The Seventh Scroll: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

by Wilbur Smith

  That night, with a dram of whisky and a decent meal warming his belly, a mosquito net over his head and a thick foam mattress under him, Nicholas drifted off to sleep with a smile on his face. They were off to a good start.

  The chanting of the monks at their matins woke him, ‘We won’t need an alarm clock here,’ he groaned, and staggered down to the river to wash and shave.

  As the sun gilded the battlements of the escarpment, he and Mek were already at their post on the heights, searching the western sky. The plan had been for Jannie to spend the night at Roseires, while Mek’s men assisted him with the loading of the cargo they had stored there on their first flight out from Malta. This was one of the vulnerable stages of the operation. Although Mek had assured them that there was little military presence in the area at the moment, it needed only a stray Sudanese government patrol to stumble on Big Dolly while she was on the ground to plunge them all into disaster. So it was with a leap of the heart that they heard the familiar drone of the turbo-props reverberating off the cliffs.

  Big Dolly lined up again for her first pass down the valley, and as she flew over the quartz crosses the huge yellow front-end loader tumbled out of her hold. Instinctively Nicholas held his breath as he watched it come hurtling down and then jerk up short on the parachute shrouds. It swayed wildly all over the sky, yoyoing on the nylon ropes, and the monks howled with amazement and excitement as they watched it drop in. It struck in a cloud of dust.

  Sapper was standing next to Nicholas, groaning and covering his eyes so that he did not have to watch the cloud of dust rising into the air. ‘Shit!’ he said in a hollow voice.

  ‘Is that a command, or merely a request?’ Nicholas asked, but he wasn’t really amused.

  As the last pallet dropped, and the aircraft climbed away under full power, Nicholas called Jannie on the radio.

  ‘Many thanks, Big Dolly. Safe flight home.’

  ‘Inshallah! If God wills!’ Jannie called back.

  ‘I will call you when I need a lift back.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’ Big Dolly trundled away. ‘Break a leg!’

  ‘Well now.’ Nicholas slapped Sapper’s back. ‘Let’s go down and see if you still have a front-ender.’

  The battered yellow machine lay on its side with oil pouring out of her, like blood from a heart-shot dinosaur.

  ‘You can push off. Just leave me a dozen of these black guys to help me,’ Sapper told them as sorrowfully as if he was standing at the graveside of his beloved.

  Sapper did not return to camp for dinner, so Tessay sent a bowl of wat and some injera bread down to him to eat while he worked. Nicholas considered going down to offer his help with repairing the damaged tractor, but thought better of it. From bitter experience he knew that at certain times Sapper wanted to be left alone, and that this was one of those times.

  In the small dark hours of the morning the camp was lit up by the blaze of headlights and the hills reverberated to the roar of a diesel engine. With even his bald head covered with grease and dust, hollow-eyed but triumphant, Sapper drove the yellow tractor into the camp and shouted at them from the high driver’s seat.

  ‘Okay, knaves and nymphs! Drop your cocks and grab your socks. Let’s go build a dam.’

  It took them another two full days to gather in all the pallets that lay strewn down the valley and to carry the stores into the ancient quarry. There they stacked them carefully in accordance with the manifest that Nicholas and Sapper had drawn up in England. It was essential that they knew where every item was stored, and that they had immediate access to it when needed. In the meantime Sapper was at work on the dam site, laying out his foundations, driving numbered wooden pegs into the banks of the river, and taking his final measurements with the long steel surveyor’s tape.

  During this preliminary work Nicholas was watching the performance of the monks, and getting to know them individually. He was able to pick out the natural leaders and the most intelligent and willing men amongst them. He was also able to identify those who spoke Arabic or a little English. The most promising of these was a monk named Hansith Sherif, whom Nicholas made his personal assistant and interpreter.

  Once they were settled into the camp, and had worked out a relationship with the monks, Mek Nimmur took Nicholas aside out of earshot of the two women.

