The Seventh Scroll (38 page)

"We are praying," she told him primly. "Tamre's instructions. We have to pray before we can go to the Jesus stone." She turned away from Nicholas, closed her eyes and clasped her hands in front of her eyes, then began to pray softly.

Nicholas found a seat on a boulder a little way from them. "I don't suppose it can do any harm," he consoled himself, as he settled down to wait. Abruptly Tamre sprang to his feet and performed a giddy little dance, flapping his arms and whirling around until he raised the dust. Then he stopped and chanted. "It is done. We can go in to the Jesus stone." Once again he seized Royan's hand and led her to the rock wall. In front of Nicholas's eyes the two of them seemed to vanish, and he stood up in mild alarm.

"Royan!" he called. "Where are you? What's going on?"

"This way, Nicky. Come this way!'

He went to the wall and exclaimed with astonishment, "My oath! We would never have found this in a year of searching."

The cliff face was folded back upon itself, forming a concealed entrance. He walked through the opening, gazing up the vertical sides, and within thirty paces came out into an open amphitheatre that was at least a hundred yards across and open to the sky. The walls were of solid rock, and he could see at a glance that it was the same micaceous schist as the block which Royan had found lying on the floor of the valley. It was apparent that the bowl had been quarried out of the living rock, leaving tiers rising up to the top of the walls. The recesses from which the blocks had been hacked were still plain to see and had left deep steps with rightangled profiles. Some scrub and undergrowth had found a precarious foothold in the cracks, but the open quarry was not choked with this growth and Nicholas could see that a stockpile of finished granite blocks remained scattered about the bottom of the excavation. He was so awed by the discovery that he could find no words to express himself. He stood just inside the entrance, his head slowly turning from side to side as he tried to take it all in.

Tamre had led Royan to the centre of the quarry where one large slab lay on its own. It was obvious that the ancients had been on the point -of removing it and transporting it up the valley, for it was finished and dressed into a perfect rectangle.

"The Jesus stone!" Tamre chanted, kneeling before the slab and pulling Royan down beside him. "Jesus led me here. The first time I came here I saw him standing on the stone. He had a long white beard and eyes that were kind and sad." He crossed himself and began to recite one of the psalms, swaying and bobbing to the rhythm.

As Nicholas moved up quietly behind them he saw the evidence that Tamre had visited this sacred place of his regularly. The Jesus stone was his own private altar, and his pathetic little offerings were lying where he had laid them. There were old tej flasks and baked clay pots, most of them cracked and broken. In them stood bunches of wild flowers that had long ago wilted and dried out. There were other treasures that he had gathered and placed upon his altar - tortoise shells and porcupine quills, a cross that had been hand-carved from wood and decorated with scraps of coloured cloth, necklaces of lucky beans, and models of animals and birds moulded from blue river clay.

Nicholas stood and watched the two of them kneeling and praying together in front of the primitive altar. He felt deeply moved by this evidence of the boy's faith, and by his childlike trust in bringing them to this place.

At last Royan stood up and came to join him. Together she and Nicholas began to make a slow circuit of the quarry floor. They spoke little, and then only in whispers as though they were in a cathedral or some holy place. She touched his arm and pointed. A number of the square blocks still lay in their original positions in the quarry walls. They had not been completely freed from the mother rock, like a foetus attached by an umbilical cord which had never been severed by the ancient masons. It was a perfect illustration of the quarrying methods used by the ancients. Work could be seen in progress in all the various stages, from the marking out of the blocks by the master craftsman, the drilling of the tap holes, the wedging of the cleavage lines, right up to the finished product lifted out of the wall and ready for transport to the dam site.

The sun had set and it was almost dark by the time they came round to the entrance of the quarry again. They sat together on one of the finished blocks, with Tamre sitting at their feet like a puppy, looking up at Royan's face.

"If he had a tail he would wag it,'Nicholas smiled.

