The Seventh Scroll

are you shouting about?

"We have broken through, effendi." Hansith Sherif grinned at him, his

teeth gleaming in his black and mudsmeared face. Nicholas eagerly pushed

his way through the workmen. They had levered a huge round boulder out

of the pack, and beyond it lay an opening. He shone his electric torch

through this window in the wall, but could make out very little

except-empty black space.

Stepping back, he slapped the monk on the back.

"Well done, Hansith. A dollar bonus for every man in the team. But keep

them working! Clear away all this rubbish." But it was not as easily

done as he had ordered. The shifts changed twice more before the shaft

was cleared completely of the last of the extraneous rubble and broken

rock. Only then could Nicholas and Royan stand in the threshold of the

cavern beyond the tunnel.

"What has happened here? What has caused this?" Royan's voice was

puzzled as Nicholas played his torch out into the void.

"I think this is a cave-in area. There was probably a fault in the rock

strata running through here and here." He picked out the cracks in the

roof of the cavern.

"You think the flow of the water through the shaft has scoured it out?"

she asked.

"I would say so, yes."Nicholas turned the beam of light downwards. "The

floor has fallen out of the shaft also."

The rock had subsided in front of them, leaving a deep hole. Ten feet

below where they stood the hole was filled with water, forming a large

circular pool with vertical rock sides. Overhead the roof had fallen in

and was now a high dome of irregular rock, and the far side of the pool

was shrouded in shadows a hundred feet or more in front of them.

There was no apparent way around this obstacle without entering the

water. Nicholas shouted to Hansith to bring one of the long bamboo poles

that they had used for the scaffolding. The pole was thirty feet long

and they had to manoeuvre its length down the tunnel. Nicholas sounded

the pool with the bamboo, probing it down into the turbid water as

deeply as he could reach.

"No bottom." He shook his head. "Do you know what I think?" He retrieved

the pole and passed it back to Hansith.

"Tell me," Royan invited.

"I think that this is the natural fault that leads the water away to the

other side of the hills, and comes to the surface again at the butterfly

fountain. The river has carved its own path., "Why hasn't it drained,

then?" Royan looked down dubiously in the pool below them.

"A -bend in the shaft, probably. Water still trapped in the top of the

shaft like the bowl of a lavatory."

He probed the waters of the pool with the beam of his torch, and Royan

exclaimed with horror and disgust as on of the giant eels came racing to

the surface, attracted by the light.

"The filthy creatures!" She stepped back involuntarily.

"The whole river must be infested with them."

The long dark shape circled the pool swiftly and then disappeared back

into the depths as suddenly as it had appeared.

"If you are right, and a section of Taita's adit has collapsed, then the

continuation of his tunnel should be on the far side of this." She

pointed across the pool, and Nicholas lifted the beam of the torch and

shone it in the direction she indicated.

"Look, icky!" she cried. "There it is."

The dark rectangular opening yawned at them from across the pool.

"How do we get across there?" Royan asked, disconsolate.

"The answer to that is, not very easily. Dammit to hell!" Nicholas swore

heartily. "This is going to cost us another couple of days that we, can

ill afford. We are going to have to build some sort of bridge across

it."

"What kind of bridge?"

"Get Sapper down here. This is his department."

Sapper stood at the brink of the sink-hole and glared across at the far

bank.

Pontoons," he grunted. "How many of those inflatable rafts have you got

squirrelled away?"

"Forget it, Sapper!" Nicholas shook his head. "You are not getting those

dirty great paws of yours on my rafts."

"Suit yourself' Sapper spread his hands in resignation.

"It would be the easiest and quickest way of doing it.

Anchor a raft in the middle and build a catwalk over the top of it. I

need something that floats high-'

"Baobab." Nicholas snapped his fingers. "That should do the trick very

nicely. When it's dried out, baobab wood is as light as balsa. Floats

just as well as one of my inflatable rafts."

"Plenty of baobabs growing along the hills," Sapper agreed. "Every

second tree in this valley seems to be a ruddy baobab."

hree hundred yards from the top of the cliff grew a massive specimen of

Adansonia digitata.

Its smooth bark resembled the skin of one of the great reptiles from the

age of the dinosaurs. Its girth was tremendous - twenty men with

outstretched arms could not have encircled it. The upper branches were

bare and twisted, and it looked as though it had been dead for a hundred

years. Only the heavy velvet-covered pods proved that it still lived;

they hung thickly from the high branches, bursting open to spill the

black seeds which were coated thickly with white cream of tartar.

"The Zulus say that the Nkulu Kulu, the Great Spirit, planted the baobab

upside down with its roots in the air to punish it," Nicholas told Royan

as they looked up at the enormous spread of its branches.

"Why would he want to do that?" she wanted to know.

"What did the poor old baobab do that was so bad?"

"It boasted that it was the.tallest and thickest tree of the forest, and

so the Nkulu Kulu decided to teach it a little lesson in humility."

One of the gigantic branches had snapped off under its own weight, and

lay on the rocky ground beneath the trunk. The wood was white and

fibrous, light as cork.

Under Nicholas's direction the axemen cut it into manageable lengths.

Once they had been carried down the adit shaft to the sink-hole, Sapper

stapled the logs together and floated them across the pool to form a

causeway. He anchored this to the rock face at either end, and then over

it he laid a catwalk of bamboo poles. The bridge of baobab logs floated

high, and although it bobbed and swayed, it could easily support the

weight of a dozen men at a time.

Nicholas was the first one across the sink-hole. He placed a roughly

made ladder against the high vertical bank, and scrambled up into the

mouth of the adit on the far side of the pool. Royan was close behind

him.

The two of them stood in the entrance to this continuation of the shaft,

and as soon as Nicholas shone his torch into it they realized that the

nature of the construction had changed. This section had not been so

heavily scoured out and eroded by the rush of river water through it.

The main flow must have drained away through the sink-hole. The

dimensions were the same, three metres wide by two high, but the

rectangular shape was more precise and although the walls and roof were

rough, like IL

those of a mine, the marks of the tools that had shaped it were now

clearly visible. The footing of the tunnel was roughly paved with slabs

of crudely dressed stone, This whole length of the tunnel had also been

submerged, for it lay below the natural level of the river before it had

been dammed. The paving under their feet was wet and covered with a

slime that had not yet had time to dry out since it had been exposed by

the receding waters. The roof and walls of the tunnel ran with moisture,

and the air was dank and cold and smelled of mud and rot.

They waited for Sapper to string the cables for the lights across the

causeway. He set up the lamps and switched them on. At once they were

aware that ahead of them the shaft had begun to rise at an angle of

about twenty degrees.

"You can see what the old devil Taita. was up to here.

He has taken us down well below water level to flood the tunnel to a

length and depth that nobody would be able to swim along. Now he is

angling up again," Nicholas pointed out to Royan. They started forward,

moving slowly up the ascending shaft, and Nicholas counted aloud each

pace he took.

"One hundred and eight, one hundred and nine, one hundred and ten-'

suddenly they came to the recent low river level. It was clearly marked

as a dry line on the walls of the tunnel. The paving under their feet

was also dry and free of the slippery coating of slime. Fifty paces

further on they passed the high flood level of the river, which was just

as clearly etched on the rock floor and the walls. Beyond that the

tunnel had never been immersed, and the walls were in the same condition

as the Egyptian slave workmen had left them four thousand years earlier.

The marks of the bronze chisels were as pristine as if they had been

inflicted just days before.

Only ten feet beyond the highest point that the river waters had ever

reached, they came out upon a stone landing. Here the floor levelled

out, and then the tunnel turned sharply back upon itself.

"Let's spare a minute just to think about this as a feat of

engineering." Nicholas took Royan's arm and pointed back down the

tunnel. "Taita has placed this landing on which we are standing

precisely above the high-water mark of the river. How did he work it out

so exactly? He had no dumpy level, and only the crudest measuring

equipment.

is. It's a he And yet he calculated it as accurately as a piece of

work."

"Well, he tells us repeatedly in the scrolls that he is a genius. I

suppose we will have to believe him now." She pulled against his grip.

"Let's go on. I must see what lies around this corner," she urged.

Side by side they turned through the one hundred and eighty degree

corner and Nicholas held the hand lamp high, with the electrical cable

trailing back down the shaft behind him. As he lit the way ahead, Royan

exclaimed aloud and seized Nicholas's free hand. Both of them froze with

astonishment.

Taita had designed the turning of the ascending ramp for dramatic

effect. The lower section of the shaft through which they had passed was

"crudely constructed, the walls irregular and undressed, the roof lumpy

and cracked. Taita had calculated his levels so finely that he had known

that the lower levels of the shaft would be submerged and damaged by the

water. He had wasted no effort on beautifying them.

Now before them rose a wide stairway. The angle of its ascent was such

that, from where they stood on the landing, the top of it was hidden

from their view. Each step stretched the full width of the tunnel, and

rose, a hand's breadth. The treads were cut from slabs of mottled

gneiss, polished and fitted to each other so precisely that the joints

between them were barely visible. The roof of the tunnel was three times

as high as it had been in the lower reaches of the tunnel, perfectly

domed and proportioned. The walls and the curved roof were of

beautifully dressed blue granite blocks, keyed into each other with

marvelous precision and symmetry. The whole was a masterpiece of the

mason's art, majestic and portentous. There was both a promise and a

menace in this vestibule to the unknown. Its simplicity and lack of

ornamentation made it even more impressive.

Royan tugged softly at Nicholas's hand and together they stepped on to

the first tread of the stairway. It was carpeted with a fine layer of

dust, soft and white as talcum powder. The dust rose in soft eddies and

wisps around their knees and then subsided as they passed on upwards. It

muted the harsh glare of the electric lamp that Nicholas carried high in

his right hand.

Gradually, as they went on upwards, the top of the staircase came into

view ahead of them. Royan dug her fingernails into the palm of

Nicholas's hand as she saw what lay ahead. The staircase ended on

another level landing, across which a rectangular doorway faced them.

They stepped up on to the landing and stood before the doorway. Neither

of them had words to express this supreme moment: they stood in silence

for what seemed like an eternity, holding each other's hand with a

fierce and possessive grip.

Finally Nicholas tore his eyes off the gateway, and looked down at

Royan. He saw his own feelings mirrored in her face, her eyes shone as

though lit from within by an incandescent passion. There was no other

person alive with whom he would wish to share this moment. He wanted it

to last for ever.

She turned her head and looked at him. They stared deeply and solemnly

into each other's eyes. Both of them were aware that this was a high

tide in their lives, one that could never be repeated. She tightened her

grip on his hand, and looked back to the doorway facing them. It had

been plastered over with white river clay, a surface that had mellowed

to the shade of ivory. There was no crack or blemish in its smooth

expanse, like the flawless skin of a beautiful virgin.

Their eyes fastened avidly on the two embossed seals in the centre of

the expanse of white clay. The upper one was in the shape of the royal

cartouche, the rectangular knot surmounted by the scarab, the homed

beetle that signified the great circle of eternity.

Royan's lips formed the words as she read them from the hieroglyphics,

but she uttered no sound. "'The Almighty. The Divine. Ruler of the Upper

and Lower Kingdoms Egypt. Familiar of the god, Horus. Beloved of Osiris

and of Of Isis. Mamose, may he five for ever!"'

Below this magnificent royal seal was a smaller, simpler design in the

shape of a hawk, with one broken wing drooping across its barred breast,

and the legend: 7, Taita the slave, have obeyed your command, divine

Pharaoh." Underneath the maimed hawk was a single column of

hieroglyphics that spelled out the stem warning: "Stranger!

The gods are watching. Disturb the king's eternal rest at your peril!'

reaking the seals on the doorway was a momentous act, and despite the

fact that the time before the onset of the rains was fast running out,

neither of them was prepared to undertake it lightly.

They had to make every effort to keep permanent re ds cor of everything

they discovered, and to inflict as little damage as possible while

gaining access.

They spent one of their precious remaining days preparing for the

break-in to the tomb. Naturally, Nicholas's first concern was the

security of the tomb area. He asked Mek Nimmur to place an armed guard

on the causeway over the sink-hole in the approach tunnel, and access

beyond this point was restricted. Only Nicholas, Royan, Sapper, Mek,

Tessay and four of the monks whom Nicholas had selected were allowed

across the bridge.

Hansith Sherif had proved himself repeatedly during the clearing of the

lower tunnel. Physically strong, willing and intelligent, he had become

Nicholas's principal assistant. It was Hansith who carried the tripod

and spare camera equipment while Nicholas photographed the approach

tunnel and the sealed doorway. He shot three rolls of high-speed film to

make certain that they had a complete record of the unbroken seals and

the doorway surrounds. Only when the filming was completed would

Nicholas allow Hansith and the other three monks to bring up the tools

needed for the break-in.

Sapper moved the Honda generator up as far as the sink-hole, to reduce

the voltage drop over the distance that the current had to travel down

the cable. Then he set up, the floodlights on the upper landing of the

staircase and focused them on the white expanse of the plastered

doorway.

VAen they assembled at the threshold they were all in a sober mood.

Despite the fact that the tomb was thousands of years old, it was still

an act of desecration that they were about to perpetrate. Royan had

translated the hieroglyphic warning on the sealed doorway to Sapper, Mek

and Tessay, and none of them was prepared to take it lightly.

Nicholas marked out the square opening he intended cutting through the

plaster covering, This was large enough to afford access, but it also

enclosed the royal cartouche and Tatia's maimed hawk seal. He intended

lifting these out in one piece, and preserving them intact. In his

imagination, he could already see them displayed in a prominent position

in the museum at Quenton Park.

Nicholas began on the right'hand upper corner of the opening. First he

used a long, needle-sharp awl as a probe.

He pressed and twisted the needle point through the dried clay in an

attempt to determine exactly what lay beneath the surface. Very soon he

found out that the plaster had been laid over laths of finely interwoven

reeds.

"That makes it a lot-easier," he told Royan. "The reed mat will help to

hold the plaster together and prevent it cracking and breaking up."

He kept working the point of the awl deeper, until suddenly the

resistance gave way and the blade ran in Its full length.

"Six inches," he said, measuring the thickness of the door off the

blade. "Taita never skimps, does he? It's a heavy bit of work."

Still using the awl, Nicholas drilled all four corners of the square

opening he intended cutting. Then he stepped back and gestured for

Hansith to bring up the heavy four-inch gimlet to enlarge them. This was

the type of drill that fishermen use for cutting through lake ice in

winter.

As soon as the gimlet broke through, Nicholas impatiently pulled Hansith

aside and peered into the hole.

Beyond the opening all was completely dark, but he caught a whiff of the

faint breath of ancient air that washed through the opening. The odour

was dry and dead and austere, the smell of the ages long past.

"What do you see?" Royan demanded at his elbow.

"The light! Give me the light!" he ordered, and when Sapper handed it to

him, he held it to the opening.

"Tell me!" Royan was dancing beside him with impatience. "What do you

see now?"

"Colours!" he whispered. "The most marvelous, indescribable colours." He

stepped back and, lifting her around the waist, held her so that she

could look into the aperture.

"Beautiful!" she cried. "It's so beautiful."

The men rigged up the heavy-duty electric blower fan which would

circulate the air in the shaft, while Nicholas prepared the chain-saw.

When he was ready, Nicholas handed Royan a pair of goggles and a dust

mask and helped her to adjust them. Then he made her fit a pair of wax

ear plugs.

Before he started the chain-saw, he sent the rest of them back down the

tunnel as far as the causeway over the sinkholes In the confined space

the exhaust fumes from the chain-saw and the dust, together with the

noise of the petrol engine, would be overpowering, but apart from that

he wanted only Royan with him at the moment of the break'in.

When they were alone, Nicholas switched the blower fan to its highest

speed, then donned his own mask and goggles and plugged his ears. He

pulled the starter cord of the chain-saw motor and it burst into life in

a cloud of blue exhaust smoke.

Nicholas braced himself and pressed the spinning chain blade into the

gimlet hole in the plastered doorway.

It cut through the thick white plaster and the laths beneath it like a

knife through the icing on a wedding cake.

Carefully he ran the cutting edge down the line he had marked out.

A cloud of flying white plaster dust filled the air.

Within seconds they could see only a few feet in front of their eyes.

Doggedly Nicholas kept the cut going, down the right -hand side, across

the bottom, then up the left side. Finally he made the last cut across

the top, and when the square trapdoor began to sag forward under its own

weight he killed the engine of the chain'saw and set it aside.

Royan jumped forwards to help him, and together in the eddies of dust

and smoke they steadied the square of plaster and prevented it from

crashing to the paving and shattering into a thousand pieces. Gently

they lifted it out from the opening and, with the seals still intact,

laid it against the side wall of the landing.

The open hatchway they had cut through the plaster was a dark square.

Nicholas adjusted the floodlight to shine through it, but the dust was

still too dense for them to be able to see much of the interior.

Nicholas climbed through the hatch into the space beyond. All was

obscured by a dense fog of dust that not even the lamps could penetrate.

He did not attempt to explore further, but immediately turned back to

help Royan through the opening after him.

He recognized her right to share every moment of this discovery. Beyond

the wall they stood quietly together, waiting for the blower fan to

clear the air. Slowly the dust fog began to dissipate, and the first

thing they became aware of was the floor beneath their feet.

