The Seventh Scroll: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

by Wilbur Smith

  As soon as it was light enough to see the path, Nicholas led them back up into the hills. The men chatted cheerfully amongst themselves in Amharic as they hurried through the thorn scrub, and they came out on the rim rock just as the sun broke out over the eastern escarpment of the valley. Nicholas had drilled the men the previous day, and he and Royan had sat half the night going over the plans, so each of them knew their part and they lost little time in setting themselves up for the descent.

  Nicholas had stripped to shorts and tennis shoes, but this time he had brought along an old Barbarians rugby jersey for warmth. While he pulled this over his head he pointed out to Royan the platform that had been dug out from the solid rock.

  She examined it carefully. ‘It’s very hard to be sure, but I think you are right. This probably is man-made.’

  ‘When you get further down you will have no doubts. There is very little weathering of the face under the overhang, and the niches are almost perfectly preserved – until they reach the high-water mark, that is,’ he told her, as he took his seat in the sling and swung out over the cliff. Dangling from the end of the gantry he gave Aly the sign, and the men lowered him down into the gorge. The rope ran smoothly through the lubricated slot.

  He saw at once that he had judged it correctly, and that he was descending in line with the double row of niches. He came level with the enigmatic circle on the cliff face, but it was fifty feet from him, and a growth of gaudy-coloured lichens had streaked and discoloured the rock, partially obscuring the details, so that he still could not be certain that it was not a natural flaw. He passed it and went on down as Aly and his team paid out the rope from above.

  When he reached the surface of the water he slipped out of the sling and dropped in. The water was very cold. He trod water, gasping, until his body became acclimatized. Then he gave Aly three tugs on the signal rope. While the canvas seat was hauled up he swam to the side of the pool and held on to one of the carved stone niches for support. He had forgotten how gloomy and cold and lonely it was here in the bottom of the chasm.

  After a long delay he craned his head backwards and watched Royan come into sight around the bulge of the overhang, dangling in the sling seat and revolving slowly at the end of the nylon rope. She looked down and waved at him cheerfully.

  ‘Full marks to that girl,’ he grinned. ‘Not much puts the wind up her.’ He wanted to shout encouragement, but he knew it was futile because the thunder of the falls smothered all other sound. So he contented himself with returning her wave.

  Halfway down he saw her tugging frantically on the signal rope. Aly had been warned to expect this, and her descent was halted immediately. Then she leaned back in the sling, hanging on with only her left hand, as she groped for Nicholas’s binoculars which hung from their strap on to her chest. She was twisted at an awkward angle as she held the glasses to her eyes and tried to manipulate the focus wheel with one hand. He saw that she was obviously having difficulty picking up the round mark on the wall and keeping it in the field of the lens, for the sling was swinging from side to side and at the same time revolving slowly.

  She struggled at the end of the rope for what seemed to Nicholas a very long time, but probably was no more than a few minutes. Then abruptly she dropped the binoculars on to her chest, threw back her head and let out a scream that, despite the roar of falling water, carried clearly to Nicholas a hundred feet beneath her. She was kicking her legs joyfully and waving her free hand at him, wild with excitement, as Aly began paying out the rope once more. Still screaming incoherently, she was looking down at him with a face that seemed to light up the cathedral gloom of the gorge.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ he yelled back, but the falls defeated both their efforts to communicate.

  Royan was wriggling about in her seat, shouting and gesticulating wildly, and now she let go the harness with her other hand and leaned further out to keep him in sight as the sling revolved. She was still twenty feet above the water when she almost lost her balance entirely, and very nearly toppled backwards out of the sling.

  ‘Careful there,’ he yelled up at her. ‘Those glasses are Zeiss. Two thousand quid at the Zurich duty-free!’

  This time his voice must have carried, for she stuck her tongue out at him in a schoolgirlish gesture. But her movements became more circumspect. When her feet were almost touching the water she signalled on the rope to stop her descent and hung there, fifty feet across the pool from him.

