Текст книги "The Seventh Scroll"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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mask and helped her to adjust them. Then he made her fit a pair of wax

ear plugs.

Before he started the chain-saw, he sent the rest of them back down the

tunnel as far as the causeway over the sinkholes In the confined space

the exhaust fumes from the chain-saw and the dust, together with the

noise of the petrol engine, would be overpowering, but apart from that

he wanted only Royan with him at the moment of the break'in.

When they were alone, Nicholas switched the blower fan to its highest

speed, then donned his own mask and goggles and plugged his ears. He

pulled the starter cord of the chain-saw motor and it burst into life in

a cloud of blue exhaust smoke.

Nicholas braced himself and pressed the spinning chain blade into the

gimlet hole in the plastered doorway.

It cut through the thick white plaster and the laths beneath it like a

knife through the icing on a wedding cake.

Carefully he ran the cutting edge down the line he had marked out.

A cloud of flying white plaster dust filled the air.

Within seconds they could see only a few feet in front of their eyes.

Doggedly Nicholas kept the cut going, down the right -hand side, across

the bottom, then up the left side. Finally he made the last cut across

the top, and when the square trapdoor began to sag forward under its own

weight he killed the engine of the chain'saw and set it aside.

Royan jumped forwards to help him, and together in the eddies of dust

and smoke they steadied the square of plaster and prevented it from

crashing to the paving and shattering into a thousand pieces. Gently

they lifted it out from the opening and, with the seals still intact,

laid it against the side wall of the landing.

The open hatchway they had cut through the plaster was a dark square.

Nicholas adjusted the floodlight to shine through it, but the dust was

still too dense for them to be able to see much of the interior.

Nicholas climbed through the hatch into the space beyond. All was

obscured by a dense fog of dust that not even the lamps could penetrate.

He did not attempt to explore further, but immediately turned back to

help Royan through the opening after him.

He recognized her right to share every moment of this discovery. Beyond

the wall they stood quietly together, waiting for the blower fan to

clear the air. Slowly the dust fog began to dissipate, and the first

thing they became aware of was the floor beneath their feet.

No longer made of stone slabs, it was covered with tiles of yellow agate

that had been polished to a gloss and fitted together so cunningly that

no joints were visible. It was like a single sheet of lovely opaque

glass, dulled only by the film of fine talcum dust that had settled upon

it.

Where their feet had disturbed the layer of dust the agate sparkled

through it, catching the light of the floodlamp.

Then the fog of dust that surrounded them thinned, and gradually a

miraculous blaze of colours and shapes began to appear through the murk.

Royan lifted the dust mask from her face and let it drop to the agate

floor.

Nicholas followed her example, and took a breath of the stagnant air. No

draught had disturbed it for thousands of years and it had the odour of

great antiquity, the musty smell of the linen bandages of an embalmed

corpse.

Now the miasma of dust faded away and before them opened a long straight

passageway, the end of which was hidden in shadow and darkness. Nicholas

turned back to the opening in the sealed door behind them, and reached

through it to bring in the fioodlight on its stand. Quickly he arranged

it to illuminate the full length of the passageway ahead of them.

As they started forward, the images of the old gods hovered around them.

They glowered at the intruders from the walls and hung over them,

watching them with huge and hostile eyes from the ceiling high overhead.

Nicholas and Royan passed on slowly. Their footfalls on the agate tiles

were muted by the thin carpet of dust, and the dust that still hung in

the air reflected the light and cast over them a luminous net that had

an ethereal, dreamlike quality.

Inscriptions covered every inch of space upon the walls and the high

roof. There were long quotations from all the mystical writings, from

the Book of Breathings, the Book of the Pylons and the Book of Wisdom.

Other blocks of hieroglyphics recited the history of Pharaoh Mamose's

existence on this earth, and extolled those virtues that made the gods

love him.

Further along they came to the first of eight shrines set into the walls

of the long funeral gallery. This one was the shrine of Osiris. It was a

circular chamber, the curved wall decorated with texts in praise of the

god, and in its niche a small statue of Osiris in his tall feathered

head-dress, with eyes of onyx and rock crystal which stared at them so

lacably that Royan shivered. Nicholas reached out and gently touched the

foot of the god.