No longer made of stone slabs, it was covered with tiles of yellow agate

that had been polished to a gloss and fitted together so cunningly that

no joints were visible. It was like a single sheet of lovely opaque

glass, dulled only by the film of fine talcum dust that had settled upon

it.

Where their feet had disturbed the layer of dust the agate sparkled

through it, catching the light of the floodlamp.

Then the fog of dust that surrounded them thinned, and gradually a

miraculous blaze of colours and shapes began to appear through the murk.

Royan lifted the dust mask from her face and let it drop to the agate

floor.

Nicholas followed her example, and took a breath of the stagnant air. No

draught had disturbed it for thousands of years and it had the odour of

great antiquity, the musty smell of the linen bandages of an embalmed

corpse.

Now the miasma of dust faded away and before them opened a long straight

passageway, the end of which was hidden in shadow and darkness. Nicholas

turned back to the opening in the sealed door behind them, and reached

through it to bring in the fioodlight on its stand. Quickly he arranged

it to illuminate the full length of the passageway ahead of them.

As they started forward, the images of the old gods hovered around them.

They glowered at the intruders from the walls and hung over them,

watching them with huge and hostile eyes from the ceiling high overhead.

Nicholas and Royan passed on slowly. Their footfalls on the agate tiles

were muted by the thin carpet of dust, and the dust that still hung in

the air reflected the light and cast over them a luminous net that had

an ethereal, dreamlike quality.

Inscriptions covered every inch of space upon the walls and the high

roof. There were long quotations from all the mystical writings, from

the Book of Breathings, the Book of the Pylons and the Book of Wisdom.

Other blocks of hieroglyphics recited the history of Pharaoh Mamose's

existence on this earth, and extolled those virtues that made the gods

love him.

Further along they came to the first of eight shrines set into the walls

of the long funeral gallery. This one was the shrine of Osiris. It was a

circular chamber, the curved wall decorated with texts in praise of the

god, and in its niche a small statue of Osiris in his tall feathered

head-dress, with eyes of onyx and rock crystal which stared at them so

lacably that Royan shivered. Nicholas reached out and gently touched the

foot of the god.

He said one word, "Gold!'

Then he looked up at the towering mural that covered the wall and half

the domed ceiling above and around the shrine. It was another gigantic

figure of the father Osiris, god of the Underworld, with his green face

and false beard, his arms crossed upon his chest, holding the flail and

the crook, wearing his tall feathered head-dress and with the erect

cobra on his brow. They gazed up at him with a sense of awe. As the

lamplight wavered in the shifting dust cloud LEI the god seemed to

become imbued with life, and to move and sway before their eyes.

They did not linger at the first shrine, for beyond it the gallery ran

on, straight as the flight of an arrow to its target. They followed it.

The next shrine set into the wall was dedicated to the goddess. The

golden figure of Isis sat in her niche, upon the throne that was her

symbol. The infant Horus suckled at her breast. Her eyes were ivory and

blue lapis lazuli.

Her murals covered the walls around her niche. There she was, the mother

with great kohl-lined eyes as black as night, wearing the sun disc and

the horns of the sacred cow pon her head. All around her, hieroglyphic

symbols covered the wall, so bright that they glowed like a cloud of

fireflies; for she possessed a hundred diverse names.

Amongst these were Ast and Net and Bast. She was also Ptah and Seker and

Mersekert and Rennut. Each of these names was a word of power, for her

sanctity and her benevolent aura had lived on where most of the old gods

had withered away for lack of worshippers to repeat and keep alive these

mystic names.

In ancient Byzantium and later in Christian Egypt they had bestowed the

old goddess's virtues and attributes upon the Virgin Mary. The image of

her suckling the infant Horus had been perpetuated in the icons of the

Madonna and child. Thus Royan responded to the goddess in all her

entities, the mingled blood of Royan's forefathers in her veins

acknowledging both Isis and Mary, heresy and truth mingling inextricably

in her heart, so that she felt at once both guilt and religious elation.

In the next shrine was a golden figure of Horus, the falcon-headed, the

last of the holy trinity. In his right hand he held the war-bow and in

his left the ankh, for life and death were his to dispense. His eyes

were red carrielians.

Portraits of his other entities surrounded the statue: Horus the infant,

suckling at the breast of Isis, Horus as the divine youth Harpocrates,

proud and lithe and beautiful, one finger touching his chin in the

ritual gesture, striding out on sandalled feet under his short, stiff

kilt.

Then Horus the falcon-headed, sometimes with the body of a lion and then

with the body of a young warrior, wearing the great crown of the south

and the north united.

Beneath him was the inscription: "Great God and Lord of Heaven, of

nunifest power, Mighty one anwngst all the gods, whose strength has

vanqUished the foes of his divine father, Osiris."

the fourth shrine stood Seth, the arch-fiend, the god of violence and

discord. His body was gold, but his head was the head of a black hyena.

In the fifth shrine stood the god of the dead and of the cemeteries,

Anubis the jackal-headed. It was he who officiated at the embalming, and

whose duty it was to examine the tongue of the great balance when the

heart of the eceased was weighed. If the beam of the scales were

exactly horizontal, then the dead man was declared worthy, but if the

balance tipped against him Anubis threw the heart to the crocodile

monster and it was devoured.

The sixth shrine was dedicated to the god of writing, Thoth. He had the

head of a sacred this and his stylus was in his hand. In the seventh

shrine the sacred cow Had stood squarely on all four hooves, her piebald

body spotted black and white, her face benignly human but with huge,

trumpet-shaped ears, The eighth shrine was the largest and most splendid

of all, for it belonged to Amon-Ra, father of all creation. He was the

sun, an enormous golden disc from which the slanting golden rays

emanated, Nicholas paused here and looked back down the long gallery.

Those eight -sacred statues comprised a treasure that matched anything

that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had discovered in the tomb of

Tutankhamen.

He felt in his heart that it was crass even to consider their monetary

value. However, the simple truth was that even one of these

extraordinary works of art would be sufficient to pay off all his debts

many times over. But he thrust the thought aside and turned once more to

face the commodious chamber at the far end of the gallery.

"The burial chamber," Royan murmured with awe. "The tomb."

As they walked towards it the shadows retreated before A them, like the

ghost of the long-dead pharaoh scurrying back to its final resting

place. Now they could see into the tomb, Its walls were aflame with

still more magnificent murals. Though they had gazed upon so many of

these already, their eyes and their senses were not yet jaded or wearied

by such profusion.

A single elongated figure rose up the far wall, and then stooped across

the ceiling. It was the supple, sinuous body the goddess Nut, giving

birth to the sun. The gold

en rays poured forth from her open womb, suffusing the sarcophagus of

the pharaoh and endowing the dead king with new life.

The royal sarcophagus stood in the centre of the chamber, a massive

coffin hewn from a solid granite block.

How many slaves must have laboured to bring this mass of stone along the

subterranean passages, Nicholas wondered.

He could imagine their sweating bodies gleaming in the lamplight, and

hear the grating squeal of the wooden rollers under the immense weight

of the coffin.

, Then Nicholas looked down into the coffin, and felt the plunge of his

spirits as he realized that the sarcophagus was empty. The massive

granite lid had been lifted from its seat, and flung aside with such

violence that it had cracked across its width and now lay in two pieces

on the floor beside the coffin.

They moved forward slowly, the bitter taste of disappointment mingling

with the dust upon their tongues, until they could look down into the

open sarcophagus. It contained only the shattered fragments of the four

canopic jars. These vessels had been carved from alabaster to contain

the entrails, liver and other internal organs of the king. The broken

lids were decorated with the heads of gods and fabulous creatures from

beyond the grave.

"Empty!" whispered Royan. "The body of the king has gone."

Over the following days, while they photographed the murals and packed

the statues of the eight gods and goddesses from the funeral gallery,

Royan and Nicholas discussed and argued the disappearance of the royal

mummy from its sarcophagus.

"The seals on the gate of the tomb were intact," Royan pointed out

repeatedly.

"There is probably an explanation for that," Nicholas told her. "Taita

himself might have removed the treasure and the body. Many times in the

writing of the seventh scroll he laments the waste of such treasure. He

points out that it could have been much better spent in protecting and

nurturing the nation and its people."

"No, it does not make sense," Royan argued, "to go to such length as to

dam the river and tunnel under the pool, to build this elaborate tomb,

and then to remove and destroy the king's mummy. Taita was always a

logical person. In his own way he revered the gods of Egypt. It shows in

all his writings. He would never have flouted the religious traditions

in which he believed so strongly. Some thing about this tomb does not

ring true for me - the mysterious and almost offhanded disappearance of

the body, even the paintings and the inscriptions up on the walls."

"I agree with you about the missing corpse, but what do you find

illogical about the decorations?" Nicholas wanted to know.

"Well, the paintings first." She indicated the image of Isis with a wave

of her hand. "They are lovely, and they are the work of a competent

classical artist, but they are hackneyed and stylized in form and choice

of colour. The figures are stiff and wooden - they do not move and

dance.

They lack that spark of genius that we were shown in the tomb of Queen

Lostris where the original scrolls in their alabaster jars were hidden."

Nicholas considered the murals thoughtfully. I see what you mean. Even

the murals in the tomb of Tanus at the monastery are in a different

class from these."

"Exactly! she said forcefully. "Those were the paintings of Taita

himself These are not. They were done by one of his hacks." , "What

else is there about the inscriptions that you don't like?"

"Have you ever heard of another tomb that did not have the text of the

Book of the Dead inscribed upon its walls, or that did not depict the

dead person's journey through the seven pylons to reach the paradise

beyond?"

Nicholas looked startled; he had never considered that it fact. Without

replying he left her and went back down the long gallery, ostensibly to

supervise the packing of the sacred statues, but in reality to give

himself more time to consider what she had said.

Before leaving England Nicholas had seen to it that all of the more

vulnerable and breakable equipment that they had air-freighted into the

gorge had been packed in sturdy metal ammunition crates. All these

crates had waterproof rubber seals and strong lever fastenings. The

original contents had been padded and protected with olystyrene packing.

When they left Ethiopia the equipP

ment would be abandoned, but the crates, together with the packing

material, had been carefully preserved for iA transporting the treasures

that they might find in the tomb.

While six of the sacred statues fitted neatly into the crates, the

images of Hathor the cow and satanic Seth were too large. However,

Nicholas discovered that these had been carved in separate parts. The

heads were detachable, and the hoofed legs of Hathor were held into the

body by wooden pins that were rotted to dust. Broken down into their

separate parts, even these two larger statues could also be packed into

the metal cases.

Nicholas watched Hansith packing Seth's ferocious head of ebony and

black resin into one of the crates. Then after a while he went back to

where Royan was working on the inscriptions on the wall above the empty

sarcophagus.

"Very well. I agree. You are right about the lack of inscriptions from

the Book of the Dead. It does seem strange.

But what can we do about it, other than accepting it as a mystery which

we can never unravel?"

"Nicky, there is something more here. This is not everything. I feel it

in every fibre of my being. We are missing something."

"Who am I, a mere male, to question the veracity of a woman's

instincts."

"Stop being superior," she snapped. "How long do I have to work over the

inscriptions from the stele?"

"A week or two at the most. I have to set up an RV with Jannie. We have

to be there at Roseires airstrip when he comes in to pick us up. That's

one date we dare not reak., "Good Lord. I thought you would have

arranged that long ago. How will you contact Jannie from here?"

"Quite simple really." Nicholas smiled. "There is a public telephone at

the post office in Debra Maryam, Tessay can move freely anywhere in the

Goiam. She will go up the escarpment with an escort of monks and

telephone Geoffrey Tennant at the British Embassy in Addis. I have

already arranged it with Geoffrey. He will relay a message on to

Jannie."

"Will Tessay do it for you?"

He nodded. "She has agreed to go up to Debra Maryam tomorrow. Jannie

must have as much notice as possible to get himself prepared for the

flight out from Malta. It's going to need some firte timing for all of

us to arrive at the airstrip simultaneously. It will be asking for

trouble for one party to sit around waiting at Roseires for the others

to arrive."

awn on the first of April," Nicholas gave Tessay the message. "Tell

Jannie . we will be there on April Fools' Day! A nice easy one to

remember."

They watched Tessay set off along the trail with her escort of monks and

Royan asked Mek Nimmur quietly, "Don't you worry about her going off

like this on her own?"

"She is a very competent person, and she is well known and liked

throughout the Gojam- She is as safe as any person can be in a dangerous

land." Mek watched Tessay's slim figure in shamnw and jodhpur pants

becoming smaller with distance. "I wish I could go with her, but-' Mek

shrugged.

Suddenly Royan exclaimed, "There is something that I forgot to ask her."

She left Nicholas and Mek standing, and ran down the trail calling after

the other woman. Her voice floated back to where Nicholas stood watching

her.

"Tessay! Wait! Come back!'

Tessay turned and waited for Royan to catch up with her. While the two

women stood talking together, Nicholas lost interest and turned to study

the distant silhouette of the escarpment-With a sinking feeling in the

pit of his stomach he saw that the thunderheads on the mountain tops

were denser and more ominous than they had been only days before. The

rains were building up swiftly now.

He wondered if they really had as long as they hoed before the dam was

threatened and they were driven out of the gorge by the rising waters.

All, He looked back down the path just in time to see Royan pass

something to Tessay, who nodded and pushed it into the pocket of her

jodhpurs. Then at last the two women embraced warmly, and Tessay turned

away. Royan stood in the middle of the trail, watching until a bend in

the valley hid Tessay from her. Then she walked slowly back to where

Nicholas waited.

"What was all that about?"he wanted to know, and she smiled

mysteriously.

"Girls' secrets. There are some things that it's best you brutish

males'don't know about." But when Nicholas raised an eyebrow at her, she

relented and told him, "Tessay will ask Geoffrey Tennant to send a

message to Mummy, just to let her know that I am all right. I don't want

her to worry about me."

As they climbed back down the scaffolding to where the fly camp had been

set up on the rock ledge beside Taita's pool, Nicholas thought how

fortuitous it was that Royan had her mother's phone number already

written down to hand to Tessay, and he wondered at this sudden

(I urge of Royan's to report her whereabouts to her mother.

wonder what she is really up to?" he mused. "I will try and wheedle it

out of Tessay when she returns."

Royan would have preferred to camp in the tomb itself, so as to be in

the midst of the inscriptions on which she was working, but Nicholas had

insisted that they sleep in the open air, and the ledge was as close as

they could get to their workplace. "The musty air in the tomb is very

probably unhealthy," he told her. "Cave disease is a real danger in

these old enclosed places. They say that is what killed some of Howard

Carter's people working in the tomb of Tutankhamen."

"The fungus spores that cause cave disease breed in bat dung," she

pointed out. "There are no bats in Mamose's tomb. Taita sealed it up too

tightly."

"Humour me," he begged. "You cannot work in there for days on end. I

want you at least to get out of the tomb for a few hours each day."

She shrugged. "Only as a special favour to you," she agreed, but as they

reached the foot of the scaffolding she gave her new sleeping quarters

only a perfunctory glance and then headed for the coffer dam and the

entrance to the approach tunnel.

They had converted the landing at the top of the staircase, outside the

plaster-seated entrance to the tomb, into their workshop. Royan spread

her drawings and photographs and reference books on the rough table of

handhewn planks that Hansith made for her. Sapper had placed one of the

floodlamps above this crude desk so that she had good light to work by.

Against one wall of the landing they had stacked the ammunition crates

which contained the eight sacred statues. Nicholas had insisted on

storing all their discoveries where he could safeguard them adequately.

Mek's armed men still kept a twenty-four-hour guard on the causeway over

the sink-hole.

While Nicholas completed his photographic record of the walls of the

long gallery and the empty burial chamber, Royan sat at her table and

pored over her papers for hours at a time, scribbling notes and

calculations from them into her notebooks. Now and then she would jump

up from her desk and dart through the hatch in the white plaster doorway

into the long gallery to study a detail on the decorated walls.

Whenever this happened, Nicholas straightened up from his camera tripod

and watched her with a fond and indulgent expression. So intent was she

that she seemed completely oblivious of him and everybody else about

her.

Nicholas had never seen her in this mood, and the depth of her powers of

concentration impressed him.

When she had worked for fifteen hours without a break he went out on to

the landing to rescue her and to lead her, protesting, back down the

tunnel to the pool where there was a hot meal waiting for them. After

she had eaten he led her to her hut and insisted that she lie down on

her inflatable mattress.

"You are going to sleep now, Royan," he ordered.

He woke to hear her creeping stealthily out of the hut next door to his,

back along the ledge to the entrance to the tomb. He checked his watch

and grunted with disbelief when he realized that they had slept for only

three and a half hours. He shaved quickly and bolted back a slab of

toasted injera bread and a cup of tea before following her into the

tomb.

He found her standing in the long gallery before the empty niche in the

shrine where the statuette of Osiris had stood. She was so preoccupied

that she did not hear him come up behind her, and she started violently

when he touched her arm.

"You startled me," she scolded him.

"What are you staring at?" he asked. "What have you discovered?"

"Nothing," she denied swiftly, and then after a moment, "I don't know.

It's just an idea."

"Come on! What are you up to?"

"It's easier for me to show you." She led him back to her table on the

stone landing, and rearranged her notebooks carefully before she spoke

again.