  ‘What did you find?’ he shouted across.

  ‘You were right, you wonderful man!’

  ‘Is it man-made? Is it an inscription? Could you read it?’

  ‘Yes, yes and yes to all three of your questions!’ She grinned triumphantly as she teased him.

  ‘Don’t be infuriating. Tell me.’

  ‘Taita’s ego got the better of him once again. He couldn’t resist signing his work.’ She laughed. ‘He has left us his autograph – the hawk with a broken wing!’

  ‘Marvellous! Plain bloody marvellous!’ he exalted.

  ‘Proof that Taita was here, Nicky. To carve that cartouche, he must have been standing on a scaffolding. Our first guess was right. That niche you are holding on to is part of his ladder to the bottom of the gorge.’

  ‘Yes, but why, Royan?’ he yelled back at her. ‘Why was Taita down here? There is no evidence of any excavation or building work.’

  They both looked around the gloomy cavern. Apart from the tiny rows of niches, the walls were unbroken, smooth and inscrutable until they plunged into the dark water.

  ‘Under the falls?’ she shouted across. ‘Is there a cutback in the rock? Can you get across there?’

  He pushed off from the cliff, and swam towards the thundering chute of water. Halfway across, the current caught him and he had to swim with all his strength to make any headway against it. Thrashing the water with flailing arms and kicking out strongly, he managed to reach a spur of polished, algae-slick rock at the nearest end of the falls.

  The water crashed over his head, but he edged his way along under the rock step into the heart of the cascade. Halfway across, the water overwhelmed him. It tore him off his precarious perch, hurled him back into the basin below and swirled him end over end. He surfaced in the middle of the pool, and once again had to swim with all his strength to break free of the grip of the current and to reach the slack water below the wall again. He clung to his handhold in the stone niche, and panted like a bellows.

  ‘Nothing?’ she called.

  He shook his head, unable to answer until he had finally regained his breath. Finally he managed: ‘Nothing. It’s a solid rock wall behind the falls.’ He gasped another breath, and then invited sarcastically, ‘Next bright idea, madam?’

  She was silent and he was glad of the respite. Then she called again, ‘Nicky, how far do those niches go down?’

  ‘You can see,’ he told her, ‘right to the one I am holding on to.’

  ‘What about below the surface?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, woman.’ He was getting cold and irritable. ‘How the hell could there be cuttings below the surface?’

  ‘Try!’ she yelled almost as irritably. He shook his head pityingly, and drew a deep breath. Still clinging to his handhold, he extended his limbs and body to their full stretch. Then his head went under the dark surface as he groped down as far as he could reach with his toes.

  Suddenly he shot back, snorting for air with a startled look on his face. ‘By Jove!’ he shouted. ‘You are right! There is another niche down there!’

  ‘I hate to say I told you so.’ Even at that range he could see the smug expression on her face.

  ‘What are you? Some kind of witch?’ Then he broke off and rolled his eyes heavenward in despair. ‘I know what you are going to ask me to do next.’

  ‘How far do the niches go down?’ she called in honeyed tones. ‘Will you dive down for me, dear Nicky?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I knew it. I am going to speak to my shop
steward. This is slave labour. From now onwards I am on strike.’

  ‘Please, Nicky!’

  He hung in the water, pumping air in and out of his lungs, hyper-ventilating, flushing his bloodstream with oxygen to increase his underwater endurance to its limits. In the end he expelled the contents of his lungs completely, squeezing out the last breath until his chest ached with the effort, and then he sucked in again, filling his lungs to their capacity with fresh air. Finally, with his chest fully expanded, he duck-dived, standing on his head with his legs high out of the water and letting their weight drive him under.

  Sliding head-first down the submerged wall, he reached down, groping for the next niche below the surface. He found it, and used it to accelerate his dive, pulling himself on downwards.

