by Wilbur Smith
‘It’s all right. He won’t ever hurt you again. It’s all over. You are my woman now – for ever!’
Since Boris and Tessay had left the camp there was no longer any reason to maintain security, and Nicholas and Royan were no longer obliged to skulk in Royan’s hut when they discussed their search for the tomb.
Nicholas transferred their headquarters into the dining hut, and had the camp staff build another large table on which they could spread the satellite photographs and all the other maps and material that they had accumulated. The chef sent a steady supply of coffee from the kitchen, while they pored over the papers and discussed their discoveries in Taita’s pool and every theory that either of them dreamed up, no matter how far-fetched.
‘We will never be certain if that shaft was made by Taita, or whether it was a natural sink-hole, until we can get back in there with the right equipment.’
‘What type of equipment are you talking about?’ she wanted to know.
‘Scuba, not oxygen rebreathers. Although the navy rebreathing outfits are much lighter and more compact, you cannot use them below a depth of thirty-three feet, the equivalent of one atmosphere of water. After that pure oxygen becomes lethal. Have you ever used an aqualung?’
She nodded. ‘When Duraid and I were on honeymoon at a resort on the Red Sea. I had a few lessons and made three or four open-water dives, but let me hasten to add that I am no expert.’
‘I promise not to send you down there,’ he smiled, ‘but I think we can safely say that we have found enough evidence both in Tanus’s tomb and Taita’s pool to make it imperative that we mount the second phase of this operation.’
She nodded agreement. ‘We will have to return with a much more extensive range of equipment, and some expert help. But you are not going to be able to pose as a tourist sportsman next time around. What possible excuse are we going to find for returning that will not set off all the alarm bells in the minds of Ethiopian bureaucracy?’
‘You are speaking to the man who has paid unofficial and uninvited visits to both those charming lads Gadaffi and Saddam. Ethiopia should be a Sunday-school picnic in comparison.’
‘When do the big rains start up in the mountains?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Yes!’ His expression became serious. ‘That is the jackpot question. You only have to look at the high-water mark on the walls of Taita’s pool to have some idea what it must be like in there when the river is in full flood.’ He flipped over the pages of his pocket diary. ‘Luckily, we still have a bit of time – not a great deal, but enough. We will need to move pretty smartly. We have to get back home before I can start work on planning phase two.’
‘We should pack up right away, then.’
‘Yes, we should. But it seems a damned shame not to take full advantage of every moment we are here, having come all this way. I think we can spare just a few more days to sound out some ideas that I have about Taita’s pool and the sink-hole, to try to arrive at some sort of informed guess about what we will need when we return.’
‘You are the boss.’
‘My word, how pleasant to hear a lady say that.’
She smiled sweetly. ‘Enjoy the moment,’ she counselled him, ‘it may never happen again.’ And then she became serious again. ‘What are these ideas that you have?’
‘What goes up must come down, what goes in must come out,’ he said mysteriously. ‘The water going into the sink-hole under such pressure must be going somewhere. Unless it joins a subterranean water system and makes its way into the Nile that way, then it should come to the surface where we can find it.’
‘Go on,’ she invited.
‘One thing is certain. Nobody is going to get into the sink-hole from the pool. The pressure is lethal. But if we can find the outlet, we may be able to explore it from the other end.’
‘That’s a fascinating possibility.’ She looked impressed, and turned to the satellite photograph. Nicholas had identified the monastery and ringed it on the photograph. He had marked in the approximate course of the river through the chasm, although the gorge itself was too narrow and covered with bush to show up on the small-scale picture, even under the high-powered magnifying lens.
‘Here is the point where the river enters the chasm.’ She pointed it out to him. ‘And here is the side valley down which the trail detours. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ he nodded. ‘What are you driving at?’
‘On our approach march, we remarked that this valley might at one time have been the original course of the Dandera river, and that it seemed to have cut a new bed for itself through the chasm.’
‘That’s right,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘I am still listening.’
‘The fall of the land towards the Nile is very steep at this point, isn’t it? Well, do you recall we crossed another smaller, but still pretty substantial, stream on our way down the dry valley? That stream seemed to emerge from somewhere on the eastern side of the valley.’
‘All right, I am with you now. You are suggesting that this may be the overflow from the sink-hole. Clever little devil, aren’t you?’
‘Just capitalizing on your genius.’ She cast down her eyes modestly, and looked up at him from under her lashes. She was clowning, but her lashes were long and dense and curling, and her eyes were the colour of burnt honey with tiny golden highlights in their depths. At this close range he found them disturbing.
He stood up and suggested, ‘Why don’t we go and take a look?’
Nicholas went to fetch his camera bag and the light day-pack from his hut, and when he returned he found Royan ready to go. But she was not alone.
‘I see that you are bringing your chaperon with you,’ he remarked with resignation.
‘Unless you are tough enough to send him away.’ Royan smiled encouragement at Tamre who stood at her side, grinning and bobbing and hugging his shoulders in the ecstasy of being in the presence of his idol.
‘Oh, very well.’ Nicholas gave in without a struggle. ‘Let the little devil come along.’