"What I have been doing these last few days is going through the

material on the stele of Tanus's tomb, picking out all the quotations

that I recognize from the classical books of mystery, the Book of

Breathings, the Book of the Pylons and -the Book of Thoth, and setting

those on one side." She showed him fifteen pages in her neat small

script.

"All this is ancient material, none of it original compositions by

Taita. I have discarded it for the time being."

She set the first notebook aside and picked up the next. "All this is

from the fourth face of the stele. It's nothing that I recognize, but

seems to be only long lists of numbers and figures. Some sort of code,

perhaps? I am not sure, but I do have some ideas on it that I will come

to later.

Now this here," she showed him the next book, "this is all fresh

material that I don't remember reading in any of the ancient classics.

Much of it, if not all of it, must be original Taita writings. If he has

left any more clues for us, I believe they will be here, in these

sections."

He grinned, "Like that marvelous quotation describing the pink and

private parts of the goddess. Is that what you are referring to?"

"Trust you not to forget that." She flushed lightly and refused to look

up from her notebook. "Look at this quotation from the head of the third

face of the stele, the side Taita has headed "autumn". It's the very

first one that caught my attention."

Nicholas leaned forward and read the hieroglyphics aloud: "'The great

god Osiris makes the opening coup with deference to the protocol of the

four bulls. At the first pylon he bears full testimony to the immutable

law of the board."' He looked up at her. "Yes, I remember that

quotation. Taita is referring to bao, the game that the old devil loved

so passionately."

"That's right." Royan looked slightly embarrassed. "But do you also

remember that I told you about a dream that I had in which I saw Du raid

again in one of the chambers of the tomb?"

"I remember." He chuckled at her discomfort. "He said I of the four

bulls. Now

4 something to you about the protoco we are going in to the, realm of

divination by dreams, are we?"

She looked annoyed by his levity. "All I am suggesting is that my

subconscious had been -digesting the quotation and come up with an

answer, which it put into the mouth of Duraid in the dream. Can't you be

serious just for one moment?

"Sorry." He was contrite. "Remind me what you heard Duraid say."

"In the dream he told me, "Remember the protocol of the four bulls -

Start at the beginning."'

"I am no expert on the game of bao. What did he mean?"

"The rules and subtleties of the game have been lost in the mists of

antiquity. But as you know, we have found examples of the bao board

amongst the grave goods in the tombs of the eleventh to the seventeenth

dynasties, and we can only guess that it was an early form of chess."

She began to sketch for him on one of the blank pages at the back of her

notebook.

"The wooden board was laid out like a chessboard, eight rows of cups

wide and eight rows deep. Like this." She drew it in with quick, deft

strokes of her ballpoint pen.

"The pieces were coloured stones that moved in a prescribed fashion. I

won't go into all the details, but the protocol of the four bulls was an

opening gambit in the game favoured by grand masters of Taita's calibre.

It consisted of making sacrifices to mass the highest-ranking stones in

the first cup from where they could dominate the important centraffiles

of the board."

"I am not sure where we are going, but lead on. I am listening."Nicholas

tried not to look too mystified.

"The first cup of the board." She indicated it on her sketch, as though

instructing a backward child. "The beginning, Duraid said, "Start at the

beginning" Taita said, "The great god Osiris makes the opening coup."'

"I still don't follow you. "Nicholas shook his head.

"Come with me." Carrying the notebooks, she led him through the hatch in

the white plaster doorway and stood beside him at the shrine of Osiris.

"The opening coup. The beginning."

She turned and faced down the gallery. "This is the first shrine. How

many shrines are there altogetherr

"Three for the trinity, then Seth, Thoth, Anubis, Hathor and Ra," he

listed. "Eight altogether."

"Glory be!" She laughed. "The lad can count! How many cups in the files

of the bao board?"

"Eight across, and eight down-' he broke off and stated at her, "You

think-?"

She did not answer, but opened the notebook. "All of these numbers and

extraneous symbols - they spell no coherent words. They do not relate to

each other in any way, except that no number in the list is greater than

eight., "I thought I had caught up with you, but I just lost you again."

"If somebody were to read the notations of a game of T, chess four

thousand years from now, what would he make of it?" she asked. "Wouldn't

it just be lists of numbers and extraneous symbols to him? You really

are being extremely dense, aren't you? This is like pulling teeth."

"Oh, Lordy, Lordy!" His face cleared. "You clever lady!

Taita is playing the game of bao with us."

"And this is the first pylon, where it starts." She gestured to the

shrine. "This is where the great god Osiris makes the opening coup. This

is where we must start at the beginning of the sacred bao board. This is

where we counter his opening move."

They both looked around the shrine for a while, studying the curved

walls and the high domed roof, and then Nicholas broke the silence. "At

the risk of being called extremely dense and having my teeth pulled, may

I ask a question? How the hell do we play a game when we don't even know

the rules?"

olonel Nogo exuded confidence and self, importance as he swaggered into

the conference room to answer von Schiller's summons.

Nahoot Guddabi bustled along behind him, determined not to be excluded

from any of the proceedings. He too tried to look confident and

important, but in truth he felt his position was very insecure and that

he needed to justify himself to his master, Von Schiller was dictating

correspondence to Utte Kemper, but as soon as they entered the room he

stood quickly and stepped on to the carpeted block.

"You promised that you would have a report for me yesterday," he snapped

at Nogo, ignoring Nahoot. "Have you not heard anything from this

informer of yours in the gorge?"

"I apologize for keeping you waiting like this, Herr von Schiller." Nogo

was immediately deflated by this sharp attack, and he became restless

and uneasy. The German frightened him. "The women were a day late

returning from Harper's camp. They are very unreliable, these country

people. Time means very little to them."

"Yes, yes." Von Schiller was impatient. "I know the failings of your

black brethren, and I might add you are not completely innocent of these

yourself, Nogo. But tell me what news you have for me."

"Harper finished work on the dam seven days ago, and immediately he

moved his camp downstream, to a new place on the hills above the ravine.

He then built some sort of bamboo ladder down into the ravine. My

informer tells me that they are clearing a hole at the bottom of the

empty pool-'

"A hole? What kind of hole?" Von Schiller turned pale as he listened,

and began sweating in a light sheen across his forehead.

"Are you all right, Herr von Schiller?" Nogo was alarmed. The German

looked very ill, as if he were about to collapse.

"I am perfectly well," von Schiller shouted at him.

"What hole was this? Describe it to me."

"The woman bringing the message is a stupid peas ant." Nogo was

uncomfortable, squirming under von Schiller's grilling. "She says only

that when the river water fell, there was a hole in the bottom that was

filled with rock and rubbish and that they have cleared this out."

"A tunnel!" Nahoot could contain himself no longer.

"It must be the entrance tunnel to the tomb."

"Be quied' Von Schiller turned on him furiously. "You have no facts to

back up that supposition. Let Nogo finish." He turned back to the

colonel. "Go on. Give me the rest of it."

"The woman says that there is a cave at the end of the hole. Like a rock

shrine, with pictures on the walls-' "Pictures? "What pictures?"

"The woman said they were pictures of the saints." Nogo made a

deprecating gesture. "She is a very uneducated woman. Stupid

"Christian saints?" von Schiller demanded.

Nahoot interjected, "That is not possible, Herr von Schiller. I tell you

that Harper has discovered the tomb of Mamose. You must act swiftly

now."

"I will not warn you again, you miserable little man," von Schiller

snarled at him. "Keep quiet."

He turned back to Nogo. "Was there anything else in the cavern? Tell me

everything the woman said."

"Pictures and statues of the saints." Nogo spread his hands. "I am

sorry, Herr von Schiller, that's what she said.

I know this is all nonsense, but that is what the woman told me."

"I will judge what is and what is not nonsense," von Schiller told him.

"What did she say happened to these statues of the saints?"

"Harper has packed them in boxes."

"Has he removed them from the shrine?"

"I do not know, Herr von Schiller. The woman did not say.

Von Schiller stepped down from his block. He began to pace up and down

the length of the hut, muttering to himself distractedly.

"Herr von Schiller-' Nahoot began, but the German waved him to silence.

At last he stopped in front of Nogo and stared up at him.

"Did they find a mummy, a body, in the- shrine?" he demanded.

do not know, Herr von Schiller. The woman did not say.

"Where is she?" Von Schiller was so agitated that he clutched the front

of Nogo's uniform jacket and stood on tiptoe to thrust his face up close

to his. "Where is this woman? Have you let her go?" Tiny droplets of

spittle flew into Nogo's face and he blinked and tried to duck, but von

Schiller had him in a death grip.

"No, sir. She is still here. I did not want to bring her to you-, "You

fool. All you are telling me is secondhand.

Bring her in here immediately. I want to question her face to face." He

shoved Nogo away from him. "Go and fetch her."

Nogo returned minutes later dragging the woman into the room by one arm.

She was young, and despite the blue tattoos across her cheeks and chin

she was pretty. She wore the long black robes and head-covering of a

married woman, and carried an infant on her hip.

As soon as Nogo released her arm she sank to the floor and whimpered

with terror. The child she carried whined in sympathy. Its nostrils were

plugged with white crusts of dried snot. The woman opened the top of her

robe with a shaking hand, fished out one of her milk-swollen breasts and

thrust the nipple into the child's mouth. Infant and mother stared at

von Schiller with terrified eyes.

"Ask her if there was a coffin or body of the saint in the shrine," von

Schiller ordered, eyeing the woman with distaste.

Nogo questioned her for a minute and then shook his head. "She does not

know anything about a body. She is very stupid. She does not understand

very well."

"Ask her about the statues of the saints. What has Harper done with

them? Where are they now? Has he removed them from the shrine?"

After another long exchange with the woman, Nogo shook his head. "No.

She says that the statues are still in the shrine. The white man has

packed them into boxes and the soldiers are guarding them."

"Soldiers? What soldiers?"

"Soldiers of Mek Nimmur, the. shufta commander that I told you about. He

is still with Harper."

"How many boxes are thereP In his impatience von Schiller went up to

where the woman sat and prodded her with the toe of his boot. "How many

statues are there?"

The woman waited with terror and shrank away from him. Von Schiller

recoiled from her at the same time, with an expression of disgust.

"Gott im HimmeW He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and patted his

mouth and nose with it. "She stinks like an animal. Ask her how many

boxes."

"Not many," Nogo translated, "perhaps five, not more than ten. She is

not sure."

"What size? How big are they?"

When Nogo put the question to her, the w6man indicated the length of her

arm. Von Schiller's disappointment registered clearly in his face.

"So few pieces, and so insignificant." He turned away from the woman and

went to stare out of the south-facing window of the hut, down over the

escarpment rim into the wilderness of the gorge. "If what this creature

says is true, then Harper has not yet discovered the treasure of Mamose.

There should be more, much more."

Nogo was talking rapidly to the woman again, and now he turned back to

von Schiller. "She says that one of Harper's party has left the camp in

the gorge, and gone to Debra Maryam."

Von Schiller spun away from the window and stared at him. "One of his

party? Who? Which one!'

"She is an Ethiopian woman. The concubine of Mek Nimmur. A woman she

calls Woizero Tessay. I know of her. She was married to the Russian

hunter, before she became Mek Nimmur's whore."

Von Schiller rushed across the room and seized the woman by the front of

her robe. He hauled her to her feet with such violence that the infant

was jerked from her grip and fell howling to the floor.

"Ask her where the woman is now," he instructed Nogo.

The mother pulled free from his grip and grovelled on the floor, trying

to pick up and console her screaming infant, Nogo grabbed her and

slapped her face resoundingly to get her attention. She clasped her baby

to her breast and gabbled out a reply.

"She does not know," Nogo admitted. "She thinks she is still at Debra

Maryam."

"Get that filthy bitch out of here!" Von Schiller jerked his head at the

woman and her child. Nogo dragged them from the hut.

"What else do you know of this woman of Mek Nimmur's?" he asked in

milder tones when Nogo returned.

"She is from one of the noble families in Addis Ababa, a blood relative

of Ras Tafari Makonnen, the old Emperor Haile Selassie."

"If she is Mek Nimmur's woman, and has come directly from Harper's camp,

then she will be able to " answer the questions that this other creature

could not."

"That is true, Herr von Schiller. But she may not wish to tell us."

"I want her," von Schiller said. "Bring her here. Helm will speak to

-her. I am sure he will be able to make her AN, see reason."

is an important person. er family has muc influence." Nogo thought

about it for a moment. "But on the other hand, she has been consorting

with a notorious bandit. That is all the reason I need for bringing her

in.

I will send a detachment of my men, under one of my most trusted

officers, to arrest her immediately." He hesitated. "If the woman is

questioned severely, it would be as well that she were not allowed to

return to her friends in Addis. They could make trouble for all of us.

Even for you, Herr von Schiller."

"What do you propose?" von, Schiller wanted to know.

"When she has answered your questions, there will have to be a little

accident,'Nogo suggested.

"Do what is necessary," von Schiller ordered. I will leave the details

to you, but make sure that if it is necessary to dispose of the woman it

is done property. I have had enough bungling." As he spoke these words

he looked across at Nahoot Guddabi, who lowered his gaze and flushed

angrily.

They had spent almost two full days at the shrine of Osiris in the long

gallery. No ancient worshipper had ever studied the texts upon those

walls more avidly than Nicholas and Royan, or examined the flamboyant

murals of the great god with more minute attention They took it in turn

to recite aloud the extracts from the stele of Tanus that Royan had

picked out and recorded in her notebooks, repeating them until they knew

each station by heart. While one read aloud, the other quo concentrated

his or her full attention upon the walls, trying to discover some

connecting link.

"'My love is a flask of cold water in the desert. My love is a banner

unfurling in the breeze. My love is the first shout of the newborn

infant,"' Nic as rea Royan looked up at him from where she squatted

attentively before the shrine, and smiled. "At times Taita was really

rather cute, wasn't he?" she said. "Such a romantic."

"Concentrate, for heaven's sake. This isn't a poetry appreciation class.

We are doing serious business here."

"Barbarian!" she muttered under her breath, but turned back to the wall

of inscriptions.

"Try this one again," Nicholas ordered, and read out, "'We he in the

vale of a thousand joinings, of infant to mother, of man to woman, of

friend to friend, of teacher to pupil, of sex to sex."'

"That's the third time you have picked out that particular quotation

this morning. What is there about it that appeals to you so strongly?"

She did not look up at him, but the back of her neck turned a ruddier

shade of red.

Sorry! Thought you might find that one as romantic as the other," he

mumbled. "Let's try this one then. "I have suffered and loved. I have

withstood the wind and the storm.

The arrow pierced my flesh but did not harm me. I have eschewed the

false path that lies straight before me. I have taken the hidden

stairway to the seat of the gods."'

Royan rocked back on her heels and glanced down the long gallery.

"Something there perhaps. "The false path that lies straight before me.

The hidden stairway"?"

"We are straining a bit now. Snapping at gnats like a hungry trout."

She stood up and pushed the tendrils of sweaty hair off her forehead.

"Oh, Nicky. It's so discouraging. We don't even know where to begin."

"Courage, lassie." He feigned the cheerfulness he did not feel. "We

begin at the beginning like your friend Taita said we must. Let me try

you with this one again." He laced his hand over his heart like a

Victorian actor and emoted, "'The vulture rises on mighty pinions to

greet the sun"-'

She laughed softly at his clowning, and then her eyes wandered from his

face and passed over his shoulder.

Suddenly she started.

"The vulture!" she blurted, and pointed at the wall behind him.

He spun around and stared in the direction she was indicating.

There was the vulture, a magnificent image of the bird, the fierce eyes

glaring and the yellow beak hooked and spread wide, with each feather

ointed. Its wings were outlined in jewel-like colours. It stood as tall

as Nicholas, but its wing-spread covered half the wall. They stared at

it together, and then Royan lifted her eyes to the ceiliAg high above

where they stood. She touched his arm and motioned him to do the same.

"The sun!" she whispered. The golden sun disc of Ra was painted in the

highest portion of the roof. Its warmth seemed to illuminate the

shadows. Its rays spread out Mi every direction, but one of these beams

followed the curve of the wall and descended to envelop the vulture

image in its spreading luminosity.

"'The vulture rises to greet the sun"," she repeated. "Does Taita mean

it literally?"

He moved closer to the mural and examined it minutely, running his hands

over the wings and down its belly to the cruel curved talons. Beneath

the paint the plastered wall was smooth. There was no Projection or any

irregularity.

The head, Nicky. Look at the head of the bird!" She jumped up and tried

to reach it, but her fingers fell short and she turned to him with a

desperate edge to her voice.

"You do it - you are much taller than I am," Only then did he see the

slight shadow down one side of the bird's head where the floodlamp

caught it, and as he touched it he realized that the head was in relief,

standing slightly above the level of the surrounding wall. He ran his

fingers over the raised head and found that the beak was part of the

relief.

"Can you feel any joint in the plaster?" Royan demanded.

He shook his head. "No. It's smooth. It all seems to be part of the main

wall."

"'The vulture rises to greet the sun",, she insisted. "Can't you detect

any movement? Try pushing the head upwards towards the sun painting."

He placed the heel of his hand under the bulge of the head and pushed

upwards. "Nothing!" he grunted.

