They were silent again for a while and then Royan smiled in the firelight, her face lighting up with anticipation.
‘Oh, Nicky! It is such an exciting challenge.’ Then her voice descended an octave. ‘But is there a way? Is it possible to get in there?’
‘We will find out.’
‘When?’
‘In due course. I haven’t thought it out fully as yet. All I am certain of is that it is going to take a prodigious amount of planning and hard work.’
‘You are still committed, then?’ She wanted his assurance. She knew that she could never do it alone. ‘You aren’t daunted by the project?’
Nicholas chuckled. ‘I will admit that I never expected Taita to lead us on such a merry chase. I imagined simply breaking open a stone gateway and finding it all waiting for us there, like Howard Carter walking into the tomb of Tutankhamen. However, to answer your question, yes, I am daunted by what it’s going to involve – but hell, nothing could stop me now! I have the smell of glory in my nostrils and the gleam of gold in my eye.’
While they talked, Tamre curled up in the dust on the other side of the fire, and pulled his shamma over his head. His rest must have been interrupted by dreams and fantasies, for he burbled and squeaked and giggled in his sleep.
‘I wonder what goes on in that poor demented head, and what visions he sees,’ Royan whispered. ‘He says he saw Jesus here in the quarry, and I am sure that he really believes that he did.’
Their voices became softer and drowsier as the fire burned down, and Royan murmured, just before she fell asleep on Nicholas’s shoulder, ‘If the tomb of Pharaoh Mamose is below the level of the river, then surely the contents will be water-damaged?’
‘I can’t believe that Taita would have built his dam and spent fifteen years working on the tomb, as he says that he did in the scrolls, only to flood it deliberately and despoil the mummy of his king and ruin his treasure,’ Nicholas murmured, with her hair tickling his cheek. ‘No, that would have precluded Pharaoh’s resurrection in the other world, and brought all his work to nothing. I think Taita has taken all that into his calculations.’
She snuggled closer, and sighed with satisfaction.
A little while later he said softly, ‘Goodnight, Royan,’ but she did not reply and her breathing was deep and even. He smiled to himself, and gently kissed the top of her head.
Nicholas was not certain what had woken him. He took a few moments to place himself, and then he realized that he was still in the quarry. There was no moon but the stars hung down close to the earth, as big and fat as bunches of ripe grapes. By their light he saw that Royan had slipped down and was lying flat on the ground beside him.
He stood up carefully, so as not to disturb her, and moved well away from the dead fire to empty his bladder. The night was deathly quiet. No night bird called, nor was there the sound of any of the other nocturnal creatures. The rocks around him still radiated the heat of the previous day’s sunlight.
Suddenly the sound that had woken him was repeated. It was a faint and distant susurration that echoed along the cliffs, so that he could form no judgement as to the direction from which it came. But he was in no doubt what the sound was. He had heard it so often before. It was the sound of faraway automatic gunfire, almost certainly an AK-47 assault rifle firing, not long ragged bursts, but short taps of three rounds, an art that took expertise and practice. He was sure that the person doing the shooting was a trained professional.
He tilted his wrist so that the luminescent dial of his watch caught the starlight, and he saw that it was a few minutes after three o’clock in the morning.
He stood listening for a long time, but the firing was not repeated. At last he returned to where Royan lay and settled down beside her again. However, he slept only shallowly and intermittently, and kept starting awake listening for more gunfire in the night.
Royan began to stir at the first lemon and orange flush of dawn in the eastern sky, and while they ate the remains of the survival rations for their breakfast he told her about the noise that had woken him during the night.
‘Do you think it could have been Boris?’ she asked. ‘He may have caught up with Mek and Tessay.’
‘I doubt that very much. Boris has already been gone several days. He should be well out of earshot by now, even beyond the sound range of the heaviest weapons.’
‘Who do you suppose it was, then?’
‘I have no idea. But I don’t like it. We should start back to camp as soon as we have had another look around the quarry. After that there is nothing further that we can do at this stage. We should make tracks for home and mother.’
