features of the surrounding countryside were the plantations of tall eucalyptus trees, the ubiquitous blue gums that provided firewood. It was the only fuel available to so many in this poor and war-torn land, which over the centuries had been ravaged by marauding armies and, more recently, by alien political doctrines.
After Nairobi the high-altitude air was cool and sweet when Royan and Nicholas left the aircraft and walked across the tarmac to the terminal building. As they entered, before they had even approached the row of waiting immigration officers someone called his name.
‘Sir Nicholas!’ They both turned to the tall young woman who glided towards them with all the grace of a dancer, her dark and delicate features lit by a welcoming smile. She wore full-length traditional skirts which enhanced her movements.
‘Welcome to my country of Ethiopia. I am Woizero Tessay.’ She looked at Royan with interest, ‘And you must be Woizero Royan.’ She held out her hand to her and Nicholas saw that the two women liked each other immediately.
‘If you will let me have your passports, I will see to the formalities while you relax in the VIP lounge. There is a man from your British Embassy waiting there to greet you, Sir Nicholas. I don’t know how he knew that you were arriving.’
There was only one person waiting in the VIP lounge. He was dressed in a well-cut tropical suit and wore the orange, yellow and blue diagonally striped old Sandhurst tie. He stood up and came to greet Nicholas immediately, ‘Nicky, how are you? It’s good to see you again. Must be all of twelve years, isn’t it?’
‘Hello, Geoffrey. I had no idea they had stuck you out here.’
‘Military attaché. His Excellency sent me down to meet you as soon as he heard that you and I had been at Sandhurst together.’ Geoffrey looked at Royan with marked interest, and with a resigned air Nicholas introduced them.
‘Geoffrey Tennant. Be careful of him. Biggest ram north of the equator. No girl safe within half a mile of him.’
‘I say, steady on,’ Geoffrey protested, looking pleased with the reference that Nicholas had given him. ‘Please don’t believe a word the man says, Dr Al Simma. Notorious prevaricator.’
Geoffrey drew Nicholas aside and quickly gave him a résumé of conditions in the country, particularly in the outlying areas. ‘HE is a little worried. He doesn’t like the idea of you swanning around out there on your own. Lots of nasty men down there in the Gojam. I told him that you knew how to look after yourself.’
In a remarkably short time Woizero Tessay was back. ‘I have cleared all your luggage, including the firearm and ammunition. This is your temporary permit. You must keep it with you at all times whilst you are in Ethiopia. Here are your passports – the visas are stamped and in order. Our flight to Lake Tana leaves in an hour, so we have plenty of time to check in.’
‘Any time you need a job, come and see me,’ Nicholas commended her efficiency.
Geoffrey Tennant walked with them as far as the departures gate, where he shook hands, Anything I can do, it goes without saying. “Serve to Lead”, Nicky.’
‘“Serve to lead”?’ Royan asked, as they walked out to the waiting aircraft.
‘Sandhurst’s motto,’ he explained.
‘Ho
w nice, Nicky,’ she murmured.
‘I have always considered Nicholas to be more dignified and appropriate,’ he said.
‘Yes, but Nicky is so sweet.’
In the high, thin air the Twin Otter aircraft that took them on the last, northern, leg pitched and yawed in the updraughts from the mountains below.
Although they were at fifteen thousand feet above sea level, the ground was close enough for them to make out the villages and the sparse areas of cultivation around them. Subjected for so many centuries to primitive agricultural methods and to the uncontrolled grazing of domestic herds, the land had a thin, impoverished look, and the bones of rock showed through the thin red fleshing of earth.
Abruptly ahead of them the plateau over which they were flying was rent through by a monstrous chasm. It was as though the earth had received a mighty sword-stroke that struck through to her very bowels.
‘The Abbay river!’ Tessay leaned forward in her seat to tap Royan’s shoulder.