  He found the second niche below that, and pulled himself on downwards. The niches were about six feet apart – a nautical fathom. Using them as a measure, he was able to calculate his progress accurately.

  Swimming on downwards, he found another niche, then another. Four rows of niches, twenty-four feet below the surface. His ears were popping and squeaking as the pressure squeezed the air out of his Eustachian tubes.

  He kept on downwards and found the fifth row of niches. Now the air in his lungs was compressing to almost half its surface volume, and as his buoyancy decreased so his descent became easier and more rapid.

  His eyes were wide open, but the waters below him were dark and turbid. He could make out only the surface of the wall directly in front of his face. He saw the sixth niche appear ahead of him and he grasped it, then hesitated.

  ‘Thirty-six feet of depth already, and no sign yet of bottom,’ he thought. There had been a time, when he was spearfishing competitively with the army team, that he could free-dive to sixty feet and stay at that depth for a full minute. But he had been younger then and in peak physical condition.

  ‘Just one more niche,’ he promised himself, ‘and then back up to the surface.’ His chest was beginning to throb and burn with the need to breathe, but he pulled hard on his handhold and shot down. He saw the vague shape of the seventh niche appear out of the murk below him.

  ‘They go right to the bottom,’ he realized with amazement. ‘How on earth did Taita do it? They had no diving equipment.’ He grasped the niche and hovered there for a moment, undecided if he should risk going further. He knew he was almost at his physical limit. Already he was hunting for air, his chest beginning to convulse involuntarily.

  ‘What about one more for the hell of it!’ He was beginning to feel light-headed, and a strange glow of euphoria came over him. He recognized the danger signs, and looked down at his own body. Through the murk he saw that his skin was wrinkled and folded by the pressure of water. There were over two atmospheres’ weight bearing down upon him, crushing in his chest. His brain was becoming starved of oxygen, and he felt reckless and invulnerable.

  ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends,’ he thought drunkenly, and went on down.

  ‘Number eight, and the doctor’s at the gate.’ He felt the eighth niche under his fingers. He was thinking in gibberish now: ‘Number eight, and I’ll have her on a plate.’

  He turned to go up again, and his feet touched bottom. ‘Fifty feet deep,’ he realized even through his fuddled state. ‘I have left it too late. Got to get back. Got to breathe.’

  He was bracing himself to push off from the bottom when something grabbed his legs and dragged him hard against the rock wall.

  ‘Octopus!’ he thought, remembering the line from Taita’s stele, ‘Her vagina is an octopus that has swallowed up a king.’

  He tried to kick out, but his legs were bound as if by the arms of a sea monster; some cold, insidious embrace held him captive. ‘Taita’s octopus. My oath! He meant it literally. It’s got me.’

  He was pinned against the wall, crushed, helpless. Terror seized him, and the rush of it through his blood flushed away the hallucinations of his oxygen-impoverished brain. He realized what had happened to him.

  ‘No octopus. This is water pressure.’ He had experienced the same phenomenon once before. On an army training exercise, while diving near the inlet to the turbines of the generators in Loch Arran, his buddy diver who was roped to him had drifted into their terrible suction. His companion had been sucked against the grille of the intake and his body had been crushed so that the splinters of his ribs had been driven through the flesh of his chest and had come out through the black neoprene rubber of his suit like daggers.

  Nicholas had narrowly escaped the same fate. The fact that he was a few feet to one side of his buddy had meant that he escaped the full brunt of the rush of water into the turbine intake. Nevertheless, one of his legs was broken, and it had taken the strength of two other army divers to prise him out of the grip of the current.

  This time he was at the limit of his air, and there was no other diver to assist him. He was being sucked into a narrow opening in the rock, the mouth of an underwater tunnel, a subaqueous shaft that bored into the rock wall.

  His upper body was free of the baleful influence of the rushing flood, but his legs were being drawn inexorably into it. He was aware that the surrounds of the opening were sharply demarcated, as straight and as square as a lintel hewn by a mason. He was being dragged over and around this lintel. Spreading out his arms, he resisted with all his strength, but his hooked fingers slid over the polished, slimy surface of the rock.