"It's been there for almost four thousand years." She was hopping from

one foot to the other with frustration.

"Dammit, Nicky, if there is a moving part, it will be stiff.

Harder! Push harder!'

He shifted his feet to get well under it and placed both hands under the

projection of the head. Slowly he brought all his strength to bear. The

cords in his neck stood out and blood flooded his face, turning it a

deep, angry red.

"Harder!" she implored him, but at last he dropped his arms to his sides

and stood back.

"No." His voice was hoarse and strained with the effort.

"It's solid. Won't budge."

"Lift me up. Let me look."

"With the greatest of pleasure. Any excuse to lay hannds on you." He

stepped behind her and placed lascivious han both arms around her waist,

then lifted her until she was able to touch the bird's head.

Quickly she explored it with her fingertips, and then she let out a

small cry of triumph.

"Nicky! You have started something. The paint is cracked all around the

outline of the head. I can feel it.

Lift me higher!

He grunted with the effort but raised her another foot off the floor.

"Yes, definitely!" she exclaimed. "Something has a hairline crack in the

wall above the moved. There is head, as well. You have a look!

He fetched one of the empty ammunition crates from the landing outside

the entrance and placed it below the vulture image. When he stepped up

on to it he was on a level with the vulture's eye.

His expression changed. Quickly he groped in his pocket and brought out

his clasp knife, He opened the blade and probed carefully around the

outline of the head.

Tiny specks of dried paint and plaster filtered down as he worked.

It does look as though the head is a separate detached piece, "he

admitted.

"Look on top of it, higher up the wall. There along the edge of the

sunbeam. Can't you see a vertical crack in the plaster?"

"You are right, you know," he admitted. "But if I try to open that crack

I am going to damage the mural. Do you want me to do that?"

She hesitated only a moment. "This tomb is going to be reflooded when

the river rises, so we are going to lose it again anyway. It's worth the

risk. Do it, Nicky!'

life-blade into the fine He pressed the point of the kn crack and

twisted it gently. A slab of painted plaster the size of his s'read hand

fell out of the wall and splattered into the dust on the agate tiles of

the floor.

He peered into the cavity that it had left in the wall.

"It looks like some kind of slot or groove in the wall," he said. "I am

going to clear its full length." Carefully he worked at the cavity he

had opened, and more loose plaster rained down.

Royan sneezed in the dust, but would not retreat, Particles of debris

lodged in her hair like confetti.

"Yes," he said at last. "There is a vertical groove running up here."

"Chip the plaster away from the crack around the vulture's head," she

ordered, and he wiped the blade against his trouser leg and attacked the

wall again.

"It's free," he said at last. "It looks as though the head will travel

up the groove. Anyway, I am going to try it, Stand back and give me room

to work."

He placed the heels of both hands under the head of the vulture, and

heaved upwards against it. Royan bunched her hands into fists and

screwed up her face in sympathy with his effort.

There was a soft grating sound, and the head began to move jerkily up

the exposed groove in the wall. It reached the top of the slot and

Nicholas jumped down from the crate. They both stared expectantly at the

disembodied head, now disfigured by the chipped and damaged plaster.

After a long, breathless wait, Royan whispered dejecr edly, "Nothing It

hasn't changed anything."

"The rest of the quotation from the stele," he reminded her. "There was

more to it than just the vulture and the sun."

"You are right." She looked around the rest of the wall eagerly. "'The

jackal hops and rests Upon his tail.

She pointed with a trembling finger at the small, almost insignificant

figure of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the graveyards, on the wall

opposite the vulture that they had mutilated. Standing at the foot of

the huge, towering painting of Osiris, he was only a little larger in

size than the ringed and bejewelled big toe of the husband of Isis and

father of Horus.

Royan ran to the wall, and the moment she touched Anubis she felt that

his image too was raised. She flung all her strength against the tiny

figure, trying to twist it first one way and then the other.

"'The jackal turns upon his tail"," she panted as she wrestled with him.

"He must turn!'

"Here, let me do that." Gently Nicholas pulled her away, and knelt

before the black-headed god image. Once again he used the blade of his

clasp knife to chip away the plaster and the thick layer of paint from

around the outline.

"It seems to be carved in some sort of hard wood and then it's been

plastered over," he told her, as he tested the construction of the

figure with the point of the blade.

When at last he had chipped it clear he tried to twist it in a clockwise

direction, and grunted with the effort.

"No! He gave up at last.

"They had no clock dials in ancient Egypt," she reminded him agitatedly.

"The other way. Turn it the other way-$

When he tried to turn it counter-clockwise, there was another rasping,

gritty sound from behind the wall panel.

The tiny figure revolved slowly in his hands, until the black head

pointed down towards the yellow tiles.

They both stood well back from the wall, looking expectantly at it, but

after another long wait even Nicholas was disheartened.

"I don know what to expect, but whatever it is, it isn't happening he

grunted with disgust.

"There is still the last part of the quotation," Royan whispered. "'The

river flows towards the earth. Beware, you violators of the sacred

plain, lest the urrath of all the gods descend upon you!"'

"The river?" Nicholas asked. "As Sapper might say, I don't see no

perishing river."

Royan did not even smile at the cockney accent.

Instead she searched the profusion of writing and images that covered

all the walls around them. Then she saw it.

"Hapi!" Her voice was shrill with excitement. "The god of the Nile! The

river!'

High up the wall, on a level with the head of the great god Osiris, the

god of the river looked down upon them.

Hapi was'a hermaphrodite, with the breasts of a woman and the genitals

of a man protruding from under the pendulous belly. The mouth in his

hippopotamus head gaped wide to display the great curved tusks that

lined his cavernous jaws.

Standing on a pile of ammunition boxes, Nicholas was able to reach the

Hapi image at the full stretch of his arms.

As he touched it he exulted, "This one is raised also."

"'The river flows towards the earth,"' she called up to him. "It must

move downwards. Try it, Nicky."

"Give me a chance to clear the edges." He used the point of the blade to

chip the outline of the god free, and then he probed the plaster beneath

it and found another vertical slot running towards the floor.

"Ready to give it a go now. He folded the knife and tucked it back into

his pocket. "Hold your breath and say a little prayer for me," he

instructed.

He settled both hands on the image of the god and began to pull steadily

downwards, Gradually he brought more pressure to bear upon it, until he

was hanging all his weight on it. Nothing moved.

"It's not working, he grunted.

"Wait!" she ordered. "I am coming up."

She scrambled up on to the boxes behind him and tight,, placed both

hands around his neck. "Hang she ordered.

"Every little bit helps, I suppose," he agreed, as she lifted her feet

and hung her full weight on his shoulders.

"It's moving!" he shouted. Suddenly the image of Hapi gave way under his

hands, and with a sharp grating sound travelled down to the bottom end

of the groove in the wall.

Nicholas lost his grip on the smoothly rounded shape as it came up hard

against the end of its slot. The stack of boxes under them toppled, and

both he and Royan dropped back to the floor of the gallery. She was

still hanging around his neck, and he lost his balance as she pulled him

over backwards. The two of them sprawled on the agate floor in an untidy

tangle of arms and legs. Nicholas scrambled to his feet and pulled her

up beside him.

"What has happened?" she gasped, looking up wildly at the damaged Hapi

figure and then around the walls of the gallery.

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing has moved."

"Perhaps there is another-' she began, but broke off at a sound from the

roof above them. They both stared upwards, startled and filled with

sudden trepidation. There was a ponderous movement from above the high

plastered ceiling.

What is thatV Royan whispered. "There is something up there. It sounds

like a living thing."

A giant was moving, coming awake after slumbering for thousands of

years, stretching and turning as he awoke.

'is it-?" She could not finish the question. She had an image in her

mind of the great god himself stirring in a hidden chamber in the rock,

opening those baleful, slanted eyes, rising on one elbow to discover who

had disturbed him from his eternal sleep.

Then there was another sound, a creaking and rumbling as though the arm

of a mighty balance was swinging slowly across, as its equilibrium

altered. Softly at first, then louder, the movement gathered momentum,

like the beginning of a mountain avalanche. Then there was a report like

the shot of a cannon.

A crack appeared in the high ceiling, running the length of the gallery.

Dust smoked from the jagged opening, and then, slowly as a nightmare,

the roof began to sag down over where they stood. Both of them were

paralysed with superstitious horror, unable to tear their gaze from the

slow, inexorable collapse of the ceiling upon them. Then a chunk of

plaster struck Nicholas's upturned face, slamming into his cheek,

tearing the skin and sending him staggering backwards against the wall.

The shock and pain aroused him at last.

"The warning!" he blurted. "Taitals warning. The wrath of the gods." He

sprang to her side and grabbed her hand, "Run!" He pulled her after him.

"Taita has booby-trapped the roof!'

They raced back along the gallery towards the opening in the seated

entrance. Lumps of stone and plaster began to rain down and dust filled

the passageway, halfblinding them. The dull rumble overhead became a

rising roar as progressively the roof collapsed. They did not dare to

look back as the thunder of falling masonry swept towards them,

threatening to overtake and overwhelm them before they were able to

reach the entrance.

A jagged piece of rock as large as her head struck Royan a glancing blow

on her shoulder, and her legs sagged under her. She would have gone down

if he had not flung one arm around her and held her upright, dragging

her along the gallery. The dust obscured the passage ahead of them, so

that the square opening that offered their only chance of escape receded

in the choking fog.

"Keep going!" he yelled at her. "Almost there." As he spoke, a thick

sheet of plaster came crashing down and smashed into the tripod stand of

the floodlamp. Instantly the gallery was plunged into utter darkness.

Completely unsighted, Nicholas's first instinct was to come up short and

try to orientate himself. But all around him the rubble of the roof was

falling heavier and faster.

He knew that at any second the entire roof would come down on top of

them, burying and crushing them. Running on without a check, he dragged

Royan along behind him in the darkness. He reached the end wall at full

tilt, and the impact knocked the breath out of him. Now, through the

swirling dust cloud, he was just able to make out the rectangular

opening in the plaster wall in front of him, back-lit by the lamps on

the landing at the head of the staircase outside.

As he reeled backwards he seized Royan around the waist and lifted her

bodily off her feet. He hurled her through the opening and heard her cry

out as she fell heavily on the far side. Another piece of rubble struck

him on the back of his head and knocked him to his knees. He felt

himself teetering on the very brink of consciousness, mail but crawled

forward, groping frantically until he touched the jagged edge of the

opening. With this handhold he was able to drag himself over the sill,

just as the full weight of the roof came thundering down along the

entire gallery.

Here on the upper landing of the staircase Royan was crouching on her

knees. She crawled towards him, guided once more by the lamplight.

"Are you all right?" she panted. A trickle of blood snaked down her

cheek from a wound in her scalp line. It cut a dark glistening runnel

through the caked white dust that powdered her face.

He did not answer, but dragged himself to his feet and pulled Royan up

beside him. "Can't stay here," he croaked, _1ro just as a thic '. lite

at St. ug mouth of the opening and swept over them, choking them and

dimming the floodlamps to a faint glimmer.

"Not safe." He pulled her away from the opening. "The whole thing might

cave in." His voice was rough, his throat closing with the dust.

He dragged her to the head of the steps and they staggered down

together, stumbling against each other, their feet sliding under them as

they came on to the algae.

slippery footing. Through the dust mist ahead of them loomed the broad

square figure of Sapper.

"What the ruddy hell is going on?" he bellowed with relief as he saw

them.

"Give me a hand here," Nicholas yelled back at him.

Sapper lifted Royan in his arms and together they ran back -down the

tunnel, only stopping to draw breath when they reached the causeway over

the sink-hole.

unburrit and glared like a mirror in the high mountain sunlight. The

public telephone should have been in its booth outside the front door.

However, the instrument had long since vanished - stolen, vandalized or,

more likely, removed by the military to prevent it being used by

Political dissidents and rebels.

Tessay had expected this, and hardly glanced into the booth before she

strode into the small room which was the main post office. It was filled

with a motley crowd of peasants and villagers, queuing to conduct their

leisurely business with the elderly postmaster, the only person behind

the barred counter. Some of the customers had spread their cloaks on the

floor and settled in for a long he post office in the village of Debra

Maryarri a small building in the dusty street behind was the church. Its

walls were of unplastered unpainted brick, and its galvanized iron roof

T

wait, chatting and smoking while their children romped and crawled

around them.

Most of the patient crowd recognized Tessay as soon as she entered the

room."Even those who had waited most of the morning in the lines at the

counter greeted her respectfully and stood aside to allow her to go to

the, head of the queue. Despite two decades of African socialism, the

feudal instincts of the rural population were still strong.

Tessay was a noblewoman and she was entitled to this preference.

"Thank you, my friends." She smiled at them and shook her head. "You are

kind, but I will wait my turn."

They were embarrassed by her refusal, and when the old postmaster leaned

over his counter top and added his insistence to the others, one of the

older women seized Tessay's arm and forcefully propelled her forward.

"Jesus and all the saints bless you, Woizero Tessay." The postmaster

clapped his hands in respectful greeting.

"Welcome back to Debra Maryam. What is it that your ladyship desires?"

The entire clientele of the post office crowded around Tessay so as not

to miss a detail of her transaction.

"I want to make a telephone call to Addis," she told the postmaster and

there was a hum of comment and discussion. This was unusual and

important business indeed.

"I will take you to the telephone exchange," the postmaster told her

importantly, and donned his official blue cap for the occasion. He came

around the counter shouting and hectoring the other customers, pushing

them aside to make way for Lady Sun. Then "he ushered her through to the

back room of the building, where the telephone exchange occupied a

cubicle the size of a small lavatory.

Tessay, the postmaster and as many of the other customers who could find

standing room pushed their way into the tiny room. The exchange operator

was almost overcome by the honour being accorded him by the beautiful

Tessay, and he shouted into his headset like a sergeant major commanding

a flag party.

"Soon now!" he-beamed at Tessay. "Only small delay.

Then you speak to British Embassy in Addis."

Tessay, who knew well what a small delay constituted, retired to the

front veranda of the post office and sent for food and flasks to be

brought from the village tej shop. She treated her escort of monks,

together with half the population of Debra Maryam, to a happy picnic

while she waited for her call to be patched through half a dozen

antiquated village exchanges to the capital. Thanks to the tei, spirits

were high amongst her entourage when finally, an hour later, the

postmaster rushed out tell her proudly that they had succeeded and that

her party was awaiting her on the line in the back room.

Tessay, the monks and fifty villagers followed the postmaster back into

the exchange and crowded, jabbering, into the cubicle. The overflow

backed up into the main post hall.

"Geoffrey Tennant speaking." The upper'class English accent was tinny

with distance and static.

"Mr Tennant, this is Woizero Tessay."

"I was expecting your call." Geoffrey's voice lightened as he realized

that he was talking to a pretty girl. "How are you, my dear?"

Tessay passed Nicholas's message to him.

"Tell Nicky it's as good as done," Geoffrey acknowledged, and hung up.

"Now," Tessay addressed the postmaster, want to place another call to

Addis - to the Egyptian Embassy." There was a buzz of delight from her

audience when they realized that the entertainment was not yet over for

the day. Everybody repaired to the veranda for more tej and

conversation.

The second call took even longer to connect, and it was after five

'clock when Tessay was at last put in contact with the Egyptian cultural

attach. Had she not once met him at one of those ubiquitous cocktail

parties on the diplomatic circuit in Addis, and made a profound

impression on him then, he would probably not have accepted her call

now.

"You are very lucky to have reached me so late," he told her. "We

usually close at four-thirty, but there is a meeting of the Organization

of African Unity on at the moment and I am working late. Anyway, how may

I help you, Woizero Tessay?"

As soon as she told him the name and rank of the person in Cairo to whom

Royan's message was addressed, his superior and condescending attitude

altered dramatically and he became effusive and eager to please. He

wrote down everything she said in detail, asking her to repeat and spell

the names of people and places. Finally he read his notes back to her

for confirmation.

At the end of the long conversation, he dropped his voice to an intimate

level and told her. "I was greatly saddened to hear of your recent

bereavement, Lady Sun.

Colonel Brusilov was a man I held in high regard. Perhaps when you

return to Addis you would do me the honour of dining with me one

evening."

"How kind and thoughtful of you." Tessay's tones were honeyed. "I would

so much enjoy meeting your charming wife again." She hung up while he

was still making confused noises of assent and denial.

By this time the sun was already setting behind the sky castles of

cumulonimbus, and there was the smell of rain in the air. It was too

late to start the journey back down the escarpment that evening, so

Tessay was relieved when the headman of Debra Maryam village sent one of

his teenage daughters to invite her to spend the night as a guest in his

home.

The headman's house was the finest in the village, not one of the

circular tukuls, but a square brick building with an iron roof. His wife

and daughters had prepared a banquet in Tessay's honour, and all the

village notables, including the priests from the church, had been

invited. It was therefore after midnight before Tessay was able to

escape to the principal bedroom, which the headman and his wife had

vacated for her.

Just before Tessay fell asleep she heard the heavy raindrops rattling on

the corrugated iron roof over her head. It was a comforting sound, but

she thought briefly of the dam further downstream in the gorge, and

hoped that this shower was merely the harbinger and not the true onset

of the big rains.

