Helm shook his head, hunching it down on his bull-like shoulders. ‘I can only guess.’
‘Guess then,’ said von Schiller, but still Helm hesitated.
‘Go on!’
‘Either he wants to move the water to another area downstream, to use it for washing out a deposit, gold nuggets or artefacts made of precious metals, perhaps even to use it for hosing the overburden off the site of the tomb—’
‘Highly unlikely!’ von Schiller interjected. ‘That would be an inefficient and expensive manner of excavation.’
‘I agree that it is far-fetched.’ Nahoot obsequiously followed von Schiller’s lead, but no one even looked at him.
‘What is your other supposition?’ Von Schiller glared at Helm.
‘The only other reason for damming the river, that I can think of, would be to reach something that has been covered by the water. Something lying in the bed of the river.’
‘That is more logical,’ von Schiller mused, and turned his attention back to the photograph. ‘What is there below this dam site?’
‘The river enters a deep and narrow ravine here.’ Helm pointed at the spot. ‘Just below his dam. The ravine stretches about eight miles, down to this point, just above the monastery. I have flown over it in the helicopter, and it seems to be impassable, and yet—’ he broke off.
‘Yes, go on! And yet – what?’
‘On one flight over the area, we found Harper and the woman on the high ground above the ravine. They were at this spot here.’ He touched the photograph, and von Schiller leaned forward to peer at it.
‘What were they doing there?’ he demanded, without looking up.
‘Nothing. They were merely sitting on the top of the cliff above the ravine.’
‘But they were aware of your presence?’
‘Of course. We were in the helicopter. They heard our approach. They were watching us, and Harper even waved.’
‘And so they would have ceased whatever activity they were engaged in when they became aware of your approach?’
Von Schiller was silent for so long that they began to fidget uncomfortably and exchange glances. When he spoke it was so unexpected that Nahoot started.
‘Harper obviously has reason to believe that the tomb lies in the gorge below the dam. When and how do you make contact with your spy that you have in Harper’s camp?’
‘Harper is receiving some of his supplies from the villages here on the escarpment. The women are driving down slaughter cattle to feed his men, and carrying down pots of tej. Our man sends back his reports with the women when they return.’
‘Very well. Very well!’ Von Schiller waved him to silence. ‘I don’t need to know his life history. All I want to know is if Harper is working in the ravine below his dam. How soon can you find this out?’
‘By the day after tomorrow at the latest,’ Helm promised him.
Von Schiller turned to Colonel Nogo at the far end of the conference table. So far he had not spoken, but had watched and listened quietly to the others.
‘How many men have you deployed in this area?’ von Schiller asked.
‘Three full companies, over three hundred men. All well trained. Many are battle-hardened veterans.’
‘Where are they? Show me on the map.’
The colonel came to stand beside him. ‘One company here, another billeted at the village of Debra Maryam, and the third company at the foot of the escarpment, ready to move forward and attack Harper’s camp.’
‘I think you should attack them now. Wipe them out, before they can uncover the tomb—’ Nahoot came in again.
‘Shut your mouth,’ von Schiller snapped without looking up at Nahoot. ‘I will ask for your opinion when I need it.’
He considered the map for a while longer, then asked Nogo, ‘How many men has this guerrilla commander, what is his name, the one who has allied himself to Harper?’
‘Mek Nimmur is not a guerrilla. He is a bandit, and notorious shufta terrorist,’ Nogo corrected him hotly.
‘One man’s freedom fighter is the next man’s terrorist,’ von Schiller remarked drily. ‘How many men has he under his command?’
‘Not many. Fewer than a hundred, perhaps no more than fifty. He has them all guarding Harper’s camp, and the dam.’
Von Schiller nodded to himself, plucking at the lobe of his ear. ‘How did Harper and his gang return to Ethiopia?’ he mused. ‘I know he flew from Malta, but it is not possible that the aircraft could have landed down there in the gorge.’
He hopped down off his block and strutted to the window of the hut through which he had a panoramic view spread below him. He stared down into the depths of the gorge, a vista of cliffs and broken hilltops and wild tablelands, smoked blue with distance.
‘How did they get in without being discovered by the authorities? Did he parachute in, the same way as he dropped his supplies?’
‘No,’ said Nogo. ‘My informer tells us that he marched in with Mek Nimmur, some days before the supplies were dropped to him.’
‘So from where did he march?’ von Schiller pondered. ‘Where is the nearest airfield where a heavy aircraft could land?’
‘If he came in with Mek Nimmur, then they almost certainly came in from the Sudan. That is where Nimmur operates from. There are many old abandoned airfields near the border. The war,’ Nogo shrugged expressively, ‘the armies are always on the move, that war has been going on for twenty years.’
‘From the Sudan?’ Von Schiller picked out the border on the map. ‘So they must have trekked in along the river.’
