"Watch and learn." Nicholas grinned at her. "I have a little treat in
store for your favourite fish."
Once all the preparations for the construction of the coffer were
complete, Nicholas cleared the cavern, sending Royan and Sapper and all
of the men up the scaffolding.
He alone remained at the edge of the pool, with the bag of fragmentation
grenades that he had begged from Mek Nimmur slung over his shoulder.
With a grenade in each hand, he hesitated. "Seven second delay," he
reminded himself "Quenton-Harper dry flies. More effective than the
Royal Coachman!'
He pulled the pins from each of the grenades and then lobbed them out
into the middle of the pool. Quickly he turned away and hurried to the
furthest corner of the cavern. He knelt with his face to the rock wall
and covered his ears with both hands.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he braced himself. The rock floor jumped under
him and the double shock waves from the explosions swept over him in
quick succession, with a savage power that drove in his chest and
stopped his breath. In the confines of the chasm the detonations were
thunderous, but his ears were protected and the deep water of the pool
absorbed much of the blast. A twin fountain of water shot high into the
air and splashed against the cliff above his head. It poured down in a
sheet over him, soaking his clothing.
As the echoes died away, he stood up, His hearing had not been adversely
affected, and he had suffered no injury other than the shower of cold
water. Back at the edge of the pool the water shimmered with movement.
Scores of the great eels flopped and writhed on the surface, flashing
their white bellies as they twisted. Many of them were dead, their
bellies burst open, floating inert, while others were merely stunned by
the blast. Knowing how tenaciously they clung to life he suspected that
they would soon recover, but for the time being they were no longer a
danger.
He bellowed up toward the top of the cliff. "All clear, Sapper. Send
them down."
The men came swarming down the scaffolding, amazed by the carnage that
the grenades had wreaked in the pool.
They lined the bank and began to fish out the bodies of the dead eels.
"You eat them?" Nicholas demanded of one of the monks.
"Very good!" The monk rubbed his belly in anticipation.
"Enough of that, you greedy perishers." SappeT drove them back to work.
"Let's get those gabions in place before they wake up and start eating
you."
With a bamboo pole Nicholas sounded the depth of the water that covered
the entrance to the shaft, and found that it was well over the height of
a man's head. They were forced to roll the gabions down into it, and
complete the filling once they were in position. It was difficult and
taxing work, and took almost two days to complete, but at last they had
built a half-moon-shaped weir around the under, water entrance, walling
it off from the main body of water in the pool.
Using leather buckets and clay tej pots the Buffaloes began to bale out
the coffer and scoop the water over the wall into the main pool.
Nicholas and Royan watched with silent trepidation as the level in the
coffer fell and the opening in the cliff was gradually revealed.
Very soon they were able to see that it was almost rectangular, about
three metres wide by two metres high, The sides and the roof had been
eroded by the rush of water through the opening, but as the level fell
lower they could see the remains of shaped stone blocks that had
probably once sealed the opening. Four courses of them I still stood
where the ancient masons had placed them across the threshold of the
opening, but the others had been torn out by thousands of years of flood
seasons and thrown into the tunnel behind, partially blocking it.
Ea erly Nicholas climbed down into the coffer. It was not yet empty but
he could not control his impatience.
The water was knee-deep as he crawled forward into the opening, and with
his bare hands tried to shift some of the rock debris that choked it.
"It's definitely some sort of shaft," he shouted back, and Royan could
not restrain herself either. She came slithering and sloshing down into
the offer, and pushed into the opening beside him.
"There's an obstruction," she cried in disappointment.
"Did Taita do that deliberately?"
might have," Nicholas gave his opinion. "Hard to tell.
A lot of this rubble and flotsam has been sucked in from the main flow
of the river, but he might have filled the tunnel behind him as he
pulled out."
"It's going to take a tremendous amount of work just to clear it enough
to find out where this passage leads to." Royan's voice had lost its
ring of excitement.
"I am afraid it is," Nicholas agreed. "We are going to have to clear
every bit of this rubbish by hand, and there won It be time for the
niceties of formal archaeological excavation. We are just going to rip
it out." He clambered back out of the coffer, and reached back to hand
her up the bank. "Well, at least we have the-floodlights he added, "We
can keep the men working in shifts, night and day, until we get
through."
hey have dammed the Dandera river," said Nahoot Ouddabi, and Gotthold
von Schiller stared at him in astonishment.
"Dammed the river? Are you certain?"he demanded.
"Yes, Herr von Schiller. We have a report from our spy in Harper's camp.
He has over three hundred men working in the gorge. That is not all. He
has air-dropped huge amounts of equipment and supplies. It is like
a.military operation. Our spy tells us that he even has an earth, moving
machine, some sort of tractor, which he has brought in."
Von Schiller looked across the table at Jake Helm for confirmation, and
Helm nodded. "Yes, Herr von Schiller.
That is true. Harper must have spent a large amount of money. The air
charter alone could have cost him fifty grand."
Von Schiller felt the first stirrings of real passion since the "Urgent
satellite message had summoned him from Frankfurt. He had flown directly
to Addis Ababa, where the jet Ranger had been waiting to carry him to
the Pegasus base camp on the escarpment above the Abbay gorge.
If this was true, and he did not doubt Helm's word, then Harper was on
to something of enormous importance.
He looked out of the window of the Quonset hut to where flowed down the
valley below the base camp.
the Dandera It was a large river. To dam that volume of water would be
an expensive and difficult project in this remote and primitive
situation - not a project to be taken on lightly without the prospect of
substantial reward.
He felt a reluctant admiration for the Englishman's achievement. "Show
me where he has placed his dam!" he ordered, and Helm came around the
table to stand beside him. Von Schiller was standing on his block, and
their eyes were on the same level.
Helm bent over the satellite photograph and carefully marked in the site
of the dam. They both studied it for a minute, and then von Schiller
asked, "What do you make of it, Helm?"
Helm shook his head, hunching it down on his bulllike shoulders. "I can
only guess."
"Guess then," said von Schiller, but still Helm all, hesitated.