When she started awake much later the rain had passed. Beyond her

uncurtained window the night was moonless and silent, except for the

howling of a pariahdog down in the village. She wondered what had woken

her, and was filled suddenly with a premonition of impending disaster, a

legacy from the Mengistu days, when any sound in the night might warn of

the arrival of the security police. So strong was this feeling that she

could not get to sleep again. Creeping quietly out of her bed, she began

dressing in the dark. She had decided to call her monks and start back

along the trail in the darkness. Only when she was at Mek Nimmur's side

once again would she feel secure.

She had just pulled on her jodhpurs and was searching beneath the bed

for her sandals when she heard the sound of a truck engine in the

distance. She went to the window and listened. The air had been cooled

by the rain and she felt the chill on her naked arms and chest.

The truck sounded as though it was approaching the village from the

south, up the track that followed the river bank. It was coming fast,

and her sense of unease sharpened. The villagers had spoken to the

monks, and it was now common knowledge that she was Mek Nimmur's woman.

Mek was a wanted man. Suddenly she felt very vulnerable and alone.

Quickly she pulled the woollen shamma over her head and thrust her feet

into her sandals. As she crept from the room she heard the headman

snoring in the front room where he and his wife had moved to make room

for her.

She turned down the short passage to the kitchen. The fir i I in the

hearth had burned down, but she could make out the shapes of the

sleeping monks on the mud floor. They lay With their shamnus pulled over

their heads, completer overed, like a row of bodies on mortuary

tables. She knelt beside the nearest of them and shook him, but

obviously he had enjoyed the tej at dinner because he was difficult to

rouse.

The sound of the approaching truck was much louder and closer by now,

and she felt her uneasiness take on a tinge of panic. Realizing that in

an emergency the monks would probably be of little real help to her, she

stood up and groped her way quickly towards the back door.

The truck was right outside the front of the house now. The headlights

flashed across the front windows and were briefly reflected down the

passageway. Abruptly the engine roar sank to a burble as the driver

decelerated, and she heard the squeal of brakes and the crunch of tyres

in the gravel outside. Then there was shouting and the trampling of many

feet as men jumped down from the back of the stationary truck.

Tessay froze halfway across the small kitchen, her head cocked to

listen. Suddenly there was a loud banging on the flimsy front door, and

chillingly familiar shouts of, "Open up here! Central Intelligence! Open

the door! Nobody leave the house!'

Tessay ran for the back door, but in the darkness she tripped over a low

table covered with dirty dishes from the previous evening's meal. She

fell heavily and the bowls -till and tei flasks crashed to the floor and

shattered. Instantly the men at the front door put their shoulders to

it, tearing it off its hinges. They burst into the house, shouting and

breaking furniture, torches flashing as they searched the front rooms.

There was a confused babble of alarm as the headman and his family

struggled awake, and then the sound of heavy blows with club and rifle

butt, followed by shrieks of pain and terror.

Tessay reached the back door and struggled to open it.

The sound of strange men rampaging through the house made her fingers

clumsy. She struggled with the lock. All the while she could hear other.

men outside running through the yard to surround the house completely.

At last she got the door open. It was dark and the area was unfamiliar

so she did not know in which direction to run, but she heard the river

close by in the night.

"If I can only reach the bank," she thought, and started across the

yard.

As she did so the beam of an electric torch blinded her, and a coarse

voice bellowed, "There she is!'

Any doubt that she was the prey was instantly dispelled, and she fled

like a startled hare in the beam of the light. They bayed behind her

like a pack of hounds. She reached the bank of the river and spun off to

the right, downstream. A pistol cracked out behind her and she ducked as

a shot fluted past her head.

"Don't shoot, you baboons!" a voice roared in commanding tones. "We want

her for questioning."

In the torch beam her white shamnw flashed like the wings of a moth

flitting around the candle flame.

"Stop her!" shouted the officer behind her. "Don't let her get away."

But she was fleet as a gazelle, and her lightly sandalled feet flew

across the rough terrain while the heavily equipped soldiers blundered

along behind her. Her spirits soared as she realized that she was

pulling away from them.

The sound of the pursuit dwindled behind her and she had reached the

limit of the effective range of the torch beam when she ran into a fence

of rusty barbed wire. Three wire strands whipped across her lower body,

at the level of her knees, her hips and her diaphragm. The top strand

drove the breath from her lungs, and the barbs tore through the wool of

her clothing and into her flesh. They snagged her like a fish in the

mesh of a net, and she hung there struggling helplessly. Rough hands

seized her and dragged her off the wire, and she sobbed with despair and

with the pain of the sharp wire spurs tearing her skin. One of the

soldiers grabbed her wrist and twisted it up between her

shoulder-blades, laughing with sadistic relish when she cried out at the

pain.

The officer came up panting over the rough ground.

He was overweight, and even in the cold night air he was sweating

heavily. It greased his fat cheeks and glistened in the light of the

torch.

"Do not hurt her, you oaf," he gasped. "She is not a criminal. She is a

high-bred lady. Bring her to the truck, but treat her with respect."

With a man on each arm they marched her to the truck, holding her so

that her feet barely touched the rough ground, and then shoved her up

into the cab on to the seat beside the uniformed driver. The plump

officer climbed in heavily after her, and she found herself wedged

in'firinly between the two men. The soldiers scrambled up into the rear

of the truck, and the driver revved the engine and let out the clutch.

Tessay was sobbing softly, and the officer glanced sideways at her. She

saw in the reflection of the headlights that his expression was gentle

and sympathetic, completely at odds with his actions.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked softly, stifling her sobs. "What

have I done wrong?"

"I have been ordered to take you to Colonel Nogo, the district

commander, for questioning in connection with shufta activities in the

Gojam," he told her, as they jolted and bounced down the rough track.

They were both silent for a while, and then the officer said quietly in

English, "The driver speaks only Amharic, I wanted to tell you that I

knew your father, Alto Zemen.

He was a good man. I am sorry for what is happening here tonight, but I

am only a lieutenant. I have to follow my orders."

"I understand that it is not your choice, or your blame."

"My name is Hammed. If I can, I will help you. For Alto Zemen's sake.,

"Thank you, Lieutenant Hammed. I need friends now."

while they waited for the dust of the cavein to settle, and for any

loose hanging rock to fall or stabilize, Nicholas dressed the minor

injuries that Ryan had sustained. The cut over her temple was not deep,

barely more than a scratch.

Nicholas saw that it did not require a stitch. He disinfected it and

covered it with a Band Aid. However, her shoulder, which the falling

rock had struck, was badly bruised. He massaged it with arnica cream.

His own bruises he treated less ceremoniously. Within an hour of the

cave-in he was ready to go back up the tunnel. He ordered Royan and

Sapper to remain on the causeway over the sink-hole while he returned to

the landing at the top of the stairs alone. He carried a bamboo pole and

a hand lamp connected to the Honda generator.

Nicholas proceeded with the utmost caution, probing the roof of the

tunnel for weakness as he went. When he reached the landing he saw at

once that the rock fall had smashed down what remained of the wkite

plaster door that had originally sealed the entrance to the tomb. The

ammunition crates, eight of which contained the statues JVI from the

shrines, had been knocked about and scattered, and some of them were

partially buried under the fallen rubble. He retrieved them and opened

each of the packed crates in turn to check the contents. With immense

relief he discovered that the stout metal containers had withstood the

rough treatment and there was no damage to the precious statues they

held. One at a time he carried them back down the tunnel as far as the

causeway and handed them into Sapper's care.

When he returned to the landing outside the tomb, Royan insisted on

accompanying him. Even his lurid descriptions of the danger of a further

rock-fall could not dissuade her. Her dismay when she stood outside the

shattered gallery was overwhelming.

"It's totally destroyed," she whispered. "All those mar, vellous works

of art. I cannot believe that Taita wanted this to happen."

"No,'Nicholas agreed ruefully. "His plan was to give us a big send-off

along the road past the seven pylons to the happy hunting grounds. And

he damned nigh succeeded."

"It's going to take a lot of hard work to clear up this mess," she said.

"What on earth are you talking about?" He turned on her in genuine

alarm. "We have saved the statues, and that's all we can hope for. Now I

think it's time to cut our losses and get out of here."

"Get out of here? Are you crazy?" She rounded on him furiously. "Are you

out of your mind?"

"At least the statues will pay our costs," he explained, and there might

even be something left over to divvy up between us, in accordance with

our agreement."

"You aren't dreaming of giving up now, when we are so close?" Her voice

rose sharply with agitation.

"The gallery is destroyed-' he began in more reasonable tones, but she

stamped her foot with agitation and shouted him down.

"The tomb is still there. Dammit! Nicky, Taita would not have gone to

those lengths if it were not. We are getting too close now - that is why

he fired that warning shot across our bows. Don't you see? We have him

really worried now. We can't give up with the prize almost in sight."

"Royan, be reasonable."

"No! No! You be reasonable." She refused to listen.

"You have to start clearing the gallery right away. I know the entrance

is open now. All we have to do is clear this mess, and I am certain that

we will find the true entrance to the tomb behind the rubble that Taita

deliberately dropped on us."

I think that bang on your head has loosened a couple of nuts and bolts."

He threw up his hands in resignation.

"But what's the use arguing with a crazy woman? We will clear just

enough of the scree to prove to you that there is nothing more to

discover in there."

"The dust is going to be our big problem." Sapper eyed the blocked

gallery entrance when they told him what they intended. "As soon as we

touch that rubble there is going to be clouds of it - more than our

little blower fan can handle."

"Right," Nicholas agreed briskly. "We will have to wet it all down. Two

lines of men back down the tunnel to the sinkholes One chain passing up

water buckets, and the other chain passing back the rubble from the

cave-in."

"It's going to take a lot of work." Sapper sucked his bottom lip

lugubriously.

"You signed on to be tough,'Nicholas reminded him.

"No time to start whinging now."

The monks, still convinced that they were engaged on the Lord's work,

accepted this new task cheerfully. They sang as they passed the chunks

of broken plaster and -rock in one direction and the clay pots of water

from the sinkhole in the other. Nicholas worked at the rock-fall with

the gang of Buffaloes, led by Hansith. It was hard, messy and dangerous

work, for each piece of rubble had to be doused with water before it

could be levered out of the pack and passed down the chain. The

staircase was soon running with muddy water and the steps were

treacherous underfoot. The fallen rock was loose and unstable, and there

was always the danger of a secondary collapse.

So many men working in the confined spaces of the gallery and tunnel

taxed the ability of the little blower fan to recirculate the air, and

it was hot and oppressive. The men stripped to loincloths and their

bodies glistened with sweat. The rubble passed back down the tunnel was

dumped into the sinkholes Even that large volume of material made no

difference to the level of the black waters. It was simply swallowed up

into the depths without trace.

Nicholas found the crowded workings so humid and claustrophobic that at

the change of the first shift he had to escape into the open air, if

only for a few minutes. Even the dark and forbidding chasm of Taita's

pool was a relief after the close confines of the underground workings.

Mek Nimmur was waiting for him when he climbed out over the wall of the

coffer dam on to the ledge beside the pool.

"Nicholas!" Mek's handsome dark face was grave. "Has Tessay returned

from Debra Maryam yet? She should have been back yesterday."

"I have not seen her, Mek. I thought she'was with you." Mek shook his

head. "I wanted to make certain that she had not returned without my men

seeing her, before I send a patrol up the trail to search for her."

"I am sorry, Mek. I did not anticipate any danger in sending her up the

escarpment." Nicholas felt a stab of guilt.

"If I had thought there was any danger, I would not have allowed her to

go," Mek agreed. "I have sent men to search for her."

But Tessay's absence was another worry for Nicholas.

It I urked at the edge of his mind during the days that followed, as the

clearing of the long funeral gallery proceeded too slowly for his

satisfaction.

Royan spent as much time at the face as Nicholas did, and both of them

were as filthy with mud and dirt as the Buffaloes who were labouring

there beside them. She mourned over each fragment of the shattered

murals.

Before they were carried away to be thrown into the sinkhole, she tried

to retrieve those on which significant portions of the paintings were

still intact. There was one jagged piece of plaster on which the lovely

head of Isis was still in one piece, and another on which the entire

figure of Thoth, the god of writing, was preserved. However, most of the

paintings were destroyed beyond any hope of ever restoring them, and

sadly they were consigned to the pit.

There was no sense of time in the long gallery, and they could not tell

night from day. It was always a surprise to leave the precincts of the

tomb and find that the stars were shining in the narrow strip of sky

that showed above Taita's pool, or to find the bright African sun

burning hotly down out of the cloudless blue. They ate and slept only

when their bodies demanded it, not according to the passage of the

hours.

Re'entering the tomb after a few hours' sleep in their shelters beside

the pool, they were crossing the causeway over the sink-hole when a wild

cry reverberated down the shaft ahead of them. Immediately there was a

hullabaloo of query and answer, and excited shouts from the men working

in the upper levels of the tunnel.

"Hansith has found something," Royan cried. "Dammit, Nicky, I knew we

should have stayed-' She began to run, and he hurried after her.

They came out on the landing in front of the gallery to find it crowded

with chattering, gesticulating, half-naked workmen. Nicholas forced his

way through them with Royan on his heels. They realized that Hansith had

cleared the gallery as far as where the shrine of Osiris had once stood.

The roof above them was jagged and broken, and lying amongst the rubbish

on the ruined agate tiles of the floor Nicholas made out the remains of

the mechanism which Taita had placed in the roof, and which they had

brought crashing down when they had activated the device.

The main part of this was an enormous stone wheel, resembling a mill

wheel and weighing many tons. Nicholas stopped to give it a cursory

examination.

"When you read River God, you realize that Taita had an obsession with

the wheel," he told Royan. "Chariot wheels, water wheels, and now this

must have been the balance wheel of his booby-trap. VA-ten we moved the

levers, we toppled the wedges that held this monstrosity in place. Once

it started rolling, it tumbled all the drop-stones that he had stacked

above the ceiling of the gallery." He glanced up at the shattered roof.

"Not now, Nicky!" Royan was hopping with impatience. "Time for your

lectures later. Taita's deathtrap is not what has excited Hansith. He

has found something else. Come on!'

They pushed their way through the pack of workmen until they reached

Hansith's tall figure.

"What is it?" Nicholas shouted over the heads of the others. "What have

you found, Hansith?"

"Here, effendi," Hansith shouted back. "Come quickly."

They pushed their way to the face, and stopped beside the monk at the

end of the blocked gallery.

"There!" Hansith pointed proudly.

Nicholas went down on one knee in the shattered remains of the shrine.

Small pieces of the painted plaster still adhered to the fractured rock

wall. Hansith pulled a slab out of the collapsed face, and pointed into

the space it had left. Nicholas peered into it and felt his pulse begin

to race. There was an opening in the side of the gallery, Even at first

glance he realized that it was the mouth of another tunnel leading off

at right-angles from the long gallery. It had been concealed behind the

plaster-covered image of the great god.

As he stared into it with awe, he felt Royan's hand on his arrn and her

warrii breath on his cheek. "This is it, Nicky. The entrance to the true

tomb of Mamose. This gallery was a bluff. Taita's red herring. This is

the veritable tomb."

"Hansith!" Nicholas called to him in a voice that was hoarse with

emotion. "Get your men to clear this doorway."

As the workmen moved the rocks Nicholas and Royan hovered close behind

them, so that they were able to watch the shape of the doorway as it was

fully revealed. It proved to be a dark rectangle, of the same dimensions

as the tunnel leading up from the sink-hole, three metres wide by two

high. The lintel and the door jambs were of beautifully cut and dressed

stone, and when Nicholas shone his lamp into the opening he saw a flight

of stone steps rising before him.

They moved the cables and the lights into the gallery and arranged them

at the entrance to this new doorway, but when Nicholas set foot on the

first step he found Royan at his side.

"I am coming with you, she told him firmly.

"It's probably booby-trapped," he warned her. "Taita is lying in wait

for you around the first bend."

"Don't try that. It just won't work, mister! I am coming."

They went slowly up the steep steps, pausing on each one to survey the

walls and the way ahead. Twenty steps from the bottom they reached

another landing. A pair of doorways led off it, one on either side.

However, the staircase continued climbing directly ahead of them.

Which way?"Nicholas asked.

"Keep going up," Royan urged him. "We can explore these side passages

later."

Cautiously, they continued climbing. After twenty more steps they came

out on an identical landing, with a doorway on each side and the

stairway in front of them.

"Keep going up," Royan ordered, without waiting for him to answer,

Twenty more steps and there was another landing with the familiar

openings on either side and the stairway straight ahead.

"This isn't making sense," Nicholas protested, but she prodded him in we

should keep going on upwards," she told him, and he did not protest

further. They passed another landing and then yet another, each of them

the exact image of those that they had passed lower down.

"At last!" Nicholas exclaimed when they came out at ay on each the top

of the staircase,,with the expected door.

"This is as far side but now a blank wall in front of them. as it goes."

she asked. "How man

"How many landings are there? altogetherr

"Eight he answered.

"Eight," she agreed. "Isn't that a familiar number

nowr lamplight. "You He turned to stare down at her in the mean-'

"I mean the eight shrines in the long gallery, these the bao board."

eight landings, and the eight cups of They stood silent and undecided on

the top landing looked about them.

an Okay," he said at last, "if you are so damned clever, tell me which

way to go now."

she recited. "Let's try the

"Eeny'meeny-miny-moe,'

t'hand doorway." righ and passage only a short They followed ri t

distance before they were confronted by a Tjunction - a blank wall with

identical twin passageways on each side.

