grasshopper. He tossed the insect on to the surface of the pool, and as
it kicked weakly and floated towards the exit a long dark shadow rose
from the bottom. There was a swirl and a mirrorlike flash of a scaly
silver belly, and the grasshopper disappeared.
"Ten'pounder,'Nicholas lamented. "Why didn't I bring my rod?"
Tamre was crouched near Nicholas on the pool bank, and suddenly he
lifted his hand and held it out. Almost at once one of the circling
butterflies settled upon his finger.
It perched there with its velvety black and yellow wings fanning gently.
They stared at him in astonishment, for it was as though the insect had
come to his bidding. Tamre giggled and offered the butterfly to Royan.
When she held out her hand, he gently transferred the gorgeous insect to
her palm.
"Thank you, Tamre. That is a wonderful gift. Now my gift to you is to
set it free again." She pursed her lips and blew it softly into flight.
They watched the butterfly climb high above the pool, and Tamre clapped
his hands and laughed with delight.
"Strange," Nicholas murmured. "He seems to have a special empathy with
all the creatures of the wilderness. I think that Jali Hora, the abbot,
does not try to control him, but lets him do very much as his simple
fancy dictates.
Special treatment for a fey soul, one that hears a different tune and
dances to it. I must admit that, despite myself, I am becoming quite
fond of the lad."
It was only another fifty feet higher that they came to the source.
There was a low cliff of red sandstone, from a grotto at whose foot the
stream gushed. The entrance was screened by a heavy growth of ferns, and
Nicholas went down on his knees to pull them aside and peer into the low
opening.
"What can you see?" Royan demanded behind him.
"Not much. It's dark in there, but it seems to go in for quite some
way."
"You are too big to get in there. You had better let me go in."
"Good place for water cobra," he remarked. "Lots of frogs for them to
eat. Are you sure you want to go?"
"I never said that I wanted to." She sat on the bank while she unlaced
her shoes, then lowered herself into the stream. It came halfway up her
thighs, and she waded forward against the flow with difficulty.
She was forced to bend almost double to creep under the overhanging roof
of the grotto. As she moved deeper in, her voice came back to him.
"The roof gets lower."
"Be careful, dear girl. Don't take any chances."
"I do wish you wouldn't call me "dear girl"." Her voice resonated
strangely from the cave entrance.
"Well, you are both those things, a girl and dear. How about if I call
you "young lady?
"Not that either. My name is Royan."There was silence for a while, then
she called again. "This is as far as I can go. It all narrows down into
a shaft of some sort."
"A shaft?" he demanded.
"Well, at least a roughly rectangular opening."
"Do you think it is the work of humans?"
"Impossible to tell. The water is coming out of it like the spout of a
bath tap. A solid jet."
"No evidence of any excavation? No marks of tools on the rock?"
"Nothing. It's slick and water-worn, covered with moss and algae."
"Could a man get into the opening, I mean if it were not for the water
pressure?"
"If he was a pygmy or a dwarf."
"Or a childT he suggested.
"Or a child," she agreed. "But who would send a child in there?"
"The ancients often used child-slaves. Taita might have done the same."
"Don't suggest it. You are destroying my high opinion of Taita," she
told him as she backed out of the entrance of the grotto. There were
pieces of fern and moss in her hair, and she was soaked from the waist
downwards. He gave her a hand and boosted her back on to the bank. The
curve of her bottom was clearly visible through her wet trousers. He
forced himself not to dwell upon the view.
"So we have to conclude that the shaft is a natural flaw in the
"I didn't say that. No. I said that I couldn't be sure.
You might be correct. Children might have been used to dig it. After
all, they were used in the coalmines during the industrial revolution."
"But there is no way that we would be able to explore the tunnel from
this end?"
"Impossible." She was vehement. "The water is pouring out under enormous
pressure. I tried to push my arrn up the shaft, but I did not have the
strength."
"Pity! I was hoping for some more irrefutable evidence, or at least
another lead." He sat down beside her on the bank, and ferreted in his
pack. She looked at him quizzically when he brought out a small black
anodized instrument and opened the lid.
"Aneroid barometer," he explained. "Every good navigator should have
one." He studied it for a moment and then made a note of the reading.
"Explain," she invited.
"I want to know if this spring is below the level of the entrance to the
sink-hole in Taita's pool. If it is not, then we can cross it off our
list of possibilities."
He stood up. "If you are ready, we can move on."
"Where to?"