He said one word, "Gold!'

Then he looked up at the towering mural that covered the wall and half

the domed ceiling above and around the shrine. It was another gigantic

figure of the father Osiris, god of the Underworld, with his green face

and false beard, his arms crossed upon his chest, holding the flail and

the crook, wearing his tall feathered head-dress and with the erect

cobra on his brow. They gazed up at him with a sense of awe. As the

lamplight wavered in the shifting dust cloud LEI  the god seemed to

become imbued with life, and to move and sway before their eyes.

They did not linger at the first shrine, for beyond it the gallery ran

on, straight as the flight of an arrow to its target. They followed it.

The next shrine set into the wall was dedicated to the goddess. The

golden figure of Isis sat in her niche, upon the throne that was her

symbol. The infant Horus suckled at her breast. Her eyes were ivory and

blue lapis lazuli.

Her murals covered the walls around her niche. There she was, the mother

with great kohl-lined eyes as black as night, wearing the sun disc and

the horns of the sacred cow  pon her head. All around her, hieroglyphic

symbols covered the wall, so bright that they glowed like a cloud of

fireflies; for she possessed a hundred diverse names.

Amongst these were Ast and Net and Bast. She was also Ptah and Seker and

Mersekert and Rennut. Each of these names was a word of power, for her

sanctity and her benevolent aura had lived on where most of the old gods

had withered away for lack of worshippers to repeat and keep alive these

mystic names.

In ancient Byzantium and later in Christian Egypt they had bestowed the

old goddess's virtues and attributes upon the Virgin Mary. The image of

her suckling the infant Horus had been perpetuated in the icons of the

Madonna and child. Thus Royan responded to the goddess in all her

entities, the mingled blood of Royan's forefathers in her veins

acknowledging both Isis and Mary, heresy and truth mingling inextricably

in her heart, so that she felt at once both guilt and religious elation.

In the next shrine was a golden figure of Horus, the falcon-headed, the

last of the holy trinity. In his right hand he held the war-bow and in

his left the ankh, for life and death were his to dispense. His eyes

were red carrielians.

Portraits of his other entities surrounded the statue: Horus the infant,

suckling at the breast of Isis, Horus as the divine youth Harpocrates,

proud and lithe and beautiful, one finger touching his chin in the

ritual gesture, striding out on sandalled feet under his short, stiff

kilt.

Then Horus the falcon-headed, sometimes with the body of a lion and then

with the body of a young warrior, wearing the great crown of the south

and the north united.

Beneath him was the inscription: "Great God and Lord of Heaven, of

nunifest power, Mighty one anwngst all the gods, whose strength has

vanqUished the foes of his divine father, Osiris."

 the fourth shrine stood Seth, the arch-fiend, the god of violence and

discord. His body was gold, but his head was the head of a black hyena.

In the fifth shrine stood the god of the dead and of the cemeteries,

Anubis the jackal-headed. It was he who officiated at the embalming, and

whose duty it was to examine the tongue of the great balance when the

heart of the  eceased was weighed. If the beam of the scales were

exactly horizontal, then the dead man was declared worthy, but if the

balance tipped against him Anubis threw the heart to the crocodile

monster and it was devoured.

The sixth shrine was dedicated to the god of writing, Thoth. He had the

head of a sacred this and his stylus was in his hand. In the seventh

shrine the sacred cow Had stood squarely on all four hooves, her piebald

body spotted black and white, her face benignly human but with huge,

trumpet-shaped ears, The eighth shrine was the largest and most splendid

of all, for it belonged to Amon-Ra, father of all creation. He was the

sun, an enormous golden disc from which the slanting golden rays

emanated, Nicholas paused here and looked back down the long gallery.

Those eight -sacred statues comprised a treasure that matched anything

that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had discovered in the tomb of

Tutankhamen.

