The Seventh Scroll (64 page)

They did not linger at the first shrine, for beyond it the gallery ran on, straight as the flight of an arrow to its target. They followed it. The next shrine set into the wall was dedicated to the goddess. The golden figure of Isis sat in her niche, upon the throne that was her symbol. The infant Horus suckled at her breast. Her eyes were ivory and blue lapis lazuli. Her murals covered the walls around her niche. There she was, the mother with great kohl-lined eyes as black as night, wearing the sun disc and the horns of the sacred cow pon her head. All around her, hieroglyphic symbols covered the wall, so bright that they glowed like a cloud of fireflies; for she possessed a hundred diverse names. Amongst these were Ast and Net and Bast. She was also Ptah and Seker and Mersekert and Rennut. Each of these names was a word of power, for her sanctity and her benevolent aura had lived on where most of the old gods had withered away for lack of worshippers to repeat and keep alive these mystic names.

In ancient Byzantium and later in Christian Egypt they had bestowed the old goddess's virtues and attributes upon the Virgin Mary. The image of her suckling the infant Horus had been perpetuated in the icons of the Madonna and child. Thus Royan responded to the goddess in all her entities, the mingled blood of Royan's forefathers in her veins acknowledging both Isis and Mary, heresy and truth mingling inextricably in her heart, so that she felt at once both guilt and religious elation. In the next shrine was a golden figure of Horus, the falcon-headed, the last of the holy trinity. In his right hand he held the war-bow and in his left the ankh, for life and death were his to dispense. His eyes were red carrielians.

Portraits of his other entities surrounded the statue: Horus the infant, suckling at the breast of Isis, Horus as the divine youth Harpocrates, proud and lithe and beautiful, one finger touching his chin in the ritual gesture, striding out on sandalled feet under his short, stiff kilt. Then Horus the falcon-headed, sometimes with the body of a lion and then with the body of a young warrior, wearing the great crown of the south and the north united.

Beneath him was the inscription: "Great God and Lord of Heaven, of nunifest power, Mighty one anwngst all the gods, whose strength has vanqUished the foes of his divine father, Osiris."

the fourth shrine stood Seth, the arch-fiend, the god of violence and discord. His body was gold, but his head was the head of a black hyena. In the fifth shrine stood the god of the dead and of the cemeteries, Anubis the jackal-headed. It was he who officiated at the embalming, and whose duty it was to examine the tongue of the great balance when the heart of the eceased was weighed. If the beam of the scales were exactly horizontal, then the dead man was declared worthy, but if the balance tipped against him Anubis threw the heart to the crocodile monster and it was devoured.

The sixth shrine was dedicated to the god of writing, Thoth. He had the head of a sacred this and his stylus was in his hand. In the seventh shrine the sacred cow Had stood squarely on all four hooves, her piebald body spotted black and white, her face benignly human but with huge, trumpetshaped ears, The eighth shrine was the largest and most splendid of all, for it belonged to Amon-Ra, father of all creation. He was the sun, an enormous golden disc from which the slanting golden rays emanated, Nicholas paused here and looked back down the long gallery. Those eight

-sacred statues comprised a treasure that matched anything that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen. He felt in his heart that it was crass even to consider their monetary value. However, the simple truth was that even one of these extraordinary works of art would be sufficient to pay off all his debts many times over. But he thrust the thought aside and turned once more to face the commodious chamber at the far end of the gallery.

"The burial chamber," Royan murmured with awe. "The tomb." As they walked towards it the shadows retreated before A them, like the ghost of the long-dead pharaoh scurrying back to its final resting place. Now they could see into the tomb, Its walls were aflame with still more magnificent murals. Though they had gazed upon so many of these already, their eyes and their senses were not yet jaded or wearied by such profusion.

A single elongated figure rose up the far wall, and then stooped across the ceiling. It was the supple, sinuous body the goddess Nut, giving birth to the sun. The gold

en rays poured forth from her open womb, suffusing the sarcophagus of the pharaoh and endowing the dead king with new life.

The royal sarcophagus stood in the centre of the chamber, a massive coffin hewn from a solid granite block.