"We can never betray his trust, and desecrate this place in any way. He has made it his own temple. I don't think he has ever brought another living soul here. Will you promise me that we will always respect it, no matter what?"

"That is the very least I can do," he agreed. Then, turning to Tamre, he said, "You have done a very good thing by bringing us here to your Jesus stone. I am very pleased with you. The lady is very pleased with you."

"We should start back to camp now," Royan suggested, looking up at the patch of sky above them. Already it was purple and indigo, shot through with the last rays of the sunset.

"I don't think that would be very wise," he disagreed.

"Because it is a moonless night one of us could very easily break a leg in the dark. That is something not to be recommended out here. It might take a week to get back to any adequate medical attention."

"You plan to sleep here?" she asked, with surprise.

"Why not? I can whip up a fire in no time and I also have a pack of survival rations for dinner - I have done this kind of thing before, you know! And you have your chaperon with you, so your honour is safe. So why not?"

"Why not, indeed?" she laughed. "We will be able to make a more detailed inspection of the quarry tomorrow early."

He stood up to start gathering firewood, but then stopped and looked up at the sky. She heard it too, that now familiar fluttering whistle in the air.

"The Pegasus helicopter once again," he said unnecessarily. "I wonder what the hell they are up to at this time of day?"

They both stared up into the gathering darkness and watched the navigational lights of the aircraft pass a thousand feet overhead, flashing red and green and white as it headed southwards in the direction of the monastery.

Nicholas built a small fire in the corner of the quarry nearest the entrance, and as they sat around it he divided the pack of dry survival rations into three parts. They nibbled them, and washed down the sweet and sticky concentrated tablets with water from his bottle.

The fire threw ghostly reflections up the side of the ed the moving shadows. When a quarry wall, and enhanc.

nightjar uttered it warbling cry from a niche high up the wall, it was so eerie and evocative that Royan shivered and moved a little closer to Nicholas.

"I wonder if somewhere on the other side Taita is aware of our progress," she said. "I get the feeling that we have him a little worried by now. We have untangled the first part of the conundrum that he set for us, and I'll bet he never expected anybody to do that well."

"The next step will be to get to the bottom of his pool.

That will be really one up on the old devil. What do you hope we might find down there?"

"I hesitate to put it into words," she replied. "I might talk it away, and put a jinx on us."

"I am not superstitious. Well, not much anyway. Shall I say it for you?" he offered, and she laughed and nodded.

He went on, "We hope to find the entrance to the tomb of Pharaoh Mamose. No more hints and riddles and red herrings. The veritable tomb." She crossed her fingers. "From your lips to God's ear!" Then she grew serious. "What do you think of our chances?

I mean of finding the tomb intact?"

He shrugged. "I will answer that once we get to the bottom of the pool."

"How are we going to do that? You have ruled out the use of an aqualung."

"I don't know," he confessed. "At this stage I just don't know. Perhaps we might be able to get in there with fullhelmeted diving suits." She was silent as she considered the seeming imposs' ability of the task ahead.

"Cheer up!" He put his arm around her shoulders, and she made no move to pull away from him. "There is one consolation. If Taita has made it so tough for us, he has also made it tough for anyone else to have got in there ahead of us. I think that if the tomb is really down there, no other grave robbers have beaten us to it."

"If the entrance to the tomb is at the bottom of the pool, then his descriptions in the scrolls are deliberately misleading. The information that has come down to us has been garbled by Taita, then by Duraid, and finally by Wilbur Smith. We are faced with the task of finding our way through this labyrinth of deliberate misinformation."

They were silent again for a while and then Royan smiled in the firelight, her face lighting up with anticipation.

"Oh, icky! It is such an exciting challenge." Then her voice descended an octave. "But is there a way? Is it possible to get in there?"

"We will find out."

"When?"

"In due course. I haven't thought it out fully as yet. All I am certain of is that it is going to take a prodigious amount of planning and hard work."