As soon as the light was strong enough, Nicholas shot a spool of film to make a record of the quarry. For comparison of scale, Royan posed beside the wall in which the embryonic blocks still lay. As she warmed to her role as a model she started to clown for him. She climbed on to the biggest of the slabs and hammed it up for the camera, pouting with one hand behind her head in the style of Marilyn Monroe.
When, finally, they went off down the valley towards the monastery they were both exultant and garrulous after their success. Their discussion was animated as they bounced ideas back and forth, and laid their plans for the further exploitation of these wonderful discoveries. By the time they reached the pink cliffs at the lower end of the chasm it was late morning. There they met a small party of monks from the monastery coming up the trail.
Even from a distance it was obvious that something dreadful had happened during their absence: the sorrowful ululations of the monks sent chills down Royan’s spine. It was the universal African sound of mourning, the harbinger of death and disaster. As they approached they saw that the monks were picking up handfuls of dust from the track and pouring it over their heads as they wailed and lamented.
‘What is it, Tamre?’ Royan asked the boy. ‘Go and find out for us!’ Tamre ran ahead to meet his brother monks. They stopped in the middle of the path and fell into a high-pitched discussion, weeping and gesticulating. Then Tamre ran back to them.
‘Your people at the camp. Something terrible has happened. Bad men came in the might. Many of the servants are dead,’ he screamed.
Nicholas grabbed Royan’s hand. ‘Come on!’ he snapped, ‘let’s find out what is going on here.’
They ran the last mile to the camp, and arrived to find another circle of monks gathered around something in front of the kitchen hut. Nicholas pushed them aside and elbowed his way to the front. There he stopped and stared with a sinking feeling in his gut, and the sweat on his face turned cold with horror. Under a buzzing blue pall of flies lay the blood-splattered corpse of the cook and three other camp servants. Their hands had been bound behind their backs, and then they had been forced to kneel before being shot in the back of the head at close range.
‘Don’t look!’ Nicholas warned Royan as she came up. ‘It’s not very pretty.’
But she ignored his advice and came to stand beside him. ‘Oh, sweet heavens. They have been slaughtered like cattle in an abattoir.’ She gagged.
‘This explains the sound of gunfire that I heard last night,’ he answered grimly. He went forward to identify the dead men. ‘Aly and Kif are not here. Where are they?’ He raised his voice and called in Arabic, turning to face the crowd. ‘Aly, where are you?’
The tracker pushed his way forward. ‘I am here, effendi.’ His voice was shaky and his face was haggard. There was blood on the front of his shirt.
‘How did this happen?’ Nicholas seized his arm and steadied him.
‘Men came in the night with the guns. Shufta. They shot into the huts where we were sleeping. They gave us no warning. They just started shooting.’
‘How many of them? Who were they?’ Nicholas demanded.
‘I do not know how many of them there were. It was dark. I was asleep. I ran away when the shooting began. They were shufta, bandits, killers. They were hyenas and jackals – there was no reason for what they have done. The
se men were my brothers, my friends.’ He began to sob, and the tears streamed down his face.
Royan turned away, sickened and horrified. She went to her hut and stopped in the doorway. It had been ransacked. Her bags had been turned out on to the floor. Her bedding had been stripped, and the mattress thrown into the corner. As though she were a sleep-walker in a nightmare, she crossed the floor and picked up the canvas folder in which she kept her papers. She turned it upside down and shook it. It was empty. The satellite photographs and the maps, all her rubbings of the stele, the Polaroids that Nicholas had taken in Tanus’s tomb – everything was gone.
Royan picked up the bed and set it the right way up. She sat down on it, and tried to gather her thoughts. She felt confused and shaken. The image of those bloody, bullet-ripped corpses laid out in front of the kitchen haunted her, and she found it difficult to concentrate and to think clearly.