"Take the right one again," she counselled, and they followed- it. But

when they came to the next T junction Nicholas stopped and faced her.

"You know what is happening here, don't your he demanded. "This is

another one of Taita's tricks. He has led us into a maze. If it were not

for the cable, we would be lost already."

With a bemused expression she looked back the way they had come, and

then down the unexplored passages to their right and left.

"When he built this, Taita could not have anticipated the age of

electricity. He expected any grave robber to be -quipped the same way he

was. Imagine being caught in here without the electric cable to follow

back the way we have come," Nicholas said softly. "Imagine having only

an oil lamp for light. Imagine what would happen to you when the oil

burnt out and you were lost in here in the utter darkness."

Royan shivered and gripped his arm.

whispered. "It's scaring!" she "Taita is beginning to play rough,'

Nicholas said softly.

"I was developing rather a soft spot for the old boy. But now I am

beginning to change my mind."

She shuddered again. "Let's go back," she whispered, "We should never

have rushed in here like this. We must go back and work it out

carefully. We are unprepared. I have the feeling that we are in danger -

I mean real danger, the same as we were in the long gallery."

As they started back through the twists and turns, picking up the

electric cable as they retreated down the stone passageways, the

temptation to break into a run became stronger with each step. Royan

hung tightly to Nicholas's arm. It seemed to both of them that some

intelligent and malignant presence lurked behind them in the darkness,

following them, watching them. and biding its time.

The army truck carrying Tessay drove back through the village of Debra

Maryam, and then turned off on to the track that followed the Dandera

river downstream towards the escarpment of the Abbay gorge.

"This is not the way to army headquarters, Tessay told Lieutenant

Hammed, and he shifted awkwardly on the seat beside her.

"Colonel Nogo is not at his headquarters. I have orders to take you to

another location."

"There is only one other place in this direction," she said. "The base

camp of the foreign prospecting company, Pegasus."

"Colonel Nogo is using that as a forward base in his campaign against

the shufta in the valley," he explained. "I have orders to take you to

him there."

Neither of them spoke again during the long, bumpy ride over the rough

track. It was almost noon when at last they reached the edge of the

escarpment and turned off on to the fork that brought them at last to

the Pegasus campThe camouflage'clad guards at the gate saluted when they

arrived. The truck drove through the gates, recognized and parked in

front of one of the long Quonset huts within the compound.

"Please wait here." Hammed got down and went into the hut, but was gone

for only a few minutes.

"Please come with me, Lady Sun." He looked "awkward and embarrassed, and

could not meet her eyes as he helped her down from the cab. He led her

to the door of the hut, and stood aside to let her enter first.

She looked around the sparsely furnished room, and realized that it must

be the company's administration centre. A conference table ran almost

the full length of the room, and there were filing cabinets and two

desks set against the side walls. A map of the area and a few technical

charts were the only decorations on the bare walls. Two men sat at the

table, and she recognized both of them immediately.

Colonel Nogo looked up at her, and his eyes were cold behind his

metal-framed spectacles. As always, his long, thin body was immaculately

uniformed; but his head was bare. His maroon beret lay on the table in

front of him.

Jake Helm leaned back in his chair with his arms folded.

At first glance his short-cropped hair made him look like a boy. Only

when she looked closer did she see how his skin was weathered, and

notice the crows' feet at the corners of his eyes. He wore an

open-necked shirt and blue jeans that were bleached almost white. His

belt buckle was of ornate Indian silver, the shape of a wild mustang's

head.

The sleeves of his cotton shirt were rolled high around his lumpy

biceps. He chewed upon the dead butt of a cheap Dutch cheroot, and the

smell of the strong tobacco was rank and offensive.

"Very well, lieutenant," Nogo dismissed Hammed in Amharic. "Wait

outside. I will call you when I need you." Once Hammed had left the

room, Tessay demanded, "Why have I been arrested, Colonel Nogo?"

Neither man acknowledged the question. They both regarded her

expressionlessly "I demand to know the reason for this high'handed

treatment," she persisted.

"You have been consorting with a band of notorious terrorists," said

Nogo softly. "Your actions have made you one of them, a shufta."

"That is not true."

"You have trespassed in a mineral concession in the Abbay valley," said

Helm. "And you and your accomplices have begun mining operations in the

area which belongs to this company."

"There are no mining operations," she protested.

"We have other information. We have evidence that you have built a dam

across the Dandera river-'

"That is nothing to do with me."

"So you do not deny that there is a dam?"

"It is nothing to do with me," she repeated. "I am not a member of any

terrorist group, and I have not taken part in any mining operations."

They were both silent again. Nogo made an entry in the notebook in front

of him. Helm stood up and sauntered across to the window behind her

right shoulder. The silence drew out until she could bear it no longer.

Even though she knew it was part of the campaign of nerves they were

waging against her, she had to break it.

"I have travelled most of the night in an army truck," she said. "I am

tired, and I need to go to a lavatory."

"If what you need to do is urgent you can do it where you are standing.

Neither Mr Helm nor I will be offended." Nogo ditered in a surprisingly

girlish manner, but did not look up from his book.

She looked over her shoulder at the door, but Helm crossed to it and

turned the key in the lock, slipping the key into his pocket. She knew

she must show no weakness in front of these two, and, though she was

tired and afraid and her bladder ached, she feigned an air of confidence

and assurance and crossed to the nearest chair. She pulled it from the

table and sat down in it easily.

Nogo looked up at her and frowned. He had not expected her to react this

way.

"You know the shufta bandit Mck Nimmur the accused abruptly.

"No," she said coldly. "I know the patriot and democratic leader Mek

Nimmur. He is no shufta."

"You are his concubine, his whore. Of course, you will say this."

She looked away from him with disdain, and his voice rose shrilly.

"Where is Mek Nimmur? How many men does he have with him?" Her composure

was beginning to rattle him."

She ignored the question, and Nogo scowled at her furiously. "If you do

not cooperate with us, I will have to use stronger methods to make you

answer my questions," he warned.

She turned in her chair and stared out of the window.

In the long silence that followed, Jake Helm crossed the room and went

to the door behind Nogo that led through to the rooms at the rebir of

the hut. He disappeared through it, and closed it behind him. The walls

of the hut were thin, and Tessay made out the murmur of voices from the

room beyond. The cadence and inflection were neither English nor

Amharic. They were using a foreign language in there. She guessed that

Helmw'as receiving instructions from a superior, who did not want her to

be able to recognize him at some later date.

After a few minutes Helm re-emerged and closed the door behind him

without locking it. He nodded to Nogo, who at once stood up. They both

came across to stand in front of Tessay.

I think that it will be better for all of us if we finish this business

as quickly as possible," said Helm softly. "Then you can go to the

bathroom, and I can go to my breakfast." She raised her chin and stared

at him defiantly, but did not answer him.

"Colonel Nogo, has tried to be reasonable. He is bound by certain

niceties of his official position. Fortunately I do not have the same

restraints. I am going to ask you the same questions that he did, but

this time you will answer them."

He took the dead cheroot from his mouth and examined the tip. Then he

threw the butt into a corner of the room and took a flat tin from his

hip pocket. From it he selected a fresh cheroot, long and black, and lit

it carefully, holding the match to it until it was drawing evenly. Then,

amid a cloud of pungent tobacco smoke, he waved the match to extinction

and asked, ",Ihere is Mek Nimmur?"

She shrugged and looked away, out of the side window of the hut.

Abruptly, without signalling the blow in any way, he hit her open-handed

across her face. It was a savage blow, delivered with a force that

snapped her head around, Then, before she could recover, he swung back

again and slammed his knuckles across her jawline. Her head was thrown

back violently in the opposite direction and she was knocked flying from

her chair.

Nogo stooped over her and seized her arms, twisting them up behind her

back. He lifted her back into the seat and stood behind her. He held her

in such a surprisingly powerful grip that she could feel the skin of her

upper arms bruising beneath his fingers.

"I have no more time to waste," Helm said quietly, taking the burning

cheroot from his lips to inspect the glowing tip. "Let us start again,

Where is Mek Nimmur?" Tessay's left eardrum felt as if it had burst with

the ferocity of those blows. Her hearing buzzed and sang. Her teeth had

been driven halfway through the flesh of her cheek, and her mouth filled

slowly with her own blood.

"Where is Mek Nimmur?" Helm repeated, leaning his face closer to hers.

"What are your friends doing with the dam in the Dandera river?"

She gathered the blood and saliva in her mouth, and suddenly and

explosively spat it into his face.

He recoiled violently and wiped the bloody mess from his eyes with the

palm of his hand.

Hold herV he said to Nogo, and seized the front of her blouse. With one

heave he ripped it open down to her waist, and Nogo giggled and leaned

forward over her shoulder to look at her breasts. He giggled again as

Helm took one of them in his hand and squeezed out the nipple between

his finger and thumb. It was the dark purple colour of a ripe mulberry.

He held her like that, pinching her flesh with his nails until the skin

tore and a droplet of blood welled up and trickled over his thumb. Then

with his other hand he took the burning cheroot from his lips and blew

on the top until it glowed hotly.

"Where is Mek Nimmur?" he asked, and lowered the cheroot towards her

breast. "WHAt are they doing in the Dandera river?

She stared down in horror as he brought the burning cheroot closer, and

tried to wriggle away from him. But Nogo held her firmly from behind.

She screamed once, on an agonized drawn-out note, as the glowing coal

touched, the tip of her nipple and the delicate skin began to blister.

inter," said Royan, spreading the enlargement of the fourth face of the

stele from Tanus's tomb under the bright glare of the floodlamp. "This

is the side that contains Taita's notations, which I am postulating are

those of the bao board. I don't understand all of them, but by a process

of elimination I have determined that the first symbol denotes one of

the four sides, or as he terms them the castles of the board., She

showed him the pages of her notebook on which she had made her

calculations.

"See here, the seated baboon is the north castle, the bee is the south,

the bird is the west and the scorpion the east." She pointed out to him

the same symbols on the photograph of the stele. "Then the second and

third figures are numbers - I believe that they designate the file and

the cup. With these we can follow the moves of his imaginary red stones.

The reds are the highest-ranking colours on the board."

"What about the verses between each set of notations?" Nicholas asked.

"Such as this one here, about the north wind and the storm?"

"I am not sure about those. Probably merely smoke, screens, if I know

Taita. He is never one to make life too easy for us. Perhaps they do

have significance, but we can only hope to unravel them as we work

through the moves of our stones."

Nicholas studied her figures a while, then grinned ruefully. "Just think

how remote was the possibility that anybody would ever be able to

decipher the clues he left behind. The first requirement is that the

searcher must have access to both chronicles, the seventh scroll and the

stele of Tanus, before he had any chance of understanding the key to the

tomb."

She laughed - a throaty, well'satisfied sound. "Yes, he must have

believed that he was perfectly safe. Well, we will see now, MasteTTaita.

We will see just how clever you really were." Then, sober and

businesslike once more, she looked up the stone staircase that led to

Taita's maze.

"Now we have to see if my figures and theories fit into the hard stones

and walls of Taita's architecture. But where do we start?"

"At the beginning," Nicholas suggested, "the god plays the first coup.

That's what Taita told us. If we start here in the shrine of Osiris, at

the foot of the staircase, then perhaps that will give us the alignment

of his imaginary bao board."

"I had the same idea," she agreed immediately. "Let's postulate that

this is the north castle of Taita board. Then we work the protocol of

the four bulls from here."

It was slow and painstaking work, trying to work their way into the mind

of the ancient scribe by probing the labyrinth of passages and tunnels

that he had built four thousand years previously. This time they moved

into the maze with more circumspection. Nicholas had filled his pockets

with lumps of dried white river clay, and he used these like a

schoolmaster's stick of chalk to write on the stone walls at each branch

and fork of the tunnels, setting out the notations from the winter face

of the, stele and marking a signpost to enable them not only to find

their way through the maze but to relate it to the model that Royan was

drawing up in her notebook.

They found that their first assumption that the shrine of Osiris was the

north castle of the board seemed to be correct, and they happily

believed that with this as the key it would be a simple matter to follow

the moves of play to their conclusion. But these hopes were soon dashed

as they realized that Taita was not thinking in the simple two

dimensions of the conventional board. He had added the third dimension

to the equation.

The stairway leading up from the shrine of Osiris was not the only link

between the eight landings. Each of the passages leading off from it was

subtly angled either upwards or downwards. As they followed the twists

and turns of one of these tunnels they did not detect the fact that they

were changing levels. Then suddenly they reemerged on to the central

staircase, but on a landing higher than the one they had entered from.

They stood there and stared at each other in horrified disbelief.

Royan spoke first. "I didn't even have the feeling that we were

ascending," she whispered. "The whole thing is infinitely more complex

than I first assumed."

"It must be constructed like one of those nuclear models of some

complicated carbon atom,'Nicholas agreed with awe. "It interlinks on all

eight planes. Quite frankly, it's terrifying."

"Now I have some- inkling what those extraneous symbols signify," Royan

muttered. "They set out the levels.

I We are going to have to rethink the entire concept.

matic rules.

"Three'dimensional bao, played to enig What chance have we got against

him?" Nicholas shook his head ruefully. "What we really need is a

computer. Taita.

without good reason. The wasn't Puffing his own virtues old hooligan

really was a mathematical genius." He shone the lamp back down the

tunnel from which they had come.

"Even when you know it's there you cannot actually see the fall in the

floor level. He designed and built it without even a slide rule or a

spirit level in his back pocket. This maze is an extraordinary piece of

engineering."

"You can form Your fan club later," she suggested. "But right now let's

start grinding those numbers again."

I am going to move the lights and the desks up here, on to this central

landing of the staircase."Nicholas agreed, I think we should work from

the centre of the board. It may help us to visualize it. Right now he

has got me thoroughly confused."

The only sound in the room was the soft on the sobbing of the

woman who lay curled Milan floor in a puddle of her own blood and urine.

Tuma Nogo sat at the long conference table and lit a he looked

cigarette. His hands trembled slightly, and gh the sickened, He was a

soldier, and he had lived through Mengistu terror. He was a hard man and

accustomed to violence and cruelty, but he was shaken with what he had

just witnessed. He knew now why von Schiller placed such The man was

barely human.

reliance on Helm Across the room Jake Helm was washing his hands in

tediously and then dabbed the small basin. He dried them fas at the

stains on his clothing with the towel as he came back and stood over

Tessay.

"I don't think there is anything else she can tell us," he said calmly.

"I don't think she held anything back."

Nogo glanced down at the woman, and saw the livid burns that spotted her

chest and her cheeks like the running ulcerations of some dreadful

smallpox. Her eyes were closed, and her lashes were frizzled away. She

had held out well. It was only when Helm had touched her eyelids with

the burning cheroot that she had at last capitulated, and gabbled out

the answers to his questions.

Nogo felt queasy, but he was relieved that it had not been necessary to

hold her lids open, as Helm had ordered, and to watch as he quenched the

flame of the cheroot against her weeping eyeballs.

"Watch her," Helm ordered, as he rolled down his sleeves. "She is a

tough one. Don't take any chances with her."

Helm walked past him, and went to the door in the far end of the hut. He

left the door open, and Nogo could hear their voices, but they were

speaking in German so he could not understand what they were saying. He

understood now why von Schiller had chosen not to be present during the

questioning. He obviously knew how Helm worked.

Helm came back into the room, and nodded at Nogo.

"Very well. We are finished with her. You know what to do., Nogo stood

up nervously and placed his hand on the webbing holster at his side.

"Here?"he asked. "No!"

"Don't be a bloody fool," Helm snapped. "Take her away. Far away. Then

get somebody in here to clean up this mess." Helm turned on his heel and

went back into the rear room.

Nogo roused himself and then went to the door of the hut. He walked wide

of where Tessay lay, so as not to soil his canvas paratrooper boots.

"Lieutenant Hammed!the called through the door.

t Hammed and Nogo lifted Tessay to her feet. Neither them spoke and

they were subdued, almost chastened, as torn and bloodied clothing.

they helped her into her yes from her naked body and the Hammed averted

his ed her glossy amber skin.

burns and other injuries that marre He draped the shamnw over her

shoulders, and led her towards the door, When she stumbled he caught her

before her with a hand under her elbow.

she fell and supported truck, and she moved He led her down the steps to

the sat in the passenger seat slowly, like a very old woman. She her

cupped hands.

with her burned and swollen face in Nogo summoned Hammed with a jerk of

his head, and led him aside. He spoke quietly to him, and Hammed's

listened to his orders. At expression became stricken as he one point he

started to protest, but Nogo snarled at him savagely and he chewed his

lower lip in silence.

"Remember!" Nogo repeated. "Well away from any of the villages. Make

certain that there are no witnesses.

Report back to me immediately."