  ‘This is the big one,’ he thought. ‘This is the one punch that you can’t duck.’ He hooked his fingers, and felt his nails tear and break as they rasped against the rock. Then suddenly they locked into the last niche in the wall above the sink-hole which was sucking him under.

  Now at least he had an anchor point. With both hands he clung to the niche, and fought the pull of the water. He fought it with all his remaining strength and all his heart, but he was near the end of his store of both. He strained until he felt the muscles in both arms popping, until the sinews in his neck stood out in steely cords and he felt something in his head must burst. But he had halted the insidious slide of his body into the sink-hole.

  ‘One more,’ he thought. ‘Just one more try.’ And he knew that was all he had left within him. His air was all used up, and so were his courage and his resolve. His mind swirled, and dark shapes clouded his vision.

  From somewhere deep inside himself he drew out the last reserves, and pulled until the darkness in his head exploded in sheets of bright colours, shooting stars and Catherine wheels that dazzled him. But he kept on pulling. He felt his legs coming out of it, the grip of the waters weakening, and he pulled once more with strength that he had never realized he possessed.

  Then suddenly he was free and shooting towards the surface, but it was too late. The darkness filled his head and in his ears was a sound like the roaring of the waterfall in the abyss. He was drowning. He was all used up. He had no knowledge of where he was, how much further he had to go to the surface, but he knew only that he was not going to make it. He was finished.

  When he came out through the surface, he did not know that he had done so, and he did not have enough strength left to lift his face out of the water and to breathe. He wallowed there like a waterlogged carcass, face down and dying. Then he felt Royan’s fingers lock into the hair in the back of his head, and the cold air on his face as she lifted it clear.

  ‘Nicky!’ she screamed at him. ‘Breathe, Nicky, breathe!’

  He opened his mouth and let out a spray of water and saliva and stale air, and then gagged and gasped.

  ‘You’re still alive! Oh, thank God. You were down for so long. I thought you had drowned.’

  As he coughed and fought for air and his senses returned, he realized in a vague way that she must have dropped out of the sling seat and come to his aid.

  ‘You were under for so long. I could not believe it.’ She held his head up, clinging with her free hand to the niche in the wall. ‘You are going to be all right now. I have got you. Just
take it easy for a while. It’s going to be all right.’

  It was amazing how much her voice encouraged him. The air tasted good and sweet and he felt his strength slowly returning.

  ‘We have to get you up,’ she told him. ‘A few minutes more to get yourself together, and then I will help you into the sling.’

  She swam with him across to the dangling sling and signalled to the men at the top of the cliff to lower it into the water. Then she held the folds of canvas open so that he could slip his legs into them.

  ‘Are you all right, Nicky?’ she demanded anxiously. ‘Hang on until you get to the top.’ She placed his hands on the side ropes of the harness. ‘Hold tight!’

  ‘Can’t leave you down here,’ he blurted groggily.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him. ‘Just have Aly send the seat down again for me.’

  When he was halfway up he looked down and saw her head bobbing in the dark waters. She looked very small and lonely, and her face pale and pathetic.

  ‘Guts!’ His voice was so weak and hoarse that he did not recognize it. ‘You’ve got real guts.’ But already he was too high for the words to carry down to her.

  Once they had got Royan safely up out of the ravine, Nicholas ordered Aly to dismantle the gantry and hide the sections in the thorn scrub. From the helicopter it would be highly visible and he did not wish to stir Jake Helm’s curiosity.

  He was in no shape to give the men a hand, but lay in the shade of one of the thorn trees with Royan tending to him. He was dismayed to find how much his near-drowning had taken out of him. He had a blinding headache, caused by oxygen starvation. His chest was very painful and stabbed him every time he breathed: in his struggles he must have torn 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 wellbeing than with the progress of their exploration.