When he came out through the surface, he did not know that he had done so, and he did not have enough strength left to lift his face out of the water and to breathe.
He wallowed the're like a waterlogged carcass, face down and dying. Then he felt Royan's fingers lock into the hair in the back of his head, and the cold air on his face as she lifted it clear.
"Nicky!" she screamed at him. "Breathe, "Nicky, breathe!'
He opened his mouth and let out a spray of water and saliva and stale air, and then gagged and gasped.
"You're still alive! Oh, thank God. You were down for so long. I thought you had drowned."
As he coughed and fought for air and his senses returned, he realized in a vague way that she must have dropped out of the sting seat and come to his aid.
"You were under for so long. I could not believe it." She held his head up, clinging with her free hand to the niche in the wall. "You are going to be all right now. I have got you. just take it easy for a while. It's going to be all right." It was amazing how much her voice encouraged him. The air tasted good and sweet and he felt his strength slowly returning.
"We have to get you up," she told him. "A few minutes more to get yourself together, and then I will help you into the sling."
She swam with him across to the dangling sling and signalled to the men at the top of the cliff to lower it into the water. Then she held the folds of canvas open so that he could slip his legs into them.
"Are you all right, Nicky?" she demanded anxiously.
"Hang on until you get to the top." She placed his hands on the side ropes of the harness. "Hold tight!'
"Can't leave you down here," he blurted groggily.
"I'll be fine," she assured him. "Just have Aly send the seat down again for me."
When he was halfway up he looked down and saw her head bobbing in the dark waters. She looked very small and lonely, and her face pate and pathetic.
"Guts!" His voice was so weak and hoarse that he did not recognize it.
"You've got real guts." But already he was too high for the words to carry down to her.
When they had got Royan safely up out of the ravine, Nicholas ordered Aly to dismantle the gantry and hide the sections in the thorn scrub. From the helicopter it would be highly visible and he did not wish to stir Jake Helm's curiosity.
He was in no shape to give the men a hand, but lay in the shade of one of the Thorn trees with Royan tending to him. He was dismayed to find how much his near-drowning had taken out of him. He had a blinding headache, caused by oxygen starvation. His chest was very painful and stabbed him every time he breathed: in his struggles he must have torn or sprained something.
He was impressed with Royan's forbearance. She made no attempt to question him about his discoveries in the bottom of the gorge, and seemed genuinely more concerned with his well being than with the progress of their exploration.
When she helped him to his feet and they started back towards camp, he moved like an old man, lame and stiff. Every muscle and sinew in his body ached. He knew that the lactic acid and nitrogen that had built up in his tissues would take some time to be reabsorbed and dispersed.
Once they reached camp Royan led him to his hut and fussed over him as she settled him under the mosquito net.
By this time he was feeling a lot better, but he neglected to inform her of this fact. It was pleasant to have a woman caring for him again. She brought him a couple of aspirin tablets and a steaming mug of tea, stiff with sugar. He was putting it on a little when he asked weakly for a second mugful.
Sitting beside his bed, she solicitously watched him drink it. "Better?" she asked, when he had finished.
"The odds are two to one that I Will survive," he told her, and she smiled.
"I can see that you are better. Your cheek is showing again. You gave me an awful scare, you know."
"Anything to get your attention."
"Now that we have decided that you will live, tell me what happened. What sort of trouble did you run into down there in the pool?"
"What you really want to know is what I found down there. Am I correct?"
"That too, she admitted.
Then he told her everything that he had discovered and how he had been caught in the inflow of the underwater sink-hole. She listened without interruption, and even when he had finished speaking she said nothing for a while, but frowned with concentrated thought.
At last she looked up at him. "You mean that Taita was able to take those stone niches right down to the very bottom of the pool, fifty feet below the surface? and when he nodded, she was silent again. Then she said, "How on earth did he accomplish that? What are your thoughts on the subject?"
-Tour thousand years ago the water level may have been lower. There may have been a drought year when the river dried up, and enabled him to get in there. How am I doing?"
"Not a bad try," she admitted, "but then why go to all the trouble of 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.
He slowed down., a little as he considered his next move. He knew this part of the valley fairly well. The previous year he had hunted over much of this terrain with an American client, who had been looking for a trophy Walia ibex. They had spent almost a month combing these same gullies and wooded ravines before they had brought down a huge old ram, black with age and carrying a pair of curled, back-sweeping horns that ranked as the tenth largest ever in the Rowland Ward record book.
He knew that two or three miles ahead the Nile began another oxbow loop out to the south, and that it then doubled back upon itself. The main trail followed the river, because a series of sheer and formidable cliffs guarded the high groupd in the centre of the loop of the river. It was, however, possible to cut the corner. Boris had'done it before, while following the wounded ibex.
The American hunter had not killed cleanly his bullet had struck the ram too far back, missing the heartlung cavity and piercing the gut. The stricken wild goat had taken to the high ground, following one of its secret paths up amongst the crags. Boris and the American had followed it up and over the mountain. Boris remembered how dangerous and
treacherous the path had been, but when it descended the far side of the mountain it had cut off nearly ten miles.
If he could find the beginning of the goat path again, there was every chance that he would be able to get ahead of Mek Nimmur and be lying in wait for him on the far side. That would give him an enormous advantage. The guerrilla leader would be expecting pursuit, not ambush.
He would be covering his back trail, and it was highly unlikely that Boris would be able to slip past the rear guard without alerting his intended victims. On the other hand, once he was ahead of them he would be in control. Then he could choose his own killing ground.
As the trail and the main flow of the Nile started to turn away towards the south, he kept watching the high ground above it, seeking a familiar landmark. He had not gone another half-mile before he found it. Here there was a break in the line of dark cliffs, a heavily forested reentrant, that cut into the wall of basalt.
He stopped and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. "Too much vodka," he grunted, "you are getting soft." His shirt was as sodden as though he had plunged in the river.