‘Almost certainly,’ Nogo agreed.
‘Then just as certainly Harper plans to escape the same way. I want you to move the company of men that you have at Debra Maryam and deploy them here and here. On both banks of the river, below the monastery. They must be in a position to prevent Harper reaching the Sudanese border, if he should try to make a run for it.’
‘Yes. Good! I understand. That is good tactics,’ Nogo nodded gloatingly, his eyes bright behind the lenses of his spectacles.
‘Then I want your remaining men moved down to the foot of the escarpment. Tell them to avoid contact with Mek Nimmur’s men, but to be in a position to move forward very quickly and seize the dam area, and to block off the ravine below the dam as soon as I give you the word.’
‘When will that be?’ Nogo asked.
‘We will continue to watch him carefully. If he makes a discovery, he will start moving the artefacts out. Many of them will be too large to conceal. Your informer will know about it. That is when we will move in on him.’
‘You should move in now, Herr von Schiller,’ Nahoot advised him, ‘before he gets a chance to open the tomb.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ von Schiller snarled at him. ‘If we strike too soon, we might never discover what he obviously has learned about the whereabouts of the tomb.’
‘We could force him—’
‘If I have learned anything in my life, it is that you cannot force a man like Harper. There is a certain type of Englishman – I remember during the last war with them— ’ He broke off and frowned. ‘No. They are very difficult people. We must not rush it now. When Harper makes a discovery in the ravine, that will be the time to pounce.’ The frown faded and he smiled a small, cold smile. ‘The waiting game. In the meantime, we play the waiting game.’
The debris that filled the shaft was not so tightly packed that it completely blocked the flow of water through it. If it had done so, Nicholas would never have been sucked in by the current, as he had been on his first dive into the pool. There were still gaps in the blockage where the larger boulders had lodged or where a treetrunk had been sucked in and jammed sideways across the width of the tunnel. Through these sections the water had found the weak spots and kept them open.
Nevertheless, the debris had taken centuries to wedge itself in, and it required back-breaking effort to prise it apart. The clearing operation was further hampered by the lack of working
space in the shaft. Only three or four of the big men from the Buffaloes were able to work in the shaft at any one time. The rest of the team were employed in passing back the rubble as it was levered out.
Nicholas changed the shifts every hour. They had more labour than they needed, and changing them often meant that the men at the face were always rested and strong, and eager to earn the bonus of silver dollars that Nicholas promised them for their progress along the shaft. At each change of shift, Nicholas disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel with Sapper’s steel tape and measured the advance.
‘One hundred and twenty feet! Well done, the Buffaloes,’ he told Hansith Sherif, the foreman monk, and then watched the water trickling past his feet. The floor of the tunnel was still sloping downwards at a constant angle. He looked back along it towards the pool, and now in the floodlights the rectangular shape of the walls was very clear to see. It was obvious that the tunnel had been designed and surveyed by an engineer.
He transferred his attention back to the floor of the tunnel and watched the run of water, trying to judge how deep they were below the original river level.
‘Eighty or ninety feet,’ he estimated. ‘No wonder the pressure in the mouth of the tunnel almost crushed me—’ he broke off as an unusually shaped fragment in the muck at his feet caught his eye. He stooped and picked it up. Then took it to one of the floodlamps and by its light examined it closely. As he rubbed it clean between finger and thumb, he began to grin.
Sloshing back along the tunnel, he yelled, ‘Royan!’ Triumphantly brandishing the fragment, he demanded, ‘What do you make of that, then?’
She was sitting on the wall of the coffer, and reached down and snatched the object out of his grasp.
‘Oh, sweet Mary! Where did you find this, Nicky?’
‘Lying in the mud. Right there in the adit, where it’s been for the last four thousand years. Where one of Taita’s workmen dropped and broke it, probably while he was sneaking a sup of wine behind the slave driver’s back.’
Eagerly Royan held the broken shard of pottery up to the lamplight. ‘You are right, Nicky,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s part of a wine vessel. Look at the flared neck and belled lip. But if there was any doubt, which there isn’t, the black firing around the rim dates it perfectly in our period. No older than 2000 BC.’
Still clutching the fragment of broken pottery, she jumped down into the mud and slush of the coffer and flung both arms around his neck.
‘Further proof, Nicky. We are on Taita’s tracks. Can’t you get them to clear any faster? We are breathing down the back of the old rogue’s neck.’
Halfway through the next shift an excited yelling echoed out of the mouth of the tunnel, and Nicholas hurried back down to the face.
‘What is it, Hansith?’ he demanded in Arabic of the foreman monk. ‘What are you shouting about?’
‘We have broken through, effendi.’ Hansith Sherif grinned at him, his teeth gleaming in his black and mud-smeared 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 U-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 one 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, Nicky!’ 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.’
Three 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 t
he 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 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.