  ‘From now on, my work will be the security of the site. We will have to be ready to prevent another raid like the one on your camp, and the slaughter at St Frumentius. Nogo and his thugs are still out there. It won’t take long for him to hear that you are back in the gorge. When he comes, I will be waiting for him.’

  ‘You are better with an AK-47 than with a pickaxe,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘Just leave Tessay here with me. I need her.’

  ‘So do I.’ Mek smiled and shook his head ruefully. ‘I am only just learning how much. Look after her for me. I will be back every night to check on her.’

  Mek took his men into the bush and deployed them in defensive positions along the trail and around the camp. When Nicholas looked up from his own work he could often make out the figure of one of Mek’s sentries on the high ground above the camp. It was reassuring to know that they were there.

  However, as he had promised, Mek was back in camp most evenings, and often in the night Nicholas heard, coming from the shelter he shared with Tessay, his deep rumbling laughter blending with her sweet silvery tones. Then Nicholas lay awake and thought about Royan in the hut so close, but yet so far away from where he lay.

  On the fifth day the second draft of three hundred labourers that Mai Metemma had conscripted for them arrived, and Nicholas was astonished. Things seldom worked that way in Africa. Nothing ever happened ahead of the promised time. He wondered what exactly Mek had told the abbot, but then decided that he didn’t really want to know, for now the main construction work could begin.

  These men were not monks, for St Frumentius had already given its all to the sacred labour, but villagers who lived up on the highlands of the escarpment. Mai Metemma had coerced them with promises of religious indulgences and threats of hellfire.

  Nicholas and Sapper divided this workforce into gangs of thirty men each, and set one of the picked monks as foreman over each gang. They were careful to grade the men by their physical appearance, so that the big strapping specimens were all grouped together as the project storm-troopers, while the smaller, more wiry men could be reserved for the tasks in which brute strength was not a necessity.

  Nicholas dreamed up a name for each gang – the Buffaloes, the Lions, the Axes and so on. It taxed his powers of invention, but he wanted to inspire in them a sense of pride and, to his own particular advantage, to encourage the gangs to compete with one another. He paraded them in the quarry, each group headed by its newly appointed ecclesiastical foreman. Using one of the ancient stone blocks as a platform, and with Tessay interpreting for him, he harangued them heartily and then told them that they would be paid in silver Maria Theresa dollars. He set their wages at three times the going rate.

  Up to this stage the men had listened to him with a sullen air of resignation, but now a remarkable transformation came over them. None of them had expected to be paid for the work, and most of them were wondering how soon they could desert and go home. Now Nicholas was promising them not only money, but silver dollars. In Ethiopia for the past two hundred years the Maria Theresa dollar had been regarded as the only true coinage. For this reason they were still minted with the original date of 1780 and the portrait of the old Empress, with her double chin and her décolletage exposing half her great bust. One of these coins was more prized than a sackful of the worthless paper birr issued by the regime in Addis. To pay his labour bills, Nicholas had included a chest of these silver coins in the first pallet load that Jannie had dropped.

  Celestial grins bloomed as they listened, and white teeth sparkled in their ebony faces. Someone began to sing, and they all stamped and danced and cheered Nicholas as they trooped off to queue for their tools.
With mattocks and shovels at the slope they filed off up the valley to the dam site, still singing and prancing.

  ‘St Nicholas,’ Tessay laughed. ‘Father Christmas. They will never forget you now.’

  ‘They may even enshrine you and build a monastery over you,’ Royan suggested sweetly.

  ‘What they don’t know is that they are going to earn every single dollar, the hard way.’

  From then onwards the work began as soon as it was light enough to see, and stopped only when it was too dark to continue. The men came back to their temporary compound each night by the light of grass torches, too weary to sing. However, Nicholas had contracted with the headmen from the highland villages to supply a slaughter beast every day. Each morning the women came down the trail driving the animal before them, and with huge pots of tej balanced on their heads.

  Over the days that followed, there were no deserters from Nicholas’s little army of workers.

