building a scaffold? Why not just use the dry river bed as an access?
Then again, surely the attraction of the spot for Taita was the river.
If it was dry, then it would be just like a thousand other places in
this gorge.
No, I have a feeling that the fact that it was so inaccessible was the
main, if not the only, reason he chose to wo there."
"I suspect that you are correct," he agreed.
"So if the river was running, even at itS lowest level as it is now, how
on earth did he manage to carve those niches below the surface? And what
would be the point in having scaffolding under water?"
"Beats me. I have no idea he admitted.
"All right, let's leave that for the moment. Now lets go over your
description of the sink-hole that almost sucked you in. Did you form any
estimate of the size of the opening?"
He shook his head. "It is almost totally dark down there. I could not
see more than two or three feet in front of me."
"Was the entrance directly between the two tows of niches?"
"No, not directly," he said thoughtfully. "It was slightly to one side.
I hit the bottom of the pool with my feet, and was just about to push
off when it grabbed me."
"So it must be at the very bottom of the pool, and slightly downstream
from the scaffolding. You say that the entrance seemed to have a square
coping?"
"I am not absolutely sure of that - remember that I could see very
little. But that was the impression I received."
"It may have been another man-made structure, then perhaps some type of
adit shaft driven into the side of the pool?"
"It's possible," he agreed reluctantly. "But on the other hand it could
just as easily be a natural fault in the strata that the river is
draining into."
She stood up to leave, and he demanded, "Where are you going?"
"I won't be long. I am going to my hut to fetch my notes, and the
material from the stele. Back in a moment."
When she returned she sat on the floor beside his bed, with her legs
drawn up under her in that double-jointed feminine fashion. As she
spread her papers around her, he pulled up the edge of the mosquito net
and looked down at what she was doing.
"Yesterday, while you were busy building the gantry, I was able to
decipher most of the rest of the "spring" face of the stele." She moved
her notebook so that he was able to overlook the pages she had opened.
"These are my preliminary notes. You will see where I have inserted a
number of question marks - here and here, for instance. That is where I
am uncertain of the translation, or where Taita has used a new and
strange symbol. I will have to give more time and consideration to those
later."
I follow you," he said, and she went on.
"These sections that I have highlighted with green are quotations from
the standard version of the Book of the Dead. Take this one here: "The
universe is drawn in circles, the disc of the sun- god, Ra. The life of
man is a circle that begins in the womb and ends in the tomb. The circle
of the chariot wheel foreshadows the death of the serpent that it
crushes beneath its rim. "Yes, I recognize the quotation," he said.
"On the other hand, these parts of the text that I have highlighted in
yellow are original Taita writings, or at least are not quotations from
the Book of the Dead or any other source that I am aware of This
paragraph here in particular is the one that I wanted to bring to your
attention."
She traced a section with her forefinger as she read it aloud, "'The
daughter of the goddess has conceived. She has been impregnated by the
one who is without seed. She has begotten her own twin sister. The fetus
lies forever -coiled in her own womb. Her twin shall never be born. She
will never see the light of day. She will five for ever in the darkness.
In the womb of the sister her bridegroom claims her in eternal marriage.
The unborn twin becomes the bride of the god, who was a man Their
destinies are intertwined. They shall live for ever. They Sul not
perish."'
She looked up from the notebook. "When I first read it, I was satisfied
that the daughter of the goddess was the Dandera river, as we had
already agreed. I was also pretty sure that the god that was once a man
must be Pharaoh.
Mamose was only deified on his ascension to the throne of Egypt. Before
that he was a man."
Nicholas nodded. !The seedless one is obviously Taita himself. He makes
repeated references to the fact that he was a eunuch. But now,' he
suggested, "if you have some new ideas about the mysterious twin sister,
let's hear them."
The twin of the river would most likely be a branch, or a fork of the
stream, wouldn't it?"
"Ah, I see what you are driving at, You are suggesting that the
sink-hole is the twin. Down there in the gorge it will never see the
Llight of day. Taita, the seedless one, claims paternity, So he is
telling us that he is the architect."
"Exactly, and he has married the twin of the river to Pharaoh Mamose for
all eternity. Putting that all together, I have come to the conclusion
that we will never find the location of Pharaoh Mamose's tomb until we
explore thoroughly that sink-hole that nearly drowned you."
"How do you suggest we do that?" he asked, and she shrugged.
"I am not the engineer, Nicky. I leave that to you to arrange. All I
know is that Taita devised some way of doing it - not only of getting
there but of working down there. If our interpretation of the stele is
correct, then he carried out extensive mining operations at the bottom
of the pool.
If he could do it, then there is no reason why you can't do it also."
"Ah!" he dernurred. "Taita was a genius. He says so repeatedly. I am
just an old plodder."
"I have got all my bets on you, Nicky. You won't let me down, will you?"
There was no call for intensive bushcraft to follow this spoor. His
quarry had taken very few anti-tracking precautions. Quite openly they
were following the main trail down the Abbay gorge, heading directly
westwards towards the Sudanese border.
Mek Nimmur was on his way back to his own stronghold.
Boris estimated that he had between fifteen and twenty men with him. It
was difficult to be certain, for the tracks on the pathway overlapped
each other, and of course he would have scouts on the'point ahead of him
and sweeping his flanks. There would also be a rear guard dragging the
trail behind him.
They were making good time, but such a large party would not be able to
outpace a single pursuer. He was sure he was gaining on them. He
reckoned that he had started four hours behind them, but judging by
recent signs he was now less than two hours adrift.
Without breaking his trot, he stooped to pick thing up from the path. As
he ran on he examined it. It was a twig, the soft tip shoot of a
kusagga-sagga plant that grew beside the track. One of the men ahead of
him had brushed against it as he passed, and snapped it off the main
branch. It gave Boris a fairly accurate gauge of how far he was behind.
Even in the heat of the gorge, the tender shoot had barely begun to
wilt. He was even closer than he had estimated.