"Why, Taita's pool, of course. We need a reading up there to establish
the difference in altitude between the two points."
nce Tamre knew where they were headed he showed them a shortcuts so it
took them just under two hours from the fountain head to the top of the
cliff face above Taita's pool.
While they rested, Royan remarked, "Tamre seems to spend most of his
days wandering around in the bush. He knows every path and game trail.
He is an excellent guide."
"Better than Boris, at least," Nicholas agreed, as he fished out his
barometer and took another reading.
"You look particularly pleased with yourself." Royan watched his face as
he studied the instrument.
"Every reason to be," he told her. "Allowing one hundred and eighty feet
for the height of the cliff below us, and another fifty feet for the
depth of the pool, the entrance to the sink-hole is still over a hundred
feet higher than your outlet through the fern grotto on the other side
of the ridge."
"Which means?"
"Which means that there is a distinct possibility that the streams are
one and the same. The inflow is here in Taita's pool and the outflow is
from your grotto."
"How on earth did Taita do it?" she puzzled. "How did he get to the
bottom of the pool? You are the engineering marvel. Tell me how you
would do it."
He shrugged, but she persisted. "I mean, there must be some established
way of doing things like that, of working under water. How do they build
the piers of a bridge, or the foundations of a dam, or - or - or how did
Taita himself build the shaft below the level of the Nile to measure the
flow of the river? You remember the description that he gives of his
hydrograph in River God?"
"The accepted technique is to build a coffer da
m " Nicholas said
casually, and then broke off and stared at her. "My oath, you really are
a corker. A dam! What if that old ruffian, Taita, dammed the whole
flipping river!"
"Would that have been possible?"
"I am beginning to believe that with Taita anything is possible. He
certainly had unlimited manpower at his disposal, and if he could build
the hydrograph on the Nile at Aswan, then he understood very clearly the
principles of hydrodynamics. After all, the old Egyptians' lives were
completely bound up with the seasonal inundations of the river and the
management of the floods. From what we have gathered about the old man,
it certainly seems Possible."
"How could we prove it?"
"By finding the remains of his dam. It had to be a hell of a work to
hold the Dandera river. There is a good chance that some evidence of it
remains."
"Where would he have built the dam?" she asked excitedly. "Or let me put
it another way, where would you site the dam if you had to do it?,
"There is one natural place for it," he answered promptly. "The spot
where the trail leaves the river and detours down the valley, and the
river falls into the chasm.
They both turned their heads in unison and looked upstream.
"What are we waiting for?" she asked, and sprang to her feet. "Let's go
look-see!
Their excitement was infectious, and Tamre giggled and danced ahead of
them along the trail through the thorns and then up the valley to the
point where it rejoined the river. The sun had lost the worst of its
heat by the time they stood once again above the falls where the
Dandera. river plunged into the mouth of the chasm, and began its last
lap in the race to join the Nile.
"If Taita. had thrown a dam across here - " Nicholas made a sweep of his
arms across the mouth of the gorge, he could have diverted the river
down the side valley here."
"It looks possible," she laughed. Tamre giggled in sympathy, not
understanding a word of what they were saying, but enjoying himself
immensely.
"I would need a dumpy level to take some shots of the actual fall of the
land. It can be very deceptive, but with the naked eye it does look
possible, as you say." He shaded his eyes and looked up the bluffs on
each side of the waterfall. They formed two craggy portals of limestone,
between which the river roared as it plunged over the lip.
"I would like to climb up there to get a clearer picture of the layout
of the terrain. Are you game?"
"Try and stop me,', she challenged him, and led the climb. It was a
heavy scramble, and in some places the limestone was rotten and
crumbling dangerously. However, when they came out on the summit of the
eastern portal they were rewarded with a splendid overall view of the
ground below.
Directly to the north, the escarpment rose like a sheer wall with its
battlements crenellated and serrated. Above and beyond it there was a
dream of further mountains, the high peaks of the Choke, blue as a
heron's plumage against the clearer distant blue of the African sky.
All around them were the badlands of the gorge, a vast confusion of
ridges and spines and reefs of rock of fifty different hues, some
ash-grey and white, others black as the hide of a bull buffalo, or red
as his heart blood. The river in bush was green, the poisonous vivid
green of the mamba in the treetop, while further from the water the
scrub was grey and sear, and along the spines of the broken kopjes stood
the stark outlines of ancient drought-struck trees, their tortured limbs
twisted and black against the sky.
"The picture of devastation," Royan whispered as she looked around her,
'untamed and untaniable. No wonder Taita chose this place. It repels all
intruders."
