The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 61

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splice the ropes and make some sort of pulley system, and I will have to

drill Aly and the other men to avoid a repetition of my last little

fiasco. We won't be ready to make the attempt until tomorrow morning at

the very earliest."

"You get on with it. I will have plenty to keep me occupied with the

translation of the stele." Then she stopped and looked up at the sky.

"Listen!" she whispered.

He cocked his head and above the sound of the river, heard the whining

flutter of rotors in the air.

"Dammit!" he snapped. "I thought we had lost the Pegasus presence. Come

on!" He grabbed her arm and hustled her off the bridge. When they

reached the land he jumped down on to the beach, and she followed him.

The two of them crept under the hanging eaves of the bridge.

They sat quietly on the white sandy beach and listened to the Jet Ranger

helicopter approaching swiftly, and then circling back over the hills

beyond the pink cliffs. This time the pilot had not spotted them, for he

turned away and began to patrol up and down the line of the chasm.

Suddenly the engine-beat changed dramatically as the pitch altered and

the pilot pulled up the collective.

"Sounds as if he is going in for a landing up there in the hills,,

Nicholas said as he crawled out from under the bridge. "I would feel a

lot easier without them snooping around."

"I don't think we have too much to worry about," Royan disagreed. "Even

if they are connected with Duraid's killers, we are still way out ahead

of them. Obviously they have not tumbled to the importance of the

monastery, and the stele."

"I hope you are right. Let's get back to camp. We must not let them see

us in the vicinity of the chasm again. It will be too much of a

coincidence for them to find us hanging around here every time they come

this way."

while Royan went to her hut and pored over her photographs and etchings,

Nicholas worked with the trackers and skinners. He spliced the

unravelled end of the nylon rope to the second Thank, to make a single

length five hundred feet long. Then he cannibalized the canvas fly of

the cooking hut, cutting it up and whipping the raw edges to make a

sling seat. He fashioned the ends of the rope into a harness which he

spliced into the four corners of the canvas seat.

He had no block and tackle, so he put together a crude gantry of poles

which could be extended out over the cliff edge to keep the rope clear

of the rock. The rope would run through the groove that he drilled in

the end of the central beam with a red-hot iron. He lubricated it with

cooking lard.

It was the middle of the afternoon by the time he had completed his

preparations. Then, leaving Royan in camp, he led his men, burdened with

the coils of rope and the pole sections of the gantry, back up the

pathway to the spot where he had abseiled down into the ravine to

retrieve the carcass of the dik-dik. From there they worked their way

downstream, following the rim of the cliff. It was heavy going for Thorn

scrub grew right up to the edge, and in many places they were forced to

use their-machetes to hack their way through.

The sound of the waterfall guided him. As they moved down river it grew

louder, until the rock seemed to quiver under his feet with the roar of

falling waters. Finally, by leaning out over the edge and peering

downwards, Nicholas could make out the flash of spray in the depths

below.

This is the spot." He grunted with satisfaction, and explained to Aly in

Arabic what he wanted done.

In order to determine the exact position in which to set up the gantry,

Nicholas climbed into the canvas sling seat and had them lower him

twenty feet down the cliff face, just as far as the beginning of the

overhang. Up to that point he was able to keep the nylon rope from

abrading on the rock, but he was also able to see around the bulge of

the face.

Hanging backwards over the falls and the rocky bowl of the river one

hundred and fifty feet below him, he was able at last to see the double

row of niches in the rock face.

However, the has-relief engraving was still hidden from view by the

tumblehome of the cliff. He gave Aly the signal and they hauled him up.

"We must set up the gantry a little further down," he told him, and

directed them as they hacked away the dense shrubbery that choked the

rim. Then suddenly he exclaimed, "I'll be damned!" He went down on one

knee to examine the rim rock that the thorns had concealed.

"There are more excavations here."

Exposed to the elements, unlike those works further down that had been

protected by the overhang, these were badly eroded. There were just

vague traces remaining in the rim rock, but he was certain that these

indentations were the upper anchor points for the ancient scaffoldin

9They set up their own gantry on the same levelled area, and extended

the long pole out over the drop. Then they rigged and secured it with a

crude cantilever system of ropes and lighter poles.

When they were finished, Nicholas crawled out to the end to test the

structure and to run the end of the rope through the slot he had

prepared for it. The whole structure seemed solid and firm.

Nevertheless, it was with relief that he crawled back to solid ground.

He stood up and looked over the tops of the thorn scrub to where the

lowering sun was fuming red and angry on the horizon.

"Enough for one day," he decided. "The rest can wait for-tomorrow."

The next morning Nicholas and Royan were both up and drinking coffee at

the campfire while it was still dark. Aly and his men were squatting at

their own fire near by, talking quietly and coughing over the first

cigarettes of the day. The project seemed to have caught their

imagination. They had no inkling of the reason for this second descent

into the chasm, but the enthusiasm of the two ferengi was infectious.

As soon as it was light enough to see the path, Nicholas led them back

up into the hills. The men chatted cheerfully amongst themselves in

Amharic as they hurried through the thorn scrub, and they came out on

the rim rock just as the sun broke out over the eastern escarpment of

the valley. Nicholas had drilled the men the previous day, and he and

Royan had sat half the night going over the plans, so each of them knew

their part and they lost little time in setting themselves up for the

descent.

Nicholas had stripped to shorts and tennis shoes, but this time he had

brought along an old Barbarians rugby jersey for warmth. While he pulled

this over his head he pointed out to Royan the platform that had been

dug out from the solid rock.

She examined it carefully. "It's very hard to be sure, but I think you

are right. This probably is man-made."

"When you get further down you will have no doubts.

There is very little weathering of the face under the overhang, and the

niches are almost perfectly preserved until they reach the high-water

mark, that is," he told her, as he took his seat in the sling and swung

out over the cliff.

Dangling from the end of the gantry he gave Aly the sign, and the men

lowered him down into the gorge. The rope ran smoothly through the

lubricated slot.

He saw at once that he had judged it correctly, and that he was

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