The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 75

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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 height

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

any blocks would have been carried down this far. Let's go back and -see

if anything was washed over the falls into the mouth of the chasm."

They returned to the bank of the Dandera and worked their way down as

far as the falls. Nicholas peered over.

"It's not as deep here as it is further down," he estimated. "I would

guess that it is less than a hundred feet."

"Do you think you could get down there?" she asked dubiously. Spray blew

back out of the depths into their faces, and they had to shout at each

other to make themselves heard over the thunder of the waters.

"Not without a rope, and some muscle men to haul me back out of there."

He perched himself on the brink and focused the binoculars down into the

bowl. There was a jumble of loose rock down the - small, rounded

boulders, and one or two very much larger. Some of them were angular,

and some with a little imagination could be called rectangular. However,

their surfaces had been smoothed by the rushing waters, and were

gleaming wet. All of them seemed partially submerged or obscured by

spray.

"I don't think we can decide anything from up here, and to tell the

truth I don't fancy going down there - not this evening anyway."

Royan sat down beside him and hugged her knees to her chest. She was

dispirited. "So there is nothing we can be certain about. Did Taita dam

the river, or didn't he?" Quite naturally he placed his arm around her

shoulders to console her, and after a moment she relaxed and leaned

against him. They stared down into the chasm in silence.

At last she drew back from him gently, and stood up.

"I suppose we should start back to camp. How long will it take us?"

"At least three hours." He stood up beside her. "You are right. It will

be dark before we get back, and there is no moon tonight."

"Funny how tired you feel after a disappointment," she said, and

stretched. "I could lie down and sleep right here on one of Taita's

stone blocks." She broke off and stared at him. "Nicky, where did he get

them?"

"Where did he get what?" He looked puzzled.

"Don't you see! We are going at it from the wrong end.

We have been trying to find out what happened to the blocks. This

morning you mentioned the quarries at Aswan. Shouldn't we consider where

Taita found the blocks for his dam, rather than what happened to them

afterwards?"

"The quarry!" Nicholas exclaimed. "My word, you are right. The

beginning, not the end. We should be looking for the quarry, not the

remnants of the dam wall."

"Where do we start?"

"I hoped you were going to tell me." He laughed out loud, and

immediately Tamre bubbled with sympathetic laughter. They both looked at

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