They were both silent for a while, awed by the wild grandeur of the
scene, but as soon as they had recovered from the exertion of the climb
their enthusiasm resurfaced.
"Now you can get a good picture of it." Nicholas pointed down into the
valley below them. "There is a clear divide at the fork of the valley.
You can see the natural fall of the ground. There, from that side of the
gorge to that point below us, is the narrowest part. It is a neck where
the river squeezes through - the natural site for a dam." He swivelled
and pointed down to the left of where they sat.
'it would not take much to spill the river into the valley.
Once he had finished whatever he was up to in the chasm, it would taken
even less to break down the wall of the dam and let the river resume its
natural course again."
Tamre watched their faces eagerly, turning his head to each speaker in
turn, uncomprehending, but aping Royan's expression like a mirror. If
she nodded he nodded, when she frowned he did the same, and when she
smiled he giggled happily.
"It's a big river." Royan shook her head, while Tamre wagged his from
side to side in sympathy and looked wise.
"What method would he have used? An earthen dam?
Surely not?" i "The Egyptians used earthen canals and dams for a great
many of their irrigation works,'Nicholas mused. "On the other hand, when
they had rock available to work with ..", they used it extensively. They
were expert masons. You have stood in the quarries at Aswan."
"Not much topsoil here in the gorge," she pointed out.
"But on the other hand, there is plenty of rock. It's like a geological
museum. Every type of rock that you could wish for."
"I agree," he said. "Rather than an earthen wall, Taita would most
probably have used a masonry and rock fill.
That is the type of dam the ancients built in Egypt, long before his
time. If that is the case, there is a chance that traces of it have
survived."
"Okay. Let's work on that hypothesis. Taita built a dam of rock stabs,
and then he breached it again. Where would we find the remains of it?"
"We would have to start searching on the actual site," he answered.
"There at the neck of the gorge. Then we would have to search downstream
from there."
They scrambled down the slope again, with Tamre picking out the easiest
route for Royan, stopping to beckon her whenever she faltered or paused
for breath. They came out in the neck of the valley and stood on the
rocky bank of the river, looking about them.
"How high would the wall have been?" Royan asked.
"Not too high. Again, I can't give you a precise answer until I have
shot the levels." He climbed a little way up the side of the wall. There
he squatted and turned his head back and forth, looking first down the
length of the valley and then towards the lip of the waterfall that
dropped into the mouth of the chasm.
Three times he changed his position, on each occasion moving a few paces
higher up the slope. The cliff became steeper the higher he climbed. In
the end he was clinging precariously to the side of it, but he seemed
satisfied. Then he called down to her.
"I would say this is about it, where I am now. This would be the he
ight
of the dam wall. It looks about fifteen feet high to me."
Royan was still standing on the bank, and now she turned and stared
across at the far bank of the river, estimating the distance to the
limestone cliff rising above it.
"Roughly a hundred feet across," she shouted up to him.
"About that," he agreed. "A lot of work, but not impossible."
"Taita. was never one to be daunted by size or difficulty." She cupped
her hands around her mouth to shout up to him. "While you are up there,
can you see any sign of works? Taita would have had to pin the dam wall
into the cliff."
He scrambled along the cliff, keeping to the same level, until he was
almost directly above the falls and could go no further. Then he slid
down to where Royan and Tamre waited.
"Nothing?" she anticipated, and he shook his head.
"No, but you can't really expect that there would be anything left after
nearly four thousand years. These cliffs have been exposed to wind and
weather for all that time. I think our best bet will be to look for any
surviving blocks from the dam wall that might have been carried away
when Taita. breached it to flood the chasm again."
They started down the valley, where Royan came upon a chunk of stone
that seemed to be of a different type from the surrounding country rock.
It was the size of an oldfashioned cabin trunk. Although it was
halfcovered by undergrowth, the uppermost end - the one that was exposed
- had a definite right-angled corner to it. She called Nicholas across
to her.
"Look at that." Royan patted it proudly. "What do you think of that?"
He climbed down beside herand ran his hands over the exposed surface of
the stab. "Possible," he repeated. "But to be certain we would have to
find the chisel marks where the "old masons started the fracture. As you
know, they chiselled a hole into the stone, and then wedged it open
until it split."
Both of them went over the exposed surface carefully, and although Royan
found an indentation that she declared was a weathered chisel mark,
Nicholas gave her only four out of ten on the scale of probability.
"We are running out of time," he said, enticing her away from her find,
'and we still have a lot of ground to cover."
They searched the valley floor for half a kilometer further, and then
Nicholas called it off. "Even in the heaviest flood it is unlikely that