How many slaves must have laboured to bring this mass of stone along the subterranean passages, Nicholas wondered.

He could imagine their sweating bodies gleaming in the lamplight, and hear the grating squeal of the wooden rollers under the immense weight of the coffin.

, Then Nicholas looked down into the coffin, and felt the plunge of his spirits as he realized that the sarcophagus was empty. The massive granite lid had been lifted from its seat, and flung aside with such violence that it had cracked across its width and now lay in two pieces on the floor beside the coffin.

They moved forward slowly, the bitter taste of disappointment mingling with the dust upon their tongues, until they could look down into the open sarcophagus. It contained only the shattered fragments of the four canopic jars. These vessels had been carved from alabaster to contain the entrails, liver and other internal organs of the king. The broken lids were decorated with the heads of gods and fabulous creatures from beyond the grave.

"Empty!" whispered Royan. "The body of the king has gone." Over the following days, while they photographed the murals and packed the statues of the eight gods and goddesses from the funeral gallery, Royan and Nicholas discussed and argued the disappearance of the royal mummy from its sarcophagus.

"The seals on the gate of the tomb were intact," Royan pointed out repeatedly.

"There is probably an explanation for that," Nicholas told her. "Taita himself might have removed the treasure and the body. Many times in the writing of the seventh scroll he laments the waste of such treasure. He points out that it could have been much better spent in protecting and nurturing the nation and its people."

"No, it does not make sense," Royan argued, "to go to such length as to dam the river and tunnel under the pool, to build this elaborate tomb, and then to remove and destroy the king's mummy. Taita was always a logical person. In his own way he revered the gods of Egypt. It shows in all his writings. He would never have flouted the religious traditions in which he believed so strongly. Some thing about this tomb does not ring true for me

- the mysterious and almost offhanded disappearance of the body, even the paintings and the inscriptions up on the walls."

"I agree with you about the missing corpse, but what do you find illogical about the decorations?" Nicholas wanted to know.

"Well, the paintings first." She indicated the image of Isis with a wave of her hand. "They are lovely, and they are the work of a competent classical artist, but they are hackneyed and stylized in form and choice of colour. The figures are stiff and wooden - they do not move and dance. They lack that spark of genius that we were shown in the tomb of Queen Lostris where the original scrolls in their alabaster jars were hidden." Nicholas considered the murals thoughtfully. I see what you mean. Even the murals in the tomb of Tanus at the monastery are in a different class from these."

"Exactly! she said forcefully. "Those were the paintings of Taita himself These are not. They were done by one of his hacks." , "What else is there about the inscriptions that you don't like?"

"Have you ever heard of another tomb that did not have the text of the Book of the Dead inscribed upon its walls, or that did not depict the dead person's journey through the seven pylons to reach the paradise beyond?" Nicholas looked startled; he had never considered that it fact. Without replying he left her and went back down the long gallery, ostensibly to supervise the packing of the sacred statues, but in reality to give himself more time to consider what she had said.

Before leaving England Nicholas had seen to it that all of the more vulnerable and breakable equipment that they had air-freighted into the gorge had been packed in sturdy metal ammunition crates. All these crates had waterproof rubber seals and strong lever fastenings. The original contents had been padded and protected with olystyrene packing. When they left Ethiopia the equipP

ment would be abandoned, but the crates, together with the packing material, had been carefully preserved for iA transporting the treasures that they might find in the tomb.

While six of the sacred statues fitted neatly into the crates, the images of Hathor the cow and satanic Seth were too large. However, Nicholas discovered that these had been carved in separate parts. The heads were detachable, and the hoofed legs of Hathor were held into the body by wooden pins that were rotted to dust. Broken down into their separate parts, even these two larger statues could also be packed into the metal cases.

Nicholas watched Hansith packing Seth's ferocious head of ebony and black resin into one of the crates. Then after a while he went back to where Royan was working on the inscriptions on the wall above the empty sarcophagus.

"Very well. I agree. You are right about the lack of inscriptions from the Book of the Dead. It does seem strange.

But what can we do about it, other than accepting it as a mystery which we can never unravel?"

"Nicky, there is something more here. This is not everything. I feel it in every fibre of my being. We are missing something."