The rim of the gorge was clear-cut, and then the slope dropped away at an angle of over thirty degrees. The bare plains of the plateau gave way immediately to the heavily forested walls of the gorge. They could make out the candelabra shapes of giant euphorbia rising above the dense jungle. In places the walls had collapsed in scree slopes of loose rock, and in others they were up-thrust into bluffs and needles that erosion had sculpted with a monstrous artistry into the figures of towering humanoids and other fantastic creatures of stone.
Down and down it plunged, and they winged out over the void until they could look directly down, a mile and more, on to the glittering snake of the river in the depths. The funnel shape of the upper walls formed a secondary rim as they reached the sheer cliffs of the sub-gorge five hundred feet above the Nile water. Deep down there between its terrible cliffs the river gouged dark pools and long slithering runs through the red sandstone. In places the gorge was forty miles across, in others it narrowed to under ten, but through all its length the grandeur and the desolation were infinite and eternal. Man had made no impression upon it.
‘You will soon be down there,’ Tessay told them in a voice so awed that it was almost a whisper, and they were both silent. Words seemed superfluous in the face of such raw and savage nature.
Almost with relief they watched the northern wall rise to meet them, and the high mountains of the Choke range stood up against the tall blue African sky, higher than their fragile little craft was flying.
The aircraft banked into its descent and Tessay pointed over the starboard wingtip.
‘Lake Tana,’ she told them. It was a wide and lovely body of water, over fifty miles long, studded with islands on each of which stood a monastery or an ancient church. As they dropped in over the water on the final approach, they could make out the white-robed priests plying between the islands on their traditional little boats made from bundles of papyrus.
The Otter touched down on the dirt strip beside the lake and rolled out in a long trailing cloud of dust. It swung in and stopped engines beside the run-down terminal building of thatch and daub.
The sunlight was so bright that Nicholas pulled a pair of sunglasses from the breast pocket of his khaki jacket and placed them on his nose as he stood at the top of the boarding ladder. He took in the pock-marks of bullets and shrapnel on the dirty white walls of the terminal, and the burnt-out hull of a Russian T35 battle tank standing in the grass on the verge of the runway. The barrel of its turret gun pointed earthwards, and grass had grown up between the rusted tracks.
The other passengers pushed forward impatiently behind him, jostling him and jabbering with excitement as they saw friends and relatives waiting to greet them under the eucalyptus trees that shaded the building. There was only one vehicle parked out there, a sand-coloured Toyota Land Cruiser. The roundel on the driver’s door had at its centre the painted head of a mountain nyala, with long corkscrew horns, and in a ribbon below it the title ‘Wild Chase Safaris’. A white man lounged behind the wheel.
As Nicholas came down the ladder behind the two women, the driver slipped out of the truck and strode out on to the strip to meet them. He was dressed in a faded khaki bush suit, and he was tall and lean and walked with a spring to his step.
‘Fortyish,’ Nicholas judged his age from the grizzling in his short beard. ‘One of the hard men,’ Nicholas thought. His ginger hair was cropped short, his eyes were pale killer blue. There was a puckered white scar that ran across one cheek and up to twist and deform his nose.
Tessay introduced Royan to him first, and he made a short, choppy bow as he shook her hand. ‘Enchanté,’ he told her in an execrable French accent and then looked at Nicholas.
‘This is my husband, Alto Boris,’ Tessay introduced him. ‘Boris, this is Alto Nicholas.’
‘My English is bad,’ Boris said. ‘My French is better.’
‘Not much to choose between them,’ Nicholas thought, but he smiled easily and said, ‘So we will speak French then. Bonjour, Monsieur Brusilov. I am delighted to make your acquaintance.’ He offered the Russian his hand.
Boris’s grip was hard – too hard. He was making a contest out of the greeting, but Nicholas had expected it. He knew this type of old, and he had taken a deep grip so Boris could not crush his fingers. Nicholas held him without allowing any strain or effort to show on his lazy smile. Boris was the first to break the handshake, and there was just the trace of respect in those pale eyes.
‘So you have come for a dik-dik?’ he asked, just short of a sneer. ‘Most of my clients come for big elephant, or at least for mountain nyala.’