Tamre lolloped away up the path ahead of them, his grubby shamma flapping around his long skinny legs, chanting the repetitive chorus of an Amharic psalm, and every few minutes looking back to make certain that Royan was still following him. It was a hard pull up the valley, and the noonday heat was debilitating. Although Tamre seemed totally unaffected, the other two were both sweating in dark patches through their shirts by the time they reached the point where the stream debouched into the valley. Gratefully, they sought the shade of a patch of acacia trees, and while they rested Nicholas glassed the side of the valley through his binoculars.
‘How are they after the dunking I gave them?’ she asked.
‘Waterproof,’ he grunted, ‘full marks to Herr Zeiss.’
‘What do you see up there?’
‘Not much. The bush is too thick. We will have to foot-slog up the side. Sorry.’
They left the shade and made their way up the side of the valley in the direct burning sunlight. The stream tumbled down a series of cascades, each with a pool at its foot. The bush crowded the banks, lush and green where the roots had been able to reach the water. Clouds of black and yellow butterflies danced over the pools, and a black and white wagtail patrolled the moss-green rocks along the edge, its long tail gyrating back and forth like the needle of a metronome.
Halfway up the slope they paused beside one of the pools to rest, and Nicholas used his hat like a fly-swatter to stun a brown and yellow grasshopper. He tossed the insect on to the surface of the pool, and as it kicked weakly and floated towards the exit a long dark shadow rose from the bottom. There was a swirl and a mirrorlike flash of a scaly silver belly, and the grasshopper disappeared.
‘Ten-pounder,’ Nicholas lamented. ‘Why didn’t I bring my rod?’
Tamre was crouched near Nicholas on the pool bank, and suddenly he lifted his hand and held it out. Almost at once one of the circling butterflies settled upon his finger. It perched there with its velvety black a
nd yellow wings fanning gently. They stared at him in astonishment, for it was as though the insect had come to his bidding. Tamre giggled and offered the butterfly to Royan. When she held out her hand, he gently transferred the gorgeous insect to her palm.
‘Thank you, Tamre. That is a wonderful gift. Now my gift to you is to set it free again.’ She pursed her lips and blew it softly into flight. They watched the butterfly climb high above the pool, and Tamre clapped his hands and laughed with delight.
‘Strange,’ Nicholas murmured. ‘He seems to have a special empathy with all the creatures of the wilderness. I think that Jali Hora, the abbot, does not try to control him, but lets him do very much as his simple fancy dictates. Special treatment for a fey soul, one that hears a different tune and dances to it. I must admit that, despite myself, I am becoming quite fond of the lad.’
It was only another fifty feet higher that they came to the source. There was a low cliff of red sandstone, from a grotto at whose foot the stream gushed. The entrance was screened by a heavy growth of ferns, and Nicholas went down on his knees to pull them aside and peer into the low opening.
‘What can you see?’ Royan demanded behind him.
‘Not much. It’s dark in there, but it seems to go in for quite some way.’
‘You are too big to get in there. You had better let me go in.’
‘Good place for water cobra,’ he remarked. ‘Lots of frogs for them to eat. Are you sure you want to go?’
‘I never said that I wanted to.’ She sat on the bank while she unlaced her shoes, then lowered herself into the stream. It came halfway up her thighs, and she waded forward against the flow with difficulty.
She was forced to bend almost double to creep under the overhanging roof of the grotto. As she moved deeper in, her voice came back to him.
‘The roof gets lower.’
‘Be careful, dear girl. Don’t take any chances.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call me “dear girl”.’ Her voice resonated strangely from the cave entrance.
‘Well, you are both those things, a girl and dear. How about if I call you “young lady”?’
‘Not that either. My name is Royan.’ There was silence for a while, then she called again. ‘This is as far as I can go. It all narrows down into a shaft of some sort.’
‘A shaft?’ he demanded.
‘Well, at least a roughly rectangular opening.’
‘Do you think it is the work of humans?’
‘Impossible to tell. The water is coming out of it like the spout of a bath tap. A solid jet.’
‘No evidence of any excavation? No marks of tools on the rock?’
‘Nothing. It’s slick and water-worn, covered with moss and algae.’
‘Could a man get into the opening, I mean if it were not for the water pressure?’
‘If he was a pygmy or a dwarf.’
‘Or a child?’ he suggested.
‘Or a child,’ she agreed. ‘But who would send a child in there?’
‘The ancients often used child-slaves. Taita might have done the same.’
‘Don’t suggest it. You are destroying my high opinion of Taita,’ she told him as she backed out of the entrance of the grotto. There were pieces of fern and moss in her hair, and she was soaked from the waist downwards. He gave her a hand and boosted her back on to the bank. The curve of her bottom was clearly visible through her wet trousers. He forced himself not to dwell upon the view.
‘So we have to conclude that the shaft is a natural flaw in the limestone, and not a man-made tunnel?’
‘I didn’t say that. No. I said that I couldn’t be sure. You might be correct. Children might have been used to dig it. After all, they were used in the coalmines during the industrial revolution.’
‘But there is no way that we would be able to explore the tunnel from this end?’
