The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 23
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bridges far upstream. Nothing for five hundred miles except racing Nile
waters and savage black basalt rock." He paused to let that sink in.
"It is one of the last true wildernesses on earth, with an evil
reputation as the haunt of wild animals and even wilder men. I have
marked the main falls that show in the gut of the gorge here on the
satellite photo." With the pointer he picked them out, each circled
neatly in red marker pen.
"Here is waterfall number two, about a hundred and twenty miles upstream
from the Sudanese border. However, there are a number of factors we have
to consider, not least the fact that the river may have altered its
course during the last four thousand years since our friend, "Taita,
visited it."
"Surely it could not have escaped from such a deep canyon, four thousand
feet," she protested. "Even the Nile must be held captive by that?"
"Yes, but it would certainly have altered the existing bed. In the flood
season the volume and force of the river exceeds my ability to describe
it to you. The river rises twenty metres up the side walls and bores
through at speeds 3; of ten knots or more."
"You navigated that?" she asked doubtfully.
"Not in the flood season. Nothing could survive that.
They both stared at the photograph in silence for a minute, imagining
the terrors of that mighty stretch of water in its fury.
Then she reminded him, "The second waterfall?
"Here it is, where one of the tributary rivers enters the main flow of
the Abbay. The tributary is the Dandera river and it rises at twelve
thousand feet altitude, below the peak of Sancai Mountain in the Choke
range, here about a hundred miles north of the gorge."
"Do you remember the spot where it joins the Abbay from when you were
there?"
"It was over twenty years ago, and even then we had been almost a month
down there in the gorge, so it all seemed to merge into a single
nightmare. The memory bluffed with the monotonous surroundings of the
cliffs and the dense Jungle of the walls, and our senses were dulled by
the heat and the insects and the roar of water and the repetitive,
unremitting toil at the oars i But, strangely, I do remember the
confluence of the Dandera and the Abbay for two reasons."
"Yes?" She sat forward eagerly, but he shook his head.
"We lost a man there. The only casualty on the second expedition. Rope
parted and he fell a hundred feet. Landed on his back across a spur of
rock."
i am sorry. But what was the other reason you remember the spot."
"There is a Coptic Christian monastery there, built into the rock face
about four hundred feet above the surface of the river."
"Down the re in the depths of the gorge?" She sounded incredulous. "Why
would they build a monastery there?"
"Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian countries on earth. It has over
nine thousand churches and monasteries, a great many of them in
similarly remote and almost inaccessible places in the mountains. This
one at the Dandera river is the reputed burial site of St. Frumentius,
the saint who introduced Christianity to Ethiopia from the Byzantine
Empire in Constantinople in the early third century. Legend has it that
he was shipwrecked on the Red Sea shore and taken to Aksum, where he
converted the Emperor Ezana."
"Did you visit the monastery?"
"Hell, no!" he laughed. "We were too busy just surviving, too eager to
escape from the hell of the gorge to have any time for sightseeing. We
descended the falls and kept on down river. All I remember of the
monastery are the excavations in the cliff face high above the pool of
the river, and the distant figures of the troglodytic monks in their
white robes lining the parapet of the caves to watch impassively as we
passed. Some of us waved up to them) and felt quite rebuffed when they
made no response."
"How would we ever reach that spot again, without a full-scale river
expedition?" she wondered aloud, staring disconsolately at the board.
"Discouraged already?" He grinned at her. "Wait until you meet some of
the mosquitoes that live down there.
They pick you up and fly with you to their lairs before they eat you."
"Be serious," she entreated him. "How would we ever get down there?"
"The monks are fed by the villagers who live up on the highlands above
the gorge. Apparently, there is a goat track down the wall. They told us
that it takes three days to get down that track into the gut of the
gorge from the rim."
"Could you find your way down?"
"No, but I have a few ideas on the subject. We will come to that later.
Firstly, we must decide what we expect to find down there after four
thousand years." He looked at her expectantly. "Your turn now. Convince
me." He handed her the silver-headed pointer, dropped into the chair
beside her and folded his arms.
"First you have to go back to the book." She exchanged the pointer for
the copy of River God. "You remember the character of Tanus from the
story?"
"Of course. He was the commander of the Egyptian armies under Queen
Lostris, with the title of Great Lion of Egypt. He led the exodus from
Egypt, when they were driven out by the Hyksos."
"He was also the Queen's secret lover and, if we are to believe Taita,
the father of Prince Memnon, her eldest son," she agreed.
Tanus was killed during a punitive expedition against an Ethiopian chief
named Arkoun in the high mountains, and his body was mummified and
brought back to the Queen by Taita,'Nicholas expanded the story.
Precisely." She nodded. This leads me on to the other clue that Duraid
and I winkled out."
"From the seventh scroll?" He unfolded his arms and sat forward in his
seat.
"No, not from the scrolls, but from the inscriptions in the tomb of
Queen Lostris." She reached into her bag and brought out another
photograph. This is an enlargement of a section of the murals from the
burial chamber, that part of the wall that later fell away and was lost
when the alabaster jars were revealed. Duraid and I believe that the
fact that Taita placed this inscription in the place of honour, over the
hiding-place of the scrolls, was significant." She passed the photograph
to him, and he picked up a magnifying glass from the table to study it.
While he puzzled over the hieroglyphics Royan went on, "You will recall
from the book how Taita loved riddles and word games, how he boasts so
often that he is the greatest of all boa players?"
Nicholas looked up from the magnifying glass, "I remember that. I go
along with the theory that bao was the forerunner of the game of chess.
I have a dozen or so boards in the museum collection, some from Egypt
and others from further south in Africa."
"Yes, I would also subscribe to that theory. Both games have many of the
same objects and rules, but bao is a more rudimentary form of the game.
It is played with coloured stones of different rank, instead of chess
men. Well, I believe that Taita was not able to resist the temptation to
display his riddling skills and his cleverness to posterity. I believe
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