‘Bit rich for my nerves,’ Nicholas grinned, ‘all that big stuff. Dik-dik will suit me fine.’
‘Have you ever been down in the gorge?’ Boris demanded. His Russian accent overpowered the French words and made them difficult to follow.
‘Sir Nicholas was one of the leaders of the 1976 river expedition,’ Royan intervened sweetly, and Nicholas was amused by her unexpected intervention. She had picked up the antagonism between them very quickly, and come to his rescue.
Boris grunted, and turned to his wife. ‘Have you got all the stores I ordered?’ he demanded.
‘Yes, Boris,’ she answered meekly. ‘They are all on board the aircraft.’ She is afraid of him, Nicholas decided, probably with good reason.
‘Let’s get loaded up, then. We have a long journey ahead of us.’
The two men rode in the front seats of the Toyota, and the women sat behind them with many of the packages of stores packed in around them. Good African protocol, Nicholas smiled to himself: men first, women fend for themselves.
‘You don’t want to do the tourist run, do you?’ Boris made it sound like a threat.
‘The tourist run?’
‘The outlet from the lake, and the power station,’ he explained. ‘The Portuguese bridge over the gorge and the point where the Blue Nile begins,’ he added. But before they could accept he warned them, ‘If you do, we won’t get into camp until long after dark.’
‘Thanks for the suggestion,’ Nicholas told him politely, ‘but I have seen it all before.’
‘Good.’ Boris made his approval evident. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The road swung away into the west, below the high mountains. This was the Gojam, the land of the aloof mountaineers. It was well-populated country, and they passed many tall, thin men along the roadside as they strode along behind their herds of goats and sheep, with their long staffs held crossways over their shoulders. Both men and women wore shammas, woollen shawls, and baggy white jodhpur pants, with their feet in open sandals.
They were people with proud and handsome features, their hair dressed out into thick, bushy halos, and their eyes fierce as those of eagles. Some of the younger women in the villages they passed through were truly beautiful. Most of the men were heavily armed. They carried two-handed swords in chased silver scabbards, and AK-47 assault rifles.
‘Makes them feel like big men,’ Boris chuckled.
‘Very brave, very macho.’
The huts in the villages were circular walled tukuls, surrounded by plantations of eucalyptus and spiky-headed sisal.
Bruised purple storm clouds boiled over the high peaks of the Choke and swept them with squalls of rain. Like silver coins, the huge drops rattled against the windscreen of the Land Cruiser and turned the road to a running river of mud under their wheels.
The condition of the road surface was appalling; in places it deteriorated into a rocky gully which even the four-wheel drive Toyota could not negotiate, and Boris was forced to make his own track across the rocky hillside. Often reduced to walking speed, they were nevertheless tossed about in their seats as the wheels bounced over the rough terrain.
‘These damn blacks don’t even think to repair the roads,’ Boris grunted. ‘They are happy to live like animals.’ None of them replied, but Nicholas glanced up into the rear-view mirror at the faces of the two women. They were closed and neutral, hiding any hurt that either of them might have felt at the remark.
As they went on, the road, bad as it had been originally, became even worse. From here onwards the soft muddy surface had been torn up by the tyres and tracks of heavy traffic.
‘Military traffic?’ Nicholas raised his voice above the buffeting rain squalls, and Boris grunted.
‘Some of it. There is a lot of shufta activity along the gorge – bandits and dissident warlords. However, most of this traffic is mineral-prospecting. One of the big mining companies has got concessions in Gojam and they are moving in to begin drilling.’
‘We have passed no civilian vehicles,’ Royan remarked, ‘not even public buses.’
‘We have just come through a terrible period in our long and troubled history,’ Tessay explained to her. ‘We are an agrarian-based economy. Once we were known as the bread basket of Africa, but when Mengistu seized power he drove us right over the edge of poverty. He used starvation as a political weapon. We are still suffering terribly. Very few of our people can afford the luxury of a motor vehicle. Most of them are worried how they will be able to afford food for their children.’