  Mounted on the high seat of the front-ender, Sapper lifted the first filled mesh gabion in the hydraulic arms. The mesh-bound parcel of boulders weighed several tons, and all work on the site came to a halt as the men crowded the banks of the Dandera river to watch. A hum of astonishment went up as Sapper eased the yellow tractor down the steep bank and, with the gabion held high, drove the vehicle into the water. The current, affronted by this invasion, swirled angrily around the high rear wheels, but Sapper pushed in deeper.

  The crowds lining the bank began to chant and clap encouragement as the water reached as high as the belly of the machine, and clouds of steam hissed from the hot steel of the sump. Sapper locked the brakes, and then lowered the heavy gabion into the flood before reversing back up the bank. The men cheered him wildly, even though the first gabion was instantly submerged and only a whirlpool on the river’s surface marked its position. Another filled gabion lay ready. The front-ender waddled up to it, lowered its steel arms and picked it up as tenderly as a mother gathering up her infant.

  Nicholas shouted at the foremen to get their gangs back to work. The long lines of men came up the valley, naked except for their brief white loincloths. Sweating heavily in the heat of the gorge, their skin glistened like anthracite freshly cut from the coal face. Each of them carried on his head a basket of stone aggregate, which he dumped into the mouth of the waiting gabion. Then he returned with his empty basket down the hill to the quarry. As each gabion was filled, another team fitted the mesh lid and laced it closed with heavy eight-gauge wire.

  ‘Twenty dollars bonus to the team with the most baskets filled today!’ Nicholas bellowed. They shouted with glee and redoubled their efforts, but they were unable to keep up with Sapper on the front-ender. He laid his stone piers artfully, working out from the shallow water alongside the bank so that each gabion lay against its neighbour, keying into the wall to give mutual support.

  At first there was little evident progress, but as a solid reef was built up beneath the surface the river began to react savagely. The voice of the water changed from a low rustle to a dull roar as it tore at Sapper’s wall.

  Soon the top of the wall of gabions thrust its head above the surface, and the river was constricted to half its former width. Now its mood was truculent. It poured through the gap in a solid green torrent, and crept almost imperceptibly up the banks as it was forced to back up behind the barrier. The river worried the foundations of the dam, clawing at it to find its weak spots, and the progress of the work slowed down as the waters rose higher.

  Up in the riverine forests along the banks the axemen were at work, and Nicholas winced each time one of the great trees toppled, groaning and shrieking like a living creature. He liked to think of himself as a conservationist, and some of these trees had taken centuries to reach this girth.

  ‘Do you want your bleeding dam, or your pretty trees?’ Sapper demanded ferociously, when Nicholas lamented in his hearing. Nicholas turned away without replying.

  They were all becoming tired with the unremitting labour. Their nerves were stretching towards snapping point, and tempers were mercurial. Already there had been a number of murderous fights amongst the workmen, and each time Nicholas had been forced to duck in under the swinging steel mattocks to break it up and separate the combatants.

  Slowly they squeezed the river in its bed as the pier crept out from the bank, and the time came when they had to transfer their efforts to the far bank. It required the combined efforts of their entire labour force to build a new road along the bank as far as the ford. There they manhandled the front-ender into the water, and, with a hundred men hauling on the tow ropes and her tall lugged rear wheels spinning and churning the surface to a froth, they dragged her across.

  Then they had to build another road back along the far bank to reach the dam site. They cut out the treetrunks that obstructed them and levered the boulders out of the way to get the tractor through. Once they had her back at the dam site they could begin the same process of laying out gabions from the far bank.

  Gradually, a few metres each day, the two walls crept closer to each other, and as the gap between them narrowed the water rose higher and became more raucous, making the work more difficult.

  In the meanwhile, two hundred metres upstream of the dam site, the Falcons and the Scorpions were at work. These two teams were building the raft of treetrunks that they had hacked from the forest. The timbers were lashed together to form a grating. Over this was laid heavy PVC sheeting to make it waterproof; then a second grating of treetrunks went over this to form a gigantic sandwich. It was all lashed together with heavy baling wire. Finally, one end of the grating was ballasted with boulders.

