and the rolls of art paper back into the haversack. "You'll need to get
your boots on. I am taking you on a little walk."
An hour later they stood in the centre of the suspension bridge, swaying
gently high above the swift waters of the Dandera river.
"Hapi is the goddess of the Nile. Is this river not then her daughter,
pining to meet her, leaping from the mountain top, roaring like a
lioness, her fangs white with spume?" she asked him.
They stared in silence at the archway of pink stone through which the
river poured, and suddenly Nicholas grinned lasciviously. "I think that
I know what you are going to say next. That's what I first thought of
when I looked at that cleft. You said it was like a gargoyle's mouth,
but I had another image."
"All I can say is that you must have some extraordinary lady friends,'
she said, and then covered her mouth. "Ooops!
I didn't mean to say that. I am being as disgusting as either you or
Taita."
"The workmen swallowed up in there!" His voice became more excite& "The
masons and the workers in stone!'
"Pharaoh Mamose was a god. The river has swallowed up a god with her -
with her stone archway." She was equally excited. "I must admit that I
would not have made the association if you hadn't explored the interior
of the cavern, and found those niches in the wall." She shook his arm.
"Nicky, we have to get in there again. We have to get a clearer look at
that has-relief you found on the cavern wall."
"It will take some preparation," he said dubiously. "I will have to
splice the ropes and make some sort of pulley system, and I will have to
drill Aly and the other men to avoid a repetition of my last little
fiasco. We won't be ready to make the attempt until tomorrow morning at
the very earliest."
"You get on with it. I will have plenty to keep me occupied with the
translation of the stele." Then she stopped and looked up at the sky.
"Listen!" she whispered.
He cocked his head and above the sound of the river, heard the whining
flutter of rotors in the air.
"Dammit!" he snapped. "I thought we had lost the Pegasus presence. Come
on!" He grabbed her arm and hustled her off the bridge. When they
reached the land he jumped down on to the beach, and she followed him.
The two of them crept under the hanging eaves of the bridge.
They sat quietly on the white sandy beach and listened to the Jet Ranger
helicopter approaching swiftly, and then circling back over the hills
beyond the pink cliffs. This time the pilot had not spotted them, for he
turned away and began to patrol up and down the line of the chasm.
Suddenly the engine-beat changed dramatically as the pitch altered and
the pilot pulled up the collective.
"Sounds as if he is going in for a landing up there in the hills,,
Nicholas said as he crawled out from under the bridge. "I would feel a
lot easier without them snooping around."
"I don't think we have too much to worry about," Royan disagreed. "Even
if they are connected with Duraid's killers, we are still way out ahead
of them. Obviously they have not tumbled to the importance of the
monastery, and the stele."
"I hope you are right. Let's get back to camp. We must not let them see
us in the vicinity of the chasm again. It will be too much of a
coincidence for them to find us hanging around here every time they come
this way."
while Royan went to her hut and pored over her photographs and etchings,
Nicholas worked with the trackers and skinners. He spliced the
unravelled end of the nylon rope to the second Thank, to make a single
length five hundred feet long. Then he cannibalized the canvas fly of
the cooking hut, cutting it up and whipping the raw edges to make a
sling seat. He fashioned the ends of the rope into a harness which he
spliced into the four corners of the canvas seat.
He had no block and tackle, so he put together a crude gantry of poles
which could be extended out over the cliff edge to keep the rope clear
of the rock. The rope would run through the groove that he drilled in
the end of the central beam with a red-hot iron. He lubricated it with
cooking lard.
It was the middle of the afternoon by the time he had completed his
preparations. Then, leaving Royan in camp, he led his men, burdened with
the coils of rope and the pole sections of the gantry, back up the
pathway to the spot where he had abseiled down into the ravine to
retrieve the carcass of the dik-dik. From there they worked their way
downstream, following the rim of the cliff. It was heavy going for Thorn
scrub grew right up to the edge, and in many places they were forced to
use their-machetes to hack their way through.
The sound of the waterfall guided him. As they moved down river it grew
louder, until the rock seemed to quiver under his feet with the roar of
falling waters. Finally, by leaning out over the edge and peering
downwards, Nicholas could make out the flash of spray in the depths
below.
This is the spot." He grunted with satisfaction, and explained to Aly in
Arabic what he wanted done.
In order to determine the exact position in which to set up the gantry,
Nicholas climbed into the canvas sling seat and had them lower him
twenty feet down the cliff face, just as far as the beginning of the
overhang. Up to that point he was able to keep the nylon rope from
abrading on the rock, but he was also able to see around the bulge of
the face.
Hanging backwards over the falls and the rocky bowl of the river one
hundred and fifty feet below him, he was able at last to see the double
row of niches in the rock face.
However, the has-relief engraving was still hidden from view by the
tumblehome of the cliff. He gave Aly the signal and they hauled him up.
"We must set up the gantry a little further down," he told him, and
directed them as they hacked away the dense shrubbery that choked the
rim. Then suddenly he exclaimed, "I'll be damned!" He went down on one
knee to examine the rim rock that the thorns had concealed.
"There are more excavations here."
Exposed to the elements, unlike those works further down that had been
protected by the overhang, these were badly eroded. There were just
vague traces remaining in the rim rock, but he was certain that these
indentations were the upper anchor points for the ancient scaffoldin
9They set up their own gantry on the same levelled area, and extended
the long pole out over the drop. Then they rigged and secured it with a
crude cantilever system of ropes and lighter poles.
When they were finished, Nicholas crawled out to the end to test the
structure and to run the end of the rope through the slot he had
prepared for it. The whole structure seemed solid and firm.
Nevertheless, it was with relief that he crawled back to solid ground.
He stood up and looked over the tops of the thorn scrub to where the
lowering sun was fuming red and angry on the horizon.
"Enough for one day," he decided. "The rest can wait for-tomorrow."
The next morning Nicholas and Royan were both up and drinking coffee at
the campfire while it was still dark. Aly and his men were squatting at
their own fire near by, talking quietly and coughing over the first
cigarettes of the day. The project seemed to have caught their
imagination. They had no inkling of the reason for this second descent
into the chasm, but the enthusiasm of the two ferengi was infectious.
As soon as it was light enough to see the path, Nicholas led them back
up into the hills. The men chatted cheerfully amongst themselves in