Hammed straightened his shoulders and saluted before up into the seat

he marched back to the truck and climbed the driver a curt order and

they beside Tessay. He gav drove out of the camp, following the track

back towards Debra Maryam. sed and in such pain that she had Tessay was

so confu s, she lurched lost all sense of time. Only half-consciou ugh

icularly ro about in the seat when the truck hit a part ead rolled

loosely on her stretch of the track, and her shoulders. Her face was so

swollen that it required an effort and when she did she thought to force

her eyelids apart, that her vision was failing and that she was going

blind.

sun, had set and darkness had Then she realized that the in the hut with

fallen. She must have spent the whole day Helm.

She felt a mild lift of relief that the burns on her eyelids had not

done more damage. At least she was still

form able to see. She peered out through the windscreen, and found

that in the headlights the road was unfamiliar.

"Where are you taking me?" she mumbled. "This is not the way back to the

village."

Lieutenant Hammed sat slumped beside her in the seat and would not

answer. She relapsed into a daze of pain and exhaustion.

She was jerked awake when the truck braked abruptly and the driver

switched off the ignition. Rude hands dragged her out of the cab and

into the glare of the headlights. Her hands were jerked behind her back

and her wrists were bound together with a raw-hide thong.

"You are hurting me," she whimpered. "You are cutting my wrists." She

had used up the last of her strength and courage. She felt beaten and

pathetic, with no fight left in her.

One of the soldiers yanked on her bound wrists and shoved her off the

road. Two others followed, each carrying trenching tools. There was

enough of a moon for her to see a grove of eucalyptus trees about a

hundred metres from the side of the road, and they led her there. They

pushed her down at the base of one of the trees and the man who had tied

her wrists stood over her, holding his rifle casually aimed down at her

and smoking a cigarette with his free hand. The others stacked their

rifles and began digging.

They seemed to take no interest in her at all, but were discussing the

All Africa Soccer Championships that were being held in Lusaka, and the

Ethiopian team's chances of reachin the finals.

It was only after a while that it began to sink into Tessay's befuddled

mind that they were digging a grave for her. The saliva in her injured

mouth dried up and she looked around desperately for Lieutenant Hammed.

But he had stayed with the truck.

"Please," she whispered to her guard, but before she could say more he

kicked her painfully in the belly. -iftu vvurta 3 ivium i- utar vyo

"Keep quied' he used the derogatory term of address only applied to an

animal or a person of the lowest order, and as she lay doubled up on the

ground she realized the futility of appealing to them. A feeling of

weakness anded her and she found herself weeping resignation overwhelm

softly and hopelessly in the darkness.

er swollen lids, \&Then she looked up again through oonlight for her to

see that the grave there was sufficient was now so deep that the two

men still digging in it were out of her line of sight. Spadefuls of dirt

flew over the lip of the hole and splattered on to the growing pile. Her

and sauntered over to the guard left her side for a momen edge of the

hole. He looked down in it and then grunted.

"Good. That is deep enough, Call the lieutenant." The two soldiers

scrambled up out of the grave, then off into gathered up their tools and

weapons and traipsed the darkness of the grove. Chatting amicably

amongst wards where the truck was themselves they headed back to parked,

leaving Tessay and her guard.

the cold and with terror, She lay there shivering with puffed while her

guard squatted at the lip of her grave and her on his cigarette. She

thought that if she could get ton for feet she could kick him into the

hole and make a ru ut when she tried to sit up her it, back through the

trees. movements were stiff and slow, and she he no feeling in her

hands or feet. She tried to force herself to move, but at that moment

she heard Lieutenant Hammed coming from the truck and she slumped back

in despair, rch. He flashed it Hammed was carrying an electric to down

into the grave.

ugh."

"Good," he said loudly. "That is deep eno He switched off the torch and

said to the man guarding Go back and wait at the truck. When her, "No

witnesses.

come back with the others to help me you hear the shots, fill the hole."

over his shoulder and disap The guard slung his rifle JI peared amongst

the trees. Hammed waited until the man was well out of earshot, then he

came to Tessay and hoisted her to her feet. He pushed her to the edge of

the grave, and then she felt him fumbling with her clothing. She tried

to lash out at him, but her arms were still bound behind her.

"I want your shanitna." He pulled the white woollen cloak off over her

shoulders, and then went with it to the edge of the grave, He jumped

down into the hole and she heard him scuffling about in the bottom.

His voice came back to her, speaking softly. "They must see something

here. A body-'

He climbed back beside her, puffing with the exertion, and stepped

behind her. She felt the touch of cold metal on the inside of her

wrists, and then he was sawing at the leather thong. She felt her bonds

fall away, and she gasped at the pain as the blood poured back into her

numb hands.

"What are you doing?" she whispered in confusion. She looked down into

the grave and saw the pale shamnia arranged to look like a human body.

"Are you going-'

"Please don't talk," he instructed her softly, as he took her by the

shoulder and led her back amongst the trees.

"Lie here." He pushed her down and made her lie flat, with her face to

the ground. He began piling dead leaves and fallen branches over her.

"Stay here! Do not try to run. Don't. move or speak until we are gone."

He flashed the torch briefly over the mound of dead branches to make

certain she was covered, then he left her and hurried back to the

graveside, unbuckling the flap of his pistol holster as he went. Two

spaced pistol shots cracked out in the night, so loud and unexpectedly

that she jumped and her heart raced wildly.

Then she heard Hammed shout, "Come, you men.

Let's get this thing finished."

They trooped back into the grove, and she heard the sound of their

spades and the thump of earth clods falling into the grave.

nant," a voice

"I cannot see what I am doing, lieute complained. "Where is your

torchlight?"

"You dorA need a light to fill a hole," Hammed snarled.

"Get on with your work. Tramp that loose soil down. I don't want anybody

stumbling on this place."

She lay quietly, trying to stop the wild tremors that shook her body. At

last the sound of the shovels let up, and she heard Hammed's voice

again.

"That will do. Make certain you leave nothing here.

Back to the truck!'

Their footsteps and their voices died away. At a distance she heard the

truck engine whirl and fire. The headlights shone through the trees as

the truck backed and filled, turning in the direction from which they

had come.

sound of the engine had died away Long after thee pile of dead

completely, she continued to lie under the tree shaking with the cold

and weeping branches. She was St. elief.

silently with exhaustion and pain and softly and off herself and Then

slowly she pushed he branched it to pull crawled to the trunk of the

nearest tree. She, used and then stood there, swaying weakly herself up

to her feet, in the darkness. elmed her. "I have it was only then that

guilt overwh betrayed Mek," she thought sickeningly. "I have told everyI

must get back to thing to his enemies. I must warn him him and warn

him-'

treetrunk and She pushed herself away from the ds the track.

blundered back through the darkness towar he only means of ascertaining

if they had solved Taita's codes correctly was to play out BE&

the moves he had listed. They went very through the tunnels of the maze,

stepping out the carefully moves that he had noted and marking then-' on

the walls in white chalk figures.

There were eighteen moves set out on the winter face of the stele. Using

Royan's first interpretation of the symbols, they were able to advance

through twelve of theseL. Then they found themselves at a dead end,

confronted by a blank stone wall and unable to make the next move.

"Damnation!" Nicholas kicked the wall, and when this had no effect he

hurled the chunk of white chalk at it. "I wish I could get my hands on

that old devil. Castration would be the least of his worries."

"Sorry." Royan scraped the hair back out of her eyes.

thought I had it right. It must be the figures in the second column. We

will have to invert them."

"We will have to start again,'Nicholas groaned.

"Right at the very beginning," she agreed.

"How do we know when we have finally got it right?

he wanted to know.

"If by following the clues we art ive at one of the winning

combinations, a bao equivalent of checkmate, on precisely the eighteenth

move. There will be no logical move after that, and we can assume we

have worked through it correctly."

"And what will we find if we ever reach that position?"

"I will tell you when we get there." She smiled at him sweetly. "Cheer

up, Nicky. It's only just starting to hurt."

Royan inverted the values of the second and third numbers of Taita's

notations, taking the first as the cup value and the second as the file

value. This time they completed only five moves before they were stymied

and could proceed no further.

"Perhaps out assumption about the third symbol being the change of level

is incorrect?" Nicholas suggested. "Let's start again and give that the

second value."

"Nicky, do you realize just how many possible combinations there are,

given the three variables?" She was at last starting to waver. "Taita

has assumed an intimate knowledge of the game. We have only the

sketchiest notions of how it was played. It's like a grand master trying

to explain to a novice the intricacies of the King's Indian Defence."

olas embroidered the simile. "At this

"In Russian!" Nich rate we are getting nowhere in a hurry. There must be

some other way of approaching it. Let's go over the epigrams Taita stuck

in between the notations again.

"All right. I'll read and you listen." She hunched over her notes. "The

trouble is that a subtle variation of the translation might change the

sense. Taita loved puns, and effect. One wrong twist a pun can rely on

a single word fo or slant to a word and we have lost it."

"Try anyway," Nicholas encouraged her. "Remember that even Taita had

never played bao in three dimensions be at the very before. if he left

a clue it would have le of beginning of the stele. Concentrate on the

first coup notations and the epigrams that separate them."

"We'll try it that way," Royan agreed. "The first notambers five and

seven and tion is the bee followed by the nu the sistrum."

I have heard that so often Nicholas grinned. "Okayt What follows?,

already that I will never forget it er over the ation." She ran her ring

"The first quot can be known hieroglyphics. "'What can be given a name

What is nanwiess can A be felt. i sail with the tide behind me and the

wind in my face. 0, my beloved, the taste of You is sweet uPon my UPs."'

"Is that all?" he asked.

"Yes, then the next notation. The scorpion and the number two and three

and the sistrum again." make Slowly! Slowly! First things first. What

can out of the 1sailing" and the "beloved'T

They riddled and wrestled with the text of the stele, So until their

eyes burned and they had lost track of day or night. They were

eventually recalled to reality by Sapperjs voice echoing up the

staircase. Nicholas stood up from the desk and stretched before he

looked at his watch.

"Eight. 'clock. But I' not sure if that is morning or evenin

Then he started as Sapper came up the staircase, and saw that his bald

head was shining with moisture and his shirt was soaked.

"What happened to you?" Nicholas demanded. "Did you fall into the

sinkholer Sapper wiped his face with the palm of his hand.

"Didn't anybody tell you? It's pissing with rain outside." They both

stared at him in horror.

"So soon?" Royan whispered. "It wasn't supposed to start for weeks yet."

Sapper shrugged. "Somebody forgot to tell the weatherman."

"Has it set in?" Nicholas asked. "What's the state of the river? Has the

level started to rise yet?"

"That's what I came to tell you. I am going up to the dam, taking the

Buffaloes with me. I want to keep an eye on it. As soon as it gets

unsafe I will send a runner down to you. When I do that, don't stop to

argue. Get out of here fast. It will mean that I expect the dam to burst

at any moment."

"Don't take Hansith with you," Nicholas ordered. "I need him here."

When Sapper had gone, taking most of the workers from the tunnel with

him, Royan and Nicholas looked at each other seriously.

"We are running out of time fast, and Taita still has us in a tangle,'

Nicholas said. "One thing I must warn you.

When the river starts to rise "

She did not let him finish. "The river!" she cried. "Not the sea! I was

mistaken in the translation. I read it as "tide".

the sea, but it should have I assumed Taita was referring to been

"curyene,.The Egyptians made no distinction between rds."

the two wo They both rushed back to the desk and her notebooks.

C4The current behind me and the wind in my face Nicholas changed the

quotation.

on the Nile," Royan exulted, "the prevailing wind is lways from the

always from the north, and the current a south. Taita was facing north.

The north castle."

"We assumed the symbol for the north was the baboon,'

he reminded her.

"No! I was wrong." Her face was alight with the fires of inspirations

"', my beloved, the taste of you is sweet upon my lips." Honey! The bee!

I had the symbols for the north and south inverted." we find there?"

"What about east and west? What can with fresh enthusiasm. "'MY

He turned back to the texts of bronze sins are red as carnelians. They

bind me like cUns the They prick my heart with fire, and I turn my eyes

towards evening star."'

"I don't see ation," he stuttered eagerly. -Prick" is the wrong transi

ing towards the qt should be "sting". The scorpion look the west. The

evening star. "Me evening star is always in rn castle, not the eastern

castle." scorpion is the wester

"We had the board inverted." She jumped up excitedly.

"Let's play it that way!'

"We still have not determined the levels," he objected.

"Is the sistrum the upper level, or is it the three swords?"

"Now that we have made this breakthrough, that is the only variable. We

are either right or Wrong. We will play work upper level, and if that

doesn' the sistrurn first as the lay it the other way round."

we can tricacies of the maze It was so much easier now. The in had

become less forbidding with familiarity. There were the large white

chalk signs in Nicholas's handwriting on each corner and at each fork

and T-junction of the tunnels.

They moved swiftly through the complex twists and turns, their

excitement rising sharply as they followed each notation and "i6und the

way still clear before them.

"The eighteenth move." Royan's voice trembled. "Hold both thumbs. If it

takes us into one of the open files that threaten the opponent's south

castle, then that will be the check coup." She drew a deep breath and

read it aloud to him. "The bird The numbers three and five. With the

lower level symbol of the three swords."

They paced it out and passed the five junctions into the lowest level of

the maze, reading their position from the chalk marks on the stone

blocks of the walls at each fork. "This is it!" Nicholas told her, and

they stood together and looked about them.

"There is nothing outstanding about this spot." Disappointment was

bitter in Royan's tone. "We have passed over it fifty times before. It

is just like any of the other turns."

"That is exactly what Taita would have wanted. Hell!

He wouldn't have put up a signpost saying " marks the spot", would he

now?"

"So what do we do?" She looked at him, for once at a loss.

"Read the last epigram from the stele."

S he had her notebook in her hand. "'From the black and holy earth of

dus very Egypt the harvest is abundant. I whip the flanks of my donkey,

and the wooden spike of the plough breaks new ground. I plant the seed,

and reap the grape and the ears of corn. In time I drink the wine and

eat the loaf. I follow the rhythm of the seasons, and tend the earth."'

She looked up at him. "The rhythm of the seasons? Is he referring us to

the four faces of the stele? The earth?"

she asked and looked down at the slabs beneath their feet, "The promise

of reward from the earth? Under our feet, perhaps?" she asked.

He stamped his foot on the slabs, but the sound was dull and solid.

"Only one way to find out." He raised his voice and it echoed weirdly

through the labyrinth. "Hansith! Come down here!'

apper sat on the high seat of his yellow frontend loader in the rain and

cheerfully cursed his gang of Buffaloes, secure in the knowledge that

they understood not a word of his insults. The rain swept over them in

intermittent gusts off the high mountains. It was not yet the solid,

drenching downpour of the true wet season. However, the river was rising

sullenly, turning dirty blue'grey with the mud and sediment that it was

bringing down.

He knew that the flood had not yet begun in earnest.

The thunder that growled ominously along the mountain peaks like a pride

of hunting lions was only the prelude to the vast celestial onslaught

which would soon follow.

Although the river was lapping the top course of gabions "s dam, and was

roaring through the bypass that of Sapper he had cut into the side

valley, he was still holding it at bay. His Buffaloes were packing more

baskets with aggregate, using up the last of the steel mesh from the

stores in the quarry. As soon as each of these was filled and wired

closed, Sapper picked it up in the front bucket of the tractor and drove

it down the bank of the Dandera. He reinforced all the weak spots in the

dam wall, and then he began raising it another course. Sapper was fully

aware of the overturning effect that the river would exert once it began

to pour over the top of the wall. Nothing would be able to withstand its

power once this happened. It would carry away a rock-filled gabion as if

it were the branch of a baobab tree. it needed only a single breach in

the wall to bring the entire structure tumbling and rolling down. He had

no illusions as to just how swiftly the river could do its fatal work.

He knew that he dared not wait for the first breach to develop in the

wall before he warned Nicholas and Royan in the chasm downstream. The

river could easily outrun any messenger he sent, and once the wall began

to go it would already be too late. It would be a matter of fine

judgement, and he slitted his eyes against another gust of slanting rain

that blew into his face. His instinct was to call them out of the chasm

now - there was already less than twelve inches of free-board at the top

of the wall.

However, he knew that Nicholas would be furious if he was made to

evacuate the workings prematurely, and in so doing aborted all their

efforts. Sapper was fully aware of the extreme risks that Nicholas had

taken and of the crippling expenditure he had made to reach this stage.

Before they had left England, he had hinted to Sapper of the straitened

circumstances in which he found himself.

Although Sapper did not understand the intricacies or the

responsibilities of being a "Name' at Lloyd's, there had been so much

publicity in the British press that he could not but realize that, if

their venture here failed, the next stop for Nicholas would be the

bankruptcy courts - and Nicholas was his friend.

The squall of. rain blew over, and a bright hot sun burst through the

low cloud banks. The flow of the river seemed undiminished, but at least

the water level on the dam wall was no longer rising, "I'll give it

another hour," he grunted, engaging the gears of the tractor and easing

her down the bank to place another gabion in position.

Nicholas worked shoulder to shoulder with Hinsith's gang as they began

to strip the paving slabs from the floor of the lowest level of the

maze. The joints between the slabs were so tight that, even using

crowbars, they had difficulty prising them apart, In order to save time,

Nicholas made the hard choice of going into a destructive search. He put

four of the strongest men in the team to work with home-made

sledgehammers, lumps of ironstone on wooden shafts, to break UP the

slabs so that they could be more readily levered out of the floor. He

felt guilty about the damage they were causing to the site, but the work

went ahead very much faster.