Nicholas burst into her hut and looked around quickly. ‘They did the same thing to me. Ransacked the place. My rifle has gone, and all my papers. But at least I had the passports and travellers’ cheques in my day-pack—’ He broke off as he saw the empty canvas folder lying at her feet. ‘Have they taken the—’
‘Yes!’ she forestalled his question. ‘They have cleaned out all our research material, even the Polaroids. Thank God you had the undeveloped rolls of film with you. It’s the same as happened to Duraid and me all over again. We aren’t safe from them, even here, even out in the remotest part of the bush.’ There was the edge of hysteria in her voice. She jumped up from the bed and ran to him.
‘Oh, Nicky, what would have happened if we had been in camp last night?’ She threw her arms around him, and clung to him. ‘We would be lying out there in the sun now, all bloody and covered with flies.’
‘Steady on, my dear. Let’s not jump to any conclusions. This could just be a chance raid by bandits.’
‘Then why did they steal our papers? What value would ordinary shufta place on rubbings and Polaroids? Where was the Pegasus helicopter heading just before the raid? They were after us, Nicky. I feel it so strongly. They wanted to kill us just as they did Duraid. They could return at any time, and now we are unarmed and helpless.’
‘All right, I agree with you that we are pretty vulnerable here. It would be wise to get out as soon as possible. There isn’t any point in staying on here anyway. There’s nothing more we can do at this stage.’ He hugged her and shook her gently. ‘Brace up! We will salvage what we can from this mess, and then get moving back to the vehicles right away.’
‘What about the dead men?’ She stood back, and with an effort forced back her tears and brought herself under control. ‘How many of our people survived?’
‘Aly, Salin and Kif escaped. They dived out of their huts and ran off into the darkness as soon as the shooting started. I have told them to get ready to leave right away. I have spoken to one of the senior priests. They will take care of the burial of the dead, and will report to the authorities as soon as they are able. But they agree that the attack was aimed at us, and that we are still in danger, and that we should get away as soon as possible.’
Within the hour they were ready to start. Nicholas had decided to leave all the camping equipment and Boris’s personal gear in the charge of Jali Hora. The mules were lightly loaded, and he planned to make a forced march out of the gorge.
The abbot had given them an escort of monks to accompany them to the top of the escarpment. ‘Only a truly Godless man would attack you while you are under the protection of the cross,’ he explained.
Nicholas found the dried hide and head of the striped dik-dik still in the skinning shed. He rolled it into a bundle and strapped it on to the load atop one of the mules, and then gave the order for the attenuated caravan to move out.
Tamre had insinuated himself into the group of monks who were escorting the party. He kept close behind Royan as they set off up the trail, with the lamentations and farewells of the monastic community following them for the first mile.
It was hot in this brutal midday. There was no movement of air to bring relief, and the stone walls of the valley sucked up the heat of that awful sun and spewed it back over them as they toiled up the steep gradients. It dried their sweat even as it oozed through their pores, leaving patterns of white salt crystals on their skins and clothing. The muleteers, spurred on by fear, set a killing pace, trotting behind their beasts and prodding their testicles with a sharpened stick to keep them moving at their best pace.
By mid-afternoon they had retraced the morning’s travel and once more reached the putative site of Taita’s dam wall. Nicholas and Royan took a few minutes’ breather to dip their heads in the river and sluice the salt and sweat from their faces and necks. Then they stood together above the falls and took a brief farewell of the chasm in which lay all their hopes and dreams.
‘How long until we return?’ she asked.
‘We cannot afford to leave it too long,’ he told her. ‘Big rains are due soon, and the hyenas have got the scent and are crowding in. From now on every day will be precious, and every hour we lose may be crucial.’
She stared down into the chasm and said softly, ‘You haven’t won yet, Taita. The game is still afoot.’
They turned away together and followed the mules up the trail towards the escarpment wall. That evening they did not stop at the traditional campsite beside the river, but pressed on several miles further until darkness forced a halt. There was no attempt to build a comfortable camp. They dined on cakes of injera bread dipped in the wat pot that the monks had carried with them. Then Nicholas and Royan spread their bedrolls side by side on the stony earth and, using the mule packs as pillows, fell into exhausted, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, while the mules were being loaded in the pre-dawn darkness, they drank a bowl of strong bitter black Ethiopian coffee. Then they started out along the trail again.