  Sapper arranged the ballast of boulders to make the raft one-side heavy, so that it would float almost vertically in the water, with one end of it scraping the bottom of the river and the other sticking up above the surface. The dimensions of the completed raft were carefully related to the gap between the two buttresses of the dam. And while the work on the raft and the wall continued Sapper built up a stockpile of filled gabions, which he stacked on both banks below the dam.

  Three other full work teams, the Elephants, the Buffaloes and the Rhinos, comprising the biggest and strongest men in the force, laboured at the head of the valley. They were digging out a deep canal into which the river could be diverted.

  ‘Your hot-shot engineer, Taita, never thought of that little refinement,’ Sapper gloated to Royan as they stood on the lip of the trench. ‘What it means is that we only have to raise the level of the river another six feet before it will start flowing down the canal and into the valley. Without it we would have had to lift the water almost twenty feet to divert it.’

  ‘Perhaps the river levels were different four thousand years ago.’ Royan felt a strange loyalty to the long-dead Egyptian, and she defended him. ‘Or perhaps he dug a canal but all traces of it have been obliterated.’

  ‘Not bleeding likely,’ Sapper grunted. ‘The little per-isher just plain didn’t think of it.’ His expression was smug and self-satisfied. ‘One up on Mr Taita, I think.’

  Royan smiled to herself. It was strange how even the practical and down-to-earth Sapper felt that this was a direct personal challenge from down the ages. He too had been caught up in Taita’s game.

  By dint of neither threat nor heavenly reward could the monks be inveigled into working on Sundays. Each Saturday evening they knocked off an hour earlier and trooped away down the valley on the trail to the monastery, so as to be in time for Holy Communion the next day. Although Nicholas grumbled and scowled at their desertion, secretly he was as relieved as any of them for the chance to rest. They were all exhausted, and for once there would be no chanting of matins to wake them at four o’clock the next morning.

  So on Saturday night they all swore to each other that they would sleep late the next morning, but from force of habit Nicholas found himself awake and fully alert at that same iniquitous hour. He could not stay in his camp bed, and when he came back from his ablutions at the rive
rside he found that Royan was also awake and dressed.

  ‘Coffee?’ She lifted the pot off the fire and poured a mugful for him.

  ‘I slept terribly badly last night,’ she admitted. ‘I had the most ridiculous dreams. I found myself in Mamose’s tomb, lost in a labyrinth of passages. I was searching for the burial chamber, opening doors, but there were always people in the rooms that I looked into. Duraid was working in one room and he looked up and said, “Remember the protocol of the four bulls. Start at the beginning.” He was so real and alive. I wanted to go to him but the door closed in my face, and I knew I would never see him again.’ Tears filled her eyes and glistened in the light of the campfire.

  Nicholas sought to distract her from the painful memory. ‘Who were in the other rooms?’ he asked.

  ‘In the next room was Nahoot Guddabi. He laughed spitefully and said, “The jackal chases the sun,” and his head changed into the head of Anubis, the jackal god of the cemetery, and he yelped and barked. I was so frightened that I ran.’

  She sipped her coffee. ‘It was all meaningless and silly, but von Schiller was in the next room, and he rose in the air and flapped his wings and said, “The vulture rises, and the stone falls.” I hated him so much I wanted to strike him, but then he was gone.’

  ‘And then you woke up?’ Nicholas suggested.

  ‘No. There was one other room.’

  ‘Who was in it?’

  She dropped her eyes, and her voice was small, ‘You were,’ she said.

  ‘Me? What did I say?’ He smiled.

  ‘You didn’t say anything,’ she whispered, and blushed so suddenly and fiercely that he was instantly intrigued.

  ‘What did I do then?’ He was still smiling.

  ‘Nothing. I mean, I can’t tell you.’ The dream returned to her, vivid and real as life, every detail of his naked body, even the smell and the feel of him. She forced herself to stop thinking about it. She felt vulnerable as she had been in the dream.