The high spirits and enthusiasm of the men were at last beginning to

wane. They had worked too long in the oppressive confines of the maze,

and every one of them was the head of the fully aware of the rising

level of the river at gorge, and of the mortal threat behind those

waters. Their expressions were surly and there was little laughter' or

banter, But more worrying for Nicholas was the fact that at ported the

first the beginning of this shift Hansith had re duty.

desertions. Sixteen of his men had failed to report for They had quietly

rolled their blankets during the night, picked up whatever items of

value or utility they found lying around the camp, and crept away into

the darkness.

Nicholas knew that it was no use sending anyone after them - they had

too much of a start, and would be halfway up the escarpment already.

This was Africa, and Nicholas was certain that now that the rot had

started it would Spread very quickly.

He joked and jollied them along, not allowing them to sense his true

feelings. He worked shoulder to shoulder in the excavation in an and

sweated along with them made attempt to hold them, But he knew that,

unless they Ali under these slabs to keep their interest another

discovery and expectations alight, he might wake up tomorrow to

all find that even the monks and the faithful Hansith were gone.

He had started lifting the slabs in the angle of the corner of the maze,

and they worked out from there in both directions down the arms Of the

tunnel. His heart sank as they broke up each paving slab with the

hammers only to find beneath it the solid stratum of the country rock

with no indication of any joint or opening.

"It doesn't look very hopeful," he muttered to Royan as he took a short

break to drink from one of the water flasks.

She too was looking unhappy as she Poured water from the flask into his

cupped hands, so that he could wash the sweat and grime from his face.

"I may have got the symbols for the levels wrong," she suggested. "It is

just the kind of trick Taita would play, to work out combinations which

would both give a logical solution." She hesitated before she appealed

to him for guidance. "Do you think I should start working back the other

combination-'

Her question was interrupted by a bellow from Hansith. "In the name of

the Blessed Virgin, effendi, come quickly!'

They spun around together. In "her haste Royan dropped the flask, which

shattered at her feet. She did not seem to notice that it had drenched

her legs, but ran back to where Hansith was standing with the hammer

poised for another stroke.

What is it-' she broke off as they both saw that beneath the paving

slabs Hansith had uncovered another layer of dressed stone sills.

These were laid neatly across the floor of the tunnel from wall to wall,

recessed into the surrounding rock, with knife-edge joints between them.

Their sides were smooth and plain, without engravings or markings upon

them.

"What is it, icky?" Royan demanded.

"Either it's another layer of paving, or it)s a cover over fall an

opening in the floor,, he told her eagerly. "We won't know until we lift

one of them."

The stone sills were too thick and heavy to be cracked with the

primitive hammers, although Hansith tried his best. In the end they were

forced to dig around the first of lever it free. It took five men to

raise the end of them and it and lift it off its foundation.

"There is an opening under it." Royan went down on the space that it had

left. "Some her knees to peer into kind of open shaft!'

Once the first sill was removed it was easier to get a urchase on the

others that blocked the rectangular open I away, Nicholas shone ing.

When they had cleared them al the dark shaft that was revealed. It the

lamp down into stretched from wall to wall of the tunnel, and the head

stand up to his room was sufficient for even Nicholas full height on the

steps that led down at a forty-five degree angle.

"Surely this must be it.

"Another stairway he exulted exhausted all the false leads by now."

Even Taita must have crowding up behind them, their The workmen were

very and the ting at this fresh disco sullen mood evapora certainty of

additional bonuses in silver dollars that they had earned.

"Are we going down?" Royan asked. "I know we should be careful and check

it for traps, but we are- running out Of time, Nicky."

"You are right, as always. The time has come when we have to press on

regardless."

hand, "Caution thrown to the winds." She took his laughing. "Let's go

down together."

tious step at a They descended side by side, one cau time, with the lamp

held head high and the shadows retreating before them.

"There is a chamber at the bottom,'Royan exclaimed.

"Looks like a store room - what are all those objects stacked along the

walls? There must be hundreds of them.

Are they coffins, sarcophaguses?" The dark shapes were almost human,

standing shoulder to shoulder, rank after rank, around the walls of the

square chamber.

"No, I think those are corn baskets on one side," she said, recognizing

them. "Those on the other side look like wine amphorae. Probably some

sort of offering to the dead."

"If this is one of the funeral store rooms," said Nicholas in a voice

tight with excitement, "then we are getting very close to the tomb now."

"Yes!' she cried. "Look - there is another doorway on the far side of

this store room. Shine the light over there."

The beam picked out the square opening facing them across this lower

chamber. It was inviting, beckoning them almost seductively. They almost

ran down the last few steps in . to . the chamber lined with the reed

baskets and pottery wine jars. But as they reached the leveffloor of the

store room they ran into an invisible barrier that stopped both of them

dead and sent them reeling backwards.

"God!" Nicholas clutched at his throat, his voice a strangled choke.

"Get back. Got to get back."

Royan was inking to her knees, also gasping and hunting for breath.

"Nicky!" she tried to scream, but her breath was trapped in her lungs.

She felt that a steel noose had encircled her chest and, as it

tightened, the breath was being forced out of her.

"Nicky! Help me!" She was strangling, like a fish thrown up on the bank.

The strength drained from her limbs, and her vision began to break up

and fade. She did not have the strength to stand.

He stooped over her and tried to lift her, but he was almost as weak. He

felt his own legs buckling, no longer able to support even his own

weight.

erately as he suffocated.

"Four minutes," he thought desp i to brain death I "That's all we have

got. Four minutes and oblivion. We have to get airer her armpits From

behind her, he slipped his arms und locked his hands together over her

breasts. Again he and ied to lift her, but his strength was gone. He

began to tr ds the stairs down which they had walk backwards towar run

so lightly, and every pace required a huge effort. She was already

unconscious, lying inert in the circle of his arms. Her limp legs

trailed across the stone floor as he dragged her back.

The lowest step caught his heels and he almost toppled his balance over

backwards. with an effort he regained and lugged her back up the steps,

her feet sliding and bumping loosely over the treads. He wanted to shout

to his lungs Hansith for help, but he did not have me air in to utter a

sound.

, she's dead," he told himself, and if you drop her no ps, his lungs

hunting for he struggled up another five ste precious air and finding

none. His strength oozed out of wobbled and as his vision slid and him a

drop at a time A

11 distorted.

"Please God, let me

"Let me breathe," he pleaded.

breathe."

Miraculously, like a direct answer to his prayer, he felt slide down his

panting throat and the precious oxygen ngth began flooding back swell

his lungs. At once his stre Royan's chest and lifted and he tightened

his grip around her bodily. He staggered up the remaining steps with her

sprawled out Of the mouth of the body in his arms and shaft on to the

slabs of the tunnel at Hansith's feet.

"What is is, effendi? What has happened to you and the lady?"

Nicholas had no breath to answer him. He laid Royan in the position for

mouth-tolmouth resuscitation, and slapped her cheeks.

"Come on!" he pleaded with her. "Speak! Talk to me!" There was no

response, so he knelt over her, covered her open mouth with his own and

blew down her throat, until from the corner of his eye he saw her chest

swelling and inflating.

He sat back for a count of three. "Please, my darling, please

breathe!'There was no colour in her yellow, corpselike face.

He bent over her and covered her mouth again, and as he filled her lungs

with his own breath he felt her stir under him.

"That's it, my darling," he told her. "Breathe! Breathe for me."

At the next breath she pushed him away and sat up groggily, staring

round at the circle of faces that hovered over her anxiously. She picked

out Nicholas's pale face amongst the black faces of the men.

"Nicky! What happened?"

"I am not sure - but whatever it was, it almost got both of us. How are

you feeling now?"

"It was as though an invisible hand had me by the throat, and was

strangling me. I couldn't breathe, and then I passed out."

"It must be some kind of gas filling the lower levels of the passage.

You were only out for less than two minutes," he reassured her. "It

takes four minutes of oxygen starvation to kill the brain."

"I have a terrible headache." She pressed her fingers to her temples. "I

heard your voice calling me back. You called me "my darling"." She

dropped her eyes.

"Just a little slip of the tongue." He lifted her to her feet and for a

moment she swayed against him, her breasts soft and warm against his

chest.

"Thank you once again, Nicky. I am so deeply in your debt already, I

will never be able to repay you."

am sure we will be able to work something out."

She was suddenly aware of the niens 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 the lower part of

the opinion. . "Because it is trapped in 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.

er that question when we have had a I will be able to answ chance to

examine their contents." He touched her cheek tenderly. "How are you

feeling? How is your headacheT

"Better. What do we do now?"

he to

"Clear the gas from the chamber, Id 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.

wall in white chalk, and He marked the level on the shaft, "Well, at

called up to Royan at the head of the still here. Must be carbon least

it's not methane. I am dioxide."

"Pretty conclusive test," she laughed. if it goes boom, it's methane."

the blower fan," Nicholas Hansith, bring down 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?" asked anxiously, looking at

her wrist-watch. Royan

"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 of acid. Vinegar,

perhaps, or even Isoonakgedagitowdirtihedsoomuetfoarnmd lost any odour,

Taita probably 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 amber indefiould hang here in the bottom

of the ch agreed. "I expect that this shaft is designed like nitely,"

she

' she pointed a ,trap. I bet that the passage rises again 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."

apper had placed caims of stones at the water's edge to monitor the

river level. He watched es his ticker them the way a stockbroker watch

tape.

It had been six hours since the last rain squall had passed. The clouds

over the valley had burned away in the Ithough they still hung densely

over hot, bright sunlight, a the northern horizon. Their great

dun'coloured thunderheads reared to the heavens, menacing and ominous,

fonning their own mighty ranges that dwarfed the mountains beneath them.

At any time the downpour might ed, begin up there in the highlands. Once

that happen 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.

would come.

The final outcome was inevitable. The rains rst. He looked The river

would spate. The dam would bu at the dam wall, and shook his head with

fill downstream 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 gr,6et 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 low the monastery at St.

Frumentius, moving up the be Abbay river."

"Pincer movement, heyT said Sapper.

Mek listened to the translation and nodded gravely. "I am heavily

outnumbered and I don't know how long I will they attack. My men are be

able to hold them when gueff illas. 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 at short notice."

to be ready to Pull out Sapper grunted. , "Don't worry too much about

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."

but I wanted to arrange

"I am on my way to them now a fall'back position. if we get cut off from

each other in the the monastery.

fighting, Nicholas has cached the boats at That is where we will

assemble."

okay Mek---2 Sapper stopped speaking and all three I the trail, where

there was a fresh of them looked bank. "What's disturbance amongst the

men along the going on?"

Mek one of my patrols coming in narrowed his eyes.

"Mere must be some new development." He stopped not understand speaking

as he realized that Sapper could him, and then his expression changed as

he recognized the small, slim figure that was being carried on a rough

litter by thing-_ men of his patrol.

towards, her and sat up weakly Tessay saw him running her to the ground

and Mek on the litter. The men lowered the litter and placed both went

down on his knees beside They held each other in silence for a his arms

airoun(:

her face in his Mek gently cupped long moment. Then features.

hands and examined her swollen and arre 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.

/4P- -I he lowed 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 se they

were now climbing was a chamber, and the stairca 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 ened before

them, and they were dazzled by a riot of OP

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!l 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."

stood on the top step and gazed around in They wonder. When compared to

these, the murals in the long gallery seemed pale and stilted, the

tawdry sham that they the work of a great master, a timeless really

were. This was genius, whose art could enchant and enrapture now just as

readily as it had four thousand years ago. involuntarily, They moved

forward slowly, almost down the arcade. It was lined on each side with

small ntal bazaar. The entrance chambers, like the stalls in an orie

ched up to the to each was guarded by tall columns that rea 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

marvelous collections. Royan shook her head in wonder, and Nicholas led

her on. The walls that separated the alcoves were decorated with panels

illustrate in 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 crowded close on either hand, waiting

thei monsters that showed the face of the king as he chance to devour

him. I with a kind and gentle, if must truly have been, a man rather

weak, face.

"Look at the figures," Nicholas agreed. "They are not forward with the

right stiff wooden dolls always stepping foot. These are real men and

women. They are anatomic and had cally correct. The artist understood

perspectiv 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 old leaf, so that it dazzled the

eye. The harness and traces the horses that would draw it into seemed

only to await and the quivers strapped to the side panels behind battle,

elins. The each tall wheel bulged with arrows and jav was emblazoned on

the side panels.

cartouche of Mamose significant vehicle were war bows Piled beside this

of electrum and bronze whose stocks were bound with wir ays of daggers

with ivory handles and gold. There were arr 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 se. There were helmets and breastplates made divine Mamo from the

skin of the crocodile, and the uniforms and regalia of the famous

regiments of Egypt dressed the life-sized the wooden statues of the king

that stood in rows against walls of the alcoves.

a They walked on down the isle, between more paint, death of the icting

the life and the ings and murals dep ters and danking. They saw him

playing with his daugh nt son. They saw him fishing and hunting and

dling his infa isn'omarches, hawking, in council with his ministers and

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 he 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

Greeceor 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 reenacted

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 ed barb from deep in his hands, removing the blood-smear 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.

"Some of those chests will contain the royal cosmetics," Royan murmured,

'and some of them will be Pharaoh's wardrobes of clothing. There will be

costumes in them for ack every occasion in his after-life. I long to be

able to unp and examine them."

all panels showed the mart iage of the The next set of king to the

young virgin, Taita's mistress. The face of Queen LostTis was tendered

with loving detail. The artist gloated on her beauty and exaggerated it,

his brush strokes caressing her naked breasts and lingering on all her

virtues until they epitomized feminine perfection.

"How much Taita loved her," Royan murmured, and there was envy in her

voice. "You can see it in every line he drew."

Nicholas smiled softly and put his arms around her shoulders.

There were hundreds more wooden chests stacked in the next alcoves.

Painted on the lids were miniatures of the king decked in all his

jewellery: his fingers and toes were thick with rings and his chest was

covered with pectoral medallions, while bangles of gold adorned his arms

and bracelets his wrists. In one portrait he wore the double crown of

the two kingdoms of Egypt united, the red crown and the white with the

heads of the vulture and the cobra on his brow. In another he wore the

blue war crown, and on a third the Nemes crown with gold and lapis wings

that covered his ears.

"If each of those chests contains the treasures depicted on its lid-'

Nicholas broke off, unable to continue the thought. The possibility of

such riches was daunting, and the imagination balked at the magnitude of

it.

"Do you remember what Taita wrote in the scrolls? "I cannot believe that

such a treasure was ever before accumulated in one place at one times'T

Royan asked him. "It seeffLs that it is all still here, every single gem

and grain of gold. The treasure of Mamose is intact."

Beyond the treasury there was another alcove lined with shelves on which

stood the ushabti figures: dolls made of green glazed porcelain or

carved from cedarwood. They were an army of tiny figures, men and women

from all the trades and professions. There were priests and scribes and

lawyers and physicians, gardeners and farmers, bakers and brewers,

handmaidens and dancing girls, seamstresses and laundrymaids, soldiers

and barbers, and common labourers.

Each of them carried the tools and accoutrements of his or her trade.

They would accompany the king to the after world and there would work

for Pharaoh, and would go forward in his place if he were ever called

upon to perform a service for the other gods.

At last Nicholas and Royan came to the end of this fabulous arcade, and

found their way closed off by a series of tall, free-standing screens,

tabernacles that had been once fine white linen mesh but were now

decayed and rotted into ribbons and streamers, dirty and shabby as old

cobwebs, And yet the stars and rosettes of shining gold Now, still

hanging in the that decorated these curtains were mesh like fish in a

fisherman's net. Through this ethereal web of silken wisps and golden

stars they could make out the shape of another gateway beyond.

actual tomb," Royan

"That must be the entrance to the thin veil between us and the

whispered. "There is only a king now.

tated at the threshold, gripped by a strange They hesi the final step

reluctance, to take an old warrior, Mek Nimmur had seen and treated most

of the injuries that a man might sus in on the battlefield. His little

guerrilla group did not have a doctor, or even a medical orderly.

Mek himself treated most of his casualties, and he always had a medical

kit close at hand.

He had the men carry Tessay to one of the huts near the quarry, where,

screened by the grass walls, he stripped her of her tattered clothing

and treated her injuries. He abrasions with disinfectant, and cleaned

her burns and clean field dressings- Then covered the worst of them with

he rolled her gently on to her stomach and snapped the which glass phial

off the needle'of the disposable syringe wh was preloaded with a

broad'spectrum antibiotic. -and he said, "I She winced at the sting of

the needle, am not a very good doctor."

other. Oh, Mek! I thought I would would have no ared never see you

again. I did not fear death as much as I fe that."

He helped her dress in the spare clothing from his pack, a sweatshirt

and fatigues that were many sizes too large for her. He rolled up the

cuffs for her, and his touch soldier.

was gentle. His hands were those of a lover, not a she whispered through

her must look so ugly," swollen, black-scabbed lips.

"You are beautiful he denied it- "To me you will always be beautiful."

He touched her cheek carefully, so as not to harm the raw burns that

covered it.

At that moment they heard the gunfire. It was still faint with distance,

borne down from the north on the rain winds.

Mek stood up immediately. "It has begun. Nogo is attacking at last it's