"Who am I, a mere male, to question the veracity of a woman's instincts."

"Stop being superior," she snapped. "How long do I have to work over the inscriptions from the stele?"

"A week or two at the most. I have to set up an RV with Jannie. We have to be there at Roseires airstrip when he comes in to pick us up. That's one date we dare not reak., "Good Lord. I thought you would have arranged that long ago. How will you contact Jannie from here?"

"Quite simple really." Nicholas smiled. "There is a public telephone at the post office in Debra Maryam, Tessay can move freely anywhere in the Goiam. She will go up the escarpment with an escort of monks and telephone Geoffrey Tennant at the British Embassy in Addis. I have already arranged it with Geoffrey. He will relay a message on to Jannie."

"Will Tessay do it for you?"

He nodded. "She has agreed to go up to Debra Maryam tomorrow. Jannie must have as much notice as possible to get himself prepared for the flight out from Malta. It's going to need some firte timing for all of us to arrive at the airstrip simultaneously. It will be asking for trouble for one party to sit around waiting at Roseires for the others to arrive."

awn on the first of April," Nicholas gave Tessay the message. "Tell Jannie . we will be there on April Fools' Day! A nice easy one to remember." They watched Tessay set off along the trail with her escort of monks and Royan asked Mek Nimmur quietly, "Don't you worry about her going off like this on her own?"

"She is a very competent person, and she is well known and liked throughout the Gojam-She is as safe as any person can be in a dangerous land." Mek watched Tessay's slim figure in shamnw and jodhpur pants becoming smaller with distance. "I wish I could go with her, but-' Mek shrugged.

Suddenly Royan exclaimed, "There is something that I forgot to ask her." She left Nicholas and Mek standing, and ran down the trail calling after the other woman. Her voice floated back to where Nicholas stood watching her.

"Tessay! Wait! Come back!'

Tessay turned and waited for Royan to catch up with her. While the two women stood talking together, Nicholas lost interest and turned to study the distant silhouette of the escarpment-With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach he saw that the thunderheads on the mountain tops were denser and more ominous than they had been only days before. The rains were building up swiftly now.

He wondered if they really had as long as they hoed before the dam was threatened and they were driven out of the gorge by the rising waters.

All, He looked back down the path just in time to see Royan pass something to Tessay, who nodded and pushed it into the pocket of her jodhpurs. Then at last the two women embraced warmly, and Tessay turned away. Royan stood in the middle of the trail, watching until a bend in the valley hid Tessay from her. Then she walked slowly back to where Nicholas waited.

"What was all that about?"he wanted to know, and she smiled mysteriously.

"Girls' secrets. There are some things that it's best you brutish males'don't know about." But when Nicholas raised an eyebrow at her, she relented and told him, "Tessay will ask Geoffrey Tennant to send a message to Mummy, just to let her know that I am all right. I don't want her to worry about me."

As they climbed back down the scaffolding to where the fly camp had been set up on the rock ledge beside Taita's pool, Nicholas thought how fortuitous it was that Royan had her mother's phone number already written down to hand to Tessay, and he wondered at this sudden (I urge of Royan's to report her whereabouts to her mother.

wonder what she is really up to?" he mused. "I will try and wheedle it out of Tessay when she returns."

Royan would have preferred to camp in the tomb itself, so as to be in the midst of the inscriptions on which she was working, but Nicholas had insisted that they sleep in the open air, and the ledge was as close as they could get to their workplace. "The musty air in the tomb is very probably unhealthy," he told her. "Cave disease is a real danger in these old enclosed places. They say that is what killed some of Howard Carter's people working in the tomb of Tutankhamen."

"The fungus spores that cause cave disease breed in bat dung," she pointed out. "There are no bats in Mamose's tomb. Taita sealed it up too tightly."

"Humour me," he begged. "You cannot work in there for days on end. I want you at least to get out of the tomb for a few hours each day." She shrugged. "Only as a special favour to you," she agreed, but as they reached the foot of the scaffolding she gave her new sleeping quarters only a perfunctory glance and then headed for the coffer dam and the entrance to the approach tunnel.