"You are still committed, then?" She wanted his assurance. She knew that she could never do it alone. "You aren't daunted by the project?" Nicholas chuckled. "I will admit that I never expected Taita to lead us on such a merry chase. I imagined simply breaking open a stone gateway and finding it all waiting for us there, like Howard Carter walking into the tomb of Tutankhamen. However, to answer your question, yes, I am daunted by what it's going to involve - but hell nothing could stop me now!

I have the smell of glory in my nostrils and the gleam of gold in my eye." While they talked, Tamre curled up in the dust on the other side of the fire, and pulled his shaninut over his head. His rest must have been interrupted by dreams and fantasies, for he burbled and squeaked and giggled in his sleep.

"I wonder what goes on in that poor demented head, and what visions he sees," Royan whispered. "He says he saw Jesus here in the quarry, and I am sure that he really believes that he did."

Their voices became softer and drowsier as the fire burned down and Royan murmured, just before she fell asleep on Nicholas's shoulder, "If the tomb of Pharaoh Mamose is below the level of the river, then surely the contents will be water-damaged?"

"I can't believe that Taita would have built his dam and spent fifteen years working on the tomb, as he says that he did in the scrolls, only to flood it deliberately and despoil the mummy of his king and ruin his treasure," Nicholas murmured, with her hair tickling his cheek. "No, t would have precluded Pharaoh's resu he that rrection in other world, and brought all his work to nothing. I think Taita has taken all that into his calculations." She snuggled closer, and sighed with satisfaction.

A little while later he said softly, "Goodnight, Royan," but she did not' reply and her breathing was deep and even. He smiled to himself, and gently kissed the top of her head.

Nicholas was not certain what had woken him.

He took a few moments to place himself, and then he realized that he was still in the quarry. There was no moon but the stars hung down close to the earth, as big and fat as bunches of ripe grapes. By their light he saw that Royan had slipped down and was lying flat on the ground beside him. He stood up carefully, so as not to disturb her, and moved well away from the dead fire to empty his bladder.

The night was deathly quiet. No night bird called, nor was there the sound of any of the other nocturnal creatures.

The rocks around him still radiated the heat of the previous day's sunlight. Suddenly the sound that had woken him was repeated.

It was a faint and distant susurration that echoed along the cliffs, so that he could form no judgement as to the direction from which it came. But he was in no doubt what the sound was. He had heard it so often before. It was the sound of faraway automatic gunfire, almost certainly an AK-47

assault rifle firing, not long ragged bursts, but short taps of three rounds, an art that took expertise and practice.

He was sure that the person doing the shooting was a trained professional. He tilted his wrist so that the luminescent dial of his watch caught the starlight, and he saw that it was a few minutes after three 'clock in the morning.

He stood listening for a long time, but the firing was not repeated. At last he returned to where Royan lay and settled down beside her again. However, he slept only shallowly and intermittently, and kept starting awake listening for more gunfire in the night.

Royan began to stir at the first lemon and orange flush of dawn in the eastern sky, and while they ate the remains of the survival rations for their breakfast he told her about the noise that had woken him during the night.

"Do you think it could have been Boris?" she asked.

"He May have caught up with Mek and Tessay."

"I doubt that very much. Boris has already been gone several days. He should be well out of earshot by now, even beyond the sound range of the heaviest weapons."

"Who do you suppose it was, then?"

"I have no idea. But I don't like it. We should start back to camp as soon as we have had another look around the quarry. After that there is nothing further that we can do at this stage. We should make tracks for home and mother."

As soon as the light was strong enough, Nicholas shot a spool of film to make a record of the quarry. For ison of scale, Royan posed beside compar the wall in which the embryonic blocks still lay. As she warmed to her role as a model she started to clown for him. She climbed on to the biggest of the slabs and hammed it up for the camera, pouting with one hand behind her head in the style of Marilyn Monroe.

When, finally, they went off down the valley towards the monastery they were both exultant and garrulous after their success. Their discussion was animated as they bounced ideas back and forth, and laid their plans for the further exploitation of these wonderful discoveries.