‘Impossible.’ She was vehement. ‘The water is pouring out under enormous pressure. I tried to push my arm up the shaft, but I did not have the strength.’
‘Pity! I was hoping for some more irrefutable evidence, or at least another lead.’ He sat down beside her on the bank, and ferreted in his pack. She looked at him quizzically when he brought out a small black anodized instrument and opened the lid.
‘Aneroid barometer,’ he explained. ‘Every good navigator should have one.’ He studied it for a moment and then made a note of the reading.
‘Explain,’ she invited.
‘I want to know if this spring is below the level of the entrance to the sink-hole in Taita’s pool. If it is not, then we can cross it off our list of possibilities.’
He stood up. ‘If you are ready, we can move on.’
‘Where to?’
‘Why, Taita’s pool, of course. We need a reading up there to establish the difference in altitude between the two points.’
Once Tamre knew where they were headed he showed them a short-cut, so it took them just under two hours from the fountain head to the top of the cliff face above Taita’s pool.
While they rested, Royan remarked, ‘Tamre seems to spend most of his days wandering around in the bush. He knows every path and game trail. He is an excellent guide.’
‘Better than Boris, at least,’ Nicholas agreed, as he fished out his barometer and took another reading.
‘You look particularly pleased with yourself.’ Royan watched his face as he studied the instrument.
‘Every reason to be,’ he told her. ‘Allowing one hundred and eighty feet for the height of the cliff below us, and another fifty feet for the depth of the pool, the entrance to the sink-hole is still over a hundred feet higher than your outlet through the fern grotto on the other side of the ridge.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means that there is a distinct possibility that the streams are one and the same. The inflow is here in Taita’s pool and the outflow is from your grotto.’
‘How on earth did Taita do it?’ she puzzled. ‘How did he get to the bottom of the pool? You are the engineering marvel. Tell me how you would do it.’
He shrugged, but she persisted. ‘I mean, there must be some established way of doing things like that, of working under water. How do they build the piers of a bridge, or the foundations of a dam, or – or – or how did Taita himself build the shaft below the level of the Nile to measure the flow of the river? You remember the description that he gives of his hydrograph in River God?’
‘The accepted technique is to build a coffer dam,’ Nicholas said casually, and then broke off and stared at her. ‘My oath, you really are a corker. A dam! What if that old ruffian, Taita, dammed the whole flipping river!’
‘Would that have been possible?’
‘I am beginning to believe that with Taita anything is possible. He certainly had unlimited manpower at his disposal, and if he could build the hydrograph on the Nile at Aswan, then he understood very clearly the principles of hydrodynamics. After all, the old Egyptians’ lives were completely bound up with the seasonal inundations of the river and the management of the floods. From what we have gathered about the old man, it certainly seems possible.’
‘How could we prove it?’
‘By finding the remains of his dam. It had to be a hell of a work to hold the Dandera river. There is a good chance that some evidence of it remains.’
‘Where would he have built the dam?’ she asked excitedly. ‘Or let me put it another way, where would you site the dam if you had to do it?’
‘There is one natural place for it,’ he answered promptly. ‘The spot where the trail leaves the river and detours down the valley, and the river falls into the chasm.’ They both turned their heads in unison and looked upstream.
‘What are we waiting for?’ she asked, and sprang to her feet. ‘Let’s go look-see!’
Their excitement was infectious, and Tamre giggled and danced ahead of them along the trail through the thorns and then up the valley to the point where it rejoined the river. The sun had lost the worst
of its heat by the time they stood once again above the falls where the Dandera river plunged into the mouth of the chasm, and began its last lap in the race to join the Nile.
‘If Taita had thrown a dam across here – ’ Nicholas made a sweep of his arms across the mouth of the gorge, ‘ – he could have diverted the river down the side valley here.’
‘It looks possible,’ she laughed. Tamre giggled in sympathy, not understanding a word of what they were saying, but enjoying himself immensely.
‘I would need a dumpy level to take some shots of the actual fall of the land. It can be very deceptive, but with the naked eye it does look possible, as you say.’ He shaded his eyes and looked up the bluffs on each side of the waterfall. They formed two craggy portals of limestone, between which the river roared as it plunged over the lip.
‘I would like to climb up there to get a clearer picture of the layout of the terrain. Are you game?’
‘Try and stop me,’ she challenged him, and led the climb. It was a heavy scramble, and in some places the limestone was rotten and crumbling dangerously. However, when they came out on the summit of the eastern portal they were rewarded with a splendid overall view of the ground below.
Directly to the north, the escarpment rose like a sheer wall with its battlements crenellated and serrated. Above and beyond it there was a dream of further mountains, the high peaks of the Choke, blue as a heron’s plumage against the clearer distant blue of the African sky.
All around them were the badlands of the gorge, a vast confusion of ridges and spines and reefs of rock of fifty different hues, some ash-grey and white, others black as the hide of a bull buffalo, or red as his heart blood. The riverine bush was green, the poisonous vivid green of the mamba in the treetop, while further from the water the scrub was grey and sear, and along the spines of the broken kopjes stood the stark outlines of ancient drought-struck trees, their tortured limbs twisted and black against the sky.
‘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.