He felt in his heart that it was crass even to consider their monetary

value. However, the simple truth was that even one of these

extraordinary works of art would be sufficient to pay off all his debts

many times over. But he thrust the thought aside and turned once more to

face the commodious chamber at the far end of the gallery.

"The burial chamber," Royan murmured with awe. "The tomb."

As they walked towards it the shadows retreated before A them, like the

ghost of the long-dead pharaoh scurrying back to its final resting

place. Now they could see into the tomb, Its walls were aflame with

still more magnificent murals. Though they had gazed upon so many of

these already, their eyes and their senses were not yet jaded or wearied

by such profusion.

A single elongated figure rose up the far wall, and then stooped across

the ceiling. It was the supple, sinuous body  the goddess Nut, giving

birth to the sun. The gold

en rays poured forth from her open womb, suffusing the sarcophagus of

the pharaoh and endowing the dead king with new life.

The royal sarcophagus stood in the centre of the chamber, a massive

coffin hewn from a solid granite block.

How many slaves must have laboured to bring this mass of stone along the

subterranean passages, Nicholas wondered.

He could imagine their sweating bodies gleaming in the lamplight, and

hear the grating squeal of the wooden rollers under the immense weight

of the coffin.

, Then Nicholas looked down into the coffin, and felt the plunge of his

spirits as he realized that the sarcophagus was empty. The massive

granite lid had been lifted from its seat, and flung aside with such

violence that it had cracked across its width and now lay in two pieces

on the floor beside the coffin.

They moved forward slowly, the bitter taste of disappointment mingling

with the dust upon their tongues, until they could look down into the

open sarcophagus. It contained only the shattered fragments of the four

canopic jars. These vessels had been carved from alabaster to contain

the entrails, liver and other internal organs of the king. The broken

lids were decorated with the heads of gods and fabulous creatures from

beyond the grave.

"Empty!" whispered Royan. "The body of the king has gone."

Over the following days, while they photographed the murals and packed

the statues of the eight gods and goddesses from the funeral gallery,

Royan and Nicholas discussed and argued the disappearance of the royal

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. Then 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

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

each other in any way, except that no number in the list is greater than

eight., "I thought I had caught up with you, but I just lost you again."

"If somebody were to read the notations of a game of T, chess four

thousand years from now, what would he make of it?" she asked. "Wouldn't

it just be lists of numbers and extraneous symbols to him? You really

are being extremely dense, aren't you? This is like pulling teeth."

"Oh, Lordy, Lordy!" His face cleared. "You clever lady!

Taita is playing the game of bao with us."

"And this is the first pylon, where it starts." She gestured to the

shrine. "This is where the great god Osiris makes the opening coup. This

is where we must start at the beginning of the sacred bao board. This is

where we counter his opening move."

They both looked around the shrine for a while, studying the curved

walls and the high domed roof, and then Nicholas broke the silence. "At

the risk of being called extremely dense and having my teeth pulled, may

I ask a question? How the hell do we play a game when we don't even know

the rules?"

olonel Nogo exuded confidence and self, importance as he swaggered into

the conference room to answer von Schiller's summons.

Nahoot Guddabi bustled along behind him, determined not to be excluded

from any of the proceedings. He too tried to look confident and

important, but in truth he felt his position was very insecure and that

he needed to justify himself to his master, Von Schiller was dictating

correspondence to Utte Kemper, but as soon as they entered the room he

stood  quickly and stepped on to the carpeted block.

"You promised that you would have a report for me yesterday," he snapped

at Nogo, ignoring Nahoot. "Have you not heard anything from this

informer of yours in the gorge?"

"I apologize for keeping you waiting like this, Herr von Schiller." Nogo

was immediately deflated by this sharp attack, and he became restless

and uneasy. The German frightened him. "The women were a day late

returning from Harper's camp. They are very unreliable, these country

people. Time means very little to them."

"Yes, yes." Von Schiller was impatient. "I know the failings of your

black brethren, and I might add you are not completely innocent of these

yourself, Nogo. But tell me what news you have for me."

"Harper finished work on the dam seven days ago, and immediately he

moved his camp downstream, to a new place on the hills above the ravine.