"Now let's get down to it. No more secrets between us Tell me every
detail that you have been holding back."
"Bring that book," she pointed to the copy of River God, and while he
fetched it she pushed the dirty dishes aside. "The first thing we should
go over is the sections of the book that Duraid edited." She turned to
the last pages.
"Here. This is where Duraid's obfuscation begins."
"Good word,'Nicholas smiled, "but let's keep it simple.
You have obfuscated me enough already."
She did not even smile. "You know the story to this point. Queen Lostris
and her people are driven out of Egypt by the Hyksos and their superior
chariots. They journey south up the Nile until they reach the confluence
of the White and Blue Niles. In other words, present-day Khartoum. All
this is reasonably faithful to the scrolls."
"I recall. Go on."
"In the holds of their river galleys they are carrying the mummified
body of Queen Lostris's husband, Pharaoh Mamose the Eighth. Twelve years
previously she has sworn to him as he lay dying of a Hyksos arrow
through his lung that she would find a secure burial site for him, and
that she would lay him in it with all his vast treasure. When they reach
Khartoum she determines that the time has at last come for her to make
good her promise to him. She sends out her son, the fourteen-year-old
Prince Memnon, with a squadron of chariots to find the burial site.
Memnon is accompanied by his mentor, the narrator of the history, the
indefatigable Taita."
"Okay, I remember this section. Memnon and Taita consult the black
Shilluk slaves they have captured, and on their advice decide to follow
the left-hand fork of the rivet, or what we know as the Blue Nile."
Royan nodded and continued the story. "They travelled eastwards and were
confronted by formidable mountains, so high that they were described as
a blue rampart.
So far what you read in the book is a fairly faithful rendition of the
scrolls, but at this point," she tapped the open page, we come to
Duraid's red herring. In his description of the foothills-'
Before she could continue, Nicholas interjected, "I remember thinking
when I originally read it that it didn't accurately describe the area
where the Blue Nile emerges from the Ethiopian highlands. There are no
foothills. There is only the sheer western escarpment of the massif. The
river comes out of it like a snake out of its hole. Whoever wrote that
description doesn't know the course of the Blue Nile."
"Do you know the area?" Royan asked, and he laughed and nodded.
"Alhen I was younger and even more stupid than I am now, I conceived the
grandiose plan of boating the Abbay gorge from Lake Tana down to the dam
at Roseires in the Sudan. The Abbay is the Ethiopian name for the Blue
Nile., "Why did you want to do that?"
"Because it had never been done before. Major Cheesman, the British
consul, had a shot at it in 1932, and nearly drowned himself. I thought
I could make a film, and write a book about the voyage and earn myself a
fortune , from the royalties. I talked my father into financing the
expedition. It was the kind of mad escapade that appealed to him. He
even wanted to join the expedition. I studied the whole course of the
Abbay river, not only on maps. I also bought myself an old Cessna 180
and flew down the gorge, five hundred miles from Lake Tana to the dam.
As I said, I was twenty-one years old and crazy."
"What happened?" She was fascinated. Duraid had never told her about
this, but it was the type of adventure that she would have expected this
man to launch into.
"I recruited eight of my friends from Sandhurst, and we devoted our
Christmas holidays to the attempt. It was a fiasco. We lasted two days
on those wild waters. The gorge is the most hellish corner of this earth
that I know of It's almost twice as deep and as rugged as the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado river in Arizona. It smashed up our kayaks before
we had covered twenty miles out of the five hundred.
We had to abandon all our equipment and climb the walls of the gorge to
reach civilization again."
He looked serious for a moment, "I lost two members of our party. Bobby
Palmer was drowned, and Tim Marshall fell on the cliffs. We were not
even able to recover their bodies. They are still down there somewhere.
I had to tell their parents-' he broke off as he remembered the agony of
it.
"Has anybody ever succeeded in navigating the Blue Nile gorge?"-she
asked, to distract him.
"Yes. I went back a few years later. This time not as leader, but as a
very junior member of the official British Armed Forces Expedition. It
took the army, the navy and the air force to beat that river."
She stared at him with a feeling of awe. He had actually rafted the
Abbay. It was as though she had been led to him by some strange fate.
Duraid was right. There bably no man in the world better qualified for
the was pro work in hand.
"So you know as much as anybody about the real the gorge. I will try to
give you a general nature of indication of what Taita actually set down
in the seventh scroll. Unfortunately this section of the scroll had
suffered some damage and Duraid and I were obliged to extrapolate from
parts of the text. You will have to tell me how this agrees with your
own knowledge of the terrain."
"Go ahead, he invited her.
"Taita described the escarpment very much the -way you did, as a sheer
wall from which the river emerged.
They were forced to leave their chariots, which were unable to cover the
steep and rugged terrain of the canyon. They were forced to go forward
on foot, leading the pack horses.
Soon the gorge grew so steep and dangerous that they lost, which fell
from the wild goat tracks some of these animal they were following and
plunged into the river far below.
This did not deter them and they pressed on at the orders of Prince
Memnon."
"I can see it exactly as he describes it. It's a fearsome bit of
countryside."
"Taita then describes coming to a series of obstacles, which he
describes as "steps". Duraid and I could not decide with certainty what
these were. But our best guess was that they were waterfalls."
"No shortage of those in the Abbay gorge, either," Nicholas nodded.
"This is the important part of his testimony. Taita tells us that after
twenty days' travel up the gorge they came upon the "second step". It
was here that the prince received a fortuitous message from his dead
father, in the form of a dream, in which he chose this as the site of
his own tomb.
Taita tells us that they travelled no further. If we are able to
determine what it was that stopped them, that would give us an accurate
measurement of just how far into the gorge they penetrated."
"Before we can go any further we will need maps and satellite
photographs of the mountains, and I will have to go over my expedition
notes and diary," Nicholas decided "I try to keep my reference library
up-to-date, and so we should have satellite photographs and the most
recent maps on file here in the museum. If they are Mrs. Street is the
one to find them."
He stood up and stretched, "I will dig out my diaries this evening and
read over them. My great-grandfather also hunted and collected in
Ethiopia in the last century. I know he crossed the Blue Nile near Debra
Markos in 1890something. I'll get out his notes as well. They are
preserved in our archives. The old boy may have written something there
that could help us."
He walked with her to the old green Land Rover in the car park, and as