As the rising sun lit the sheer walls of the escarpment ahead of them they seemed close enough to touch, and Nicholas remarked to Royan, as she swung along long-legged beside him, ‘At this pace we should reach the foot of the escarpment this afternoon, and there is a good chance that we might sleep tonight in the cavern behind the waterfall.’
‘That means we could cut a couple of days off the journey and reach the trucks some time tomorrow.’
‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘I’ll be glad to get out of here.’
‘It feels like a trap,’ Royan agreed, looking at the rocky, broken ground that rose on either hand, hemming them into the narrow bottom of the Dandera river. ‘I have been doing a bit of thinking, Nicky.’
‘Let’s hear your conclusions.’
‘No conclusions, only some disturbing thoughts. Suppose somebody at Pegasus who can understand them is now in possession of our rubbings and Polaroids. What will their reaction be if they know how much progress we have made in the search?’
‘Not very happy thoughts,’ he agreed. ‘But on the other hand there is not much we can do about any of that until we get back to civilization, except keep our eyes wide open and our wits about us. Hell, I haven’t even got the little Rigby rifle. We are a flock of sitting ducks.’
Aly, the muleteers and the monks seemed to be of the same opinion, for they never slackened the pace. It was midday before they called the first brief halt to brew coffee and to water the mules. While the men lit fires, Nicholas took his binoculars from the mule pack and began to climb the rock slope. He had not covered much ground before he glanced back and saw Royan climbing after him. He waited for her to catch up.
‘You should have taken the chance to rest,’ he told her severely. ‘Heat exhaustion is a real danger.’
‘I don’t trust you going off on your own. I want to know what you are up to.’
‘Just a little recce. We should have scouts out ahead, not just go charging blindly along the trail like this. If I remember correctly from the inward march, some of the worst ground lies just ahead of us. Lord knows what we m
ay run into.’
They went on upwards, but it was not possible to reach the crest for a sheet of unscalable vertical cliff barred their way. Nicholas chose the best vantage point below this barrier, and glassed both slopes of the valley ahead of them. The terrain was as he had remembered it. They were approaching the foot of the escarpment wall and the ground was becoming more rugged and severe, like the swell of the open ocean sensing the land and rising up in alarm before breaking in confusion upon the shore. The trail followed the river closely. The cliffs hung over the narrow aisle of ground that made up the bank, sculpted by wind and weather into strange, menacing shapes, like the battlements of a wicked witch’s castle in an old Disney cartoon. At one point a buttress of red sandstone overhung the trail, forcing the river to detour around it, and the trail was reduced so much that it would be difficult for a laden mule to negotiate without being pushed off the bank into the river.
Nicholas studied the bottom of the valley carefully through the lens. He could pick out nothing that seemed suspicious or untoward, so he raised his head and swept the cliffs and their tops.
At that moment Aly’s voice came up from the valley below, echoing along the slope as he shouted, ‘Hurry, effendi! The mules are ready to go on!’
Nicholas waved down to him, but then lifted the binoculars for one more sweep of the ground ahead. A wink of bright light caught his eye – a brief ephemeral stab of brilliance like the signal of a heliograph. He switched his whole attention to the spot on the cliff from which it had emanated.
‘What is it? What have you seen?’ Royan demanded.
‘I am not sure. Probably nothing,’ he replied, without lowering the binoculars. It may have been a reflection from a polished metal surface, or from the lens of another pair of binoculars, or from the barrel of a sniper’s rifle, he thought. On the other hand, a chip of mica or a pebble of rock crystal could reflect sunlight the same way, and even some of the aloes and other succulent plants have shiny leaves. He watched the spot carefully for a few more minutes, and then Aly’s voice floated up to them again.