The Seventh Scroll tes-2

by Wilbur Smith

  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. Th
en 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.

  They had converted the landing at the top of the staircase, outside the

  plaster-seated entrance to the tomb, into their workshop. Royan spread

  her drawings and photographs and reference books on the rough table of

  handhewn planks that Hansith made for her. Sapper had placed one of the

  floodlamps above this crude desk so that she had good light to work by.

  Against one wall of the landing they had stacked the ammunition crates

  which contained the eight sacred statues. Nicholas had insisted on

  storing all their discoveries where he could safeguard them adequately.

  Mek's armed men still kept a twenty-four-hour guard on the causeway over

  the sink-hole.

  While Nicholas completed his photographic record of the walls of the

  long gallery and the empty burial chamber, Royan sat at her table and

  pored over her papers for hours at a time, scribbling notes and

  calculations from them into her notebooks. Now and then she would jump

  up from her desk and dart through the hatch in the white plaster doorway

  into the long gallery to study a detail on the decorated walls.

  Whenever this happened, Nicholas straightened up from his camera tripod

  and watched her with a fond and indulgent expression. So intent was she

  that she seemed completely oblivious of him and everybody else about

  her.

  Nicholas had never seen her in this mood, and the depth of her powers of

  concentration impressed him.

  When she had worked for fifteen hours without a break he went out on to

  the landing to rescue her and to lead her, protesting, back down the

  tunnel to the pool where there was a hot meal waiting for them. After

  she had eaten he led her to her hut and insisted that she lie down on

  her inflatable mattress.

  "You are going to sleep now, Royan," he ordered.

  He woke to hear her creeping stealthily out of the hut next door to his,

  back along the ledge to the entrance to the tomb. He checked his watch

  and grunted with disbelief when he realized that they had slept for only

  three and a half hours. He shaved quickly and bolted back a slab of

  toasted injera bread and a cup of tea before following her into the

  tomb.

  He found her standing in the long gallery before the empty niche in the

  shrine where the statuette of Osiris had stood. She was so preoccupied

  that she did not hear him come up behind her, and she started violently

  when he touched her arm.

  "You startled me," she scolded him.

  "What are you staring at?" he asked. "What have you discovered?"

  "Nothing," she denied swiftly, and then after a moment, "I don't know.

  It's just an idea."

  "Come on! What are you up to?"

  "It's easier for me to show you." She led him back to her table on the

  stone landing, and rearranged her notebooks carefully before she spoke

  again.

  "What I have been doing these last few days is going through the

  material on the stele of Tanus's tomb, picking out all the quotations

  that I recognize from the classical books of mystery, the Book of

  Breathings, the Book of the Pylons and -the Book of Thoth, and setting

  those on one side." She showed him fifteen pages in her neat small

  script.

  "All this is ancient material, none of it original compositions by

  Taita. I have discarded it for the time being."

  She set the first notebook aside and picked up the next. "All this is

  from the fourth face of the stele. It's nothing that I recognize, but

  seems to be only long lists of numbers and figures. Some sort of code,

  perhaps? I am not sure, but I do have some ideas on it that I will come

  to later.

  Now this here," she showed him the next book, "this is all fresh

  material that I don't remember reading in any of the ancient classics.

  Much of it, if not all of it, must be original Taita writings. If he has

  left any more clues for us, I believe they will be here, in these

  sections."

  He grinned, "Like that marvelous quotation describing the pink and

  private parts of the goddess. Is that what you are referring to?"

  "Trust you not to forget that." She flushed lightly and refused to look

  up from her notebook. "Look at this quotation from the head of the third

  face of the stele, the side Taita has headed "autumn". It's the very

  first one that caught my attention."

  Nicholas leaned forward and read the hieroglyphics aloud: "'The great

  god Osiris makes the opening coup with deference to the protocol of the

  four bulls. At the first pylon he bears full testimony to the immutable

  law of the board."' He looked up at her. "Yes, I remember that

  quotation. Taita is referring to bao, the game that the old devil loved

  so passionately."

  "That's right." Royan looked slightly embarrassed. "But do you also

  remember that I told you about a dream that I had in which I saw Du raid

  again in one of the chambers of the tomb?"

  "I remember." He chuckled at her discomfort. "He said I of the four

  bulls. Now

  4 something to you about the protoco we are going in to the, realm of

  divination by dreams, are we?"

  She looked annoyed by his levity. "All I am suggesting is that my
r />   subconscious had been -digesting the quotation and come up with an

  answer, which it put into the mouth of Duraid in the dream. Can't you be

  serious just for one moment?

  "Sorry." He was contrite. "Remind me what you heard Duraid say."

  "In the dream he told me, "Remember the protocol of the four bulls -

  Start at the beginning."'

  "I am no expert on the game of bao. What did he mean?"

  "The rules and subtleties of the game have been lost in the mists of

  antiquity. But as you know, we have found examples of the bao board

  amongst the grave goods in the tombs of the eleventh to the seventeenth

  dynasties, and we can only guess that it was an early form of chess."

  She began to sketch for him on one of the blank pages at the back of her

  notebook.

  "The wooden board was laid out like a chessboard, eight rows of cups

  wide and eight rows deep. Like this." She drew it in with quick, deft

  strokes of her ballpoint pen.

  "The pieces were coloured stones that moved in a prescribed fashion. I

  won't go into all the details, but the protocol of the four bulls was an

  opening gambit in the game favoured by grand masters of Taita's calibre.

  It consisted of making sacrifices to mass the highest-ranking stones in

  the first cup from where they could dominate the important centraffiles

  of the board."

  "I am not sure where we are going, but lead on. I am listening."Nicholas

  tried not to look too mystified.

  "The first cup of the board." She indicated it on her sketch, as though

  instructing a backward child. "The beginning, Duraid said, "Start at the

  beginning" Taita said, "The great god Osiris makes the opening coup."'

  "I still don't follow you. "Nicholas shook his head.

  "Come with me." Carrying the notebooks, she led him through the hatch in

  the white plaster doorway and stood beside him at the shrine of Osiris.

  "The opening coup. The beginning."

  She turned and faced down the gallery. "This is the first shrine. How

  many shrines are there altogetherr

  "Three for the trinity, then Seth, Thoth, Anubis, Hathor and Ra," he

  listed. "Eight altogether."

  "Glory be!" She laughed. "The lad can count! How many cups in the files

  of the bao board?"

  "Eight across, and eight down-' he broke off and stated at her, "You

  think-?"

  She did not answer, but opened the notebook. "All of these numbers and

  extraneous symbols - they spell no coherent words. They do not relate to