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 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