The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 117

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Nicholas and Sapper had drawn up in England. it was essential that they

knew where every item was stored, and that they had immediate access to

it when needed. In the meantime Sapper was at work on the dam site,

laying out his foundations, driving numbered wooden pegs into the banks

of the river, and taking his final measurements with the long steel

surveyor's tape.

During this preliminary work Nicholas was watching the performance of

the monks, and getting to know them individually. He was able to pick

out the natural leaders and the most intelligent and willing men amongst

them.

He was also able to identify those who spoke Arabic or a little English.

The most promising of these was a monk named Hansith Sherif, whom

Nicholas made his personal assistant and interpreter.

Once they were settled into the camp, and had worked out a relationship

with the monks, Mek Nimmur took of Nicholas aside out of earshot the two

women.

"From now on, my work will be the security of the site.

MOS Maa's :rllar WV.

We will have to be ready to prevent another raid like the one on your

camp, and the slaughter at St. Frumentius.

Nogo and his thugs are still out there. It won't take long for him to

hear that you are back in the gorge. When he comes, I will be waiting

for him."

"You are better with an AK-47 than with a pickaxes' Nicholas agreed.

"Just leave Tessay here with me.. I need her."

"So do I' Mek smiled and shook his head ruefully, "I am only just

learning how much. Look after her for me. I will be back every night to

check on her."

Mek took his men into the bush and deployed them in defensive positions

along the trail and around the campWhen Nicholas looked up from his own

work he could often make out the figure of one of Mek's sentries on the

high ground above the camp. It was reassuring to know that they were

there.

However, as he had promised, Mek was back in camp most evenings, and

often in the night Nicholas heard, coming from the shelter he shared

with Tessay, his deep rumbling laughter blending with her sweet silvery

tones.

Then Nicholas lay awake and thought about Royan in the hut so close, but

yet so far away from where he lay.

On the fifth day the second draft of three hundred labourers that Mai

Metemma had conscripted for them arrived, and Nicholas was astonished,

Things seldom worked that way in Africa.

Nothing ever happened ahead of the promised time. He

wondered what exactly they decided

that he didn't really want to know, for now main construction work could

begin.

These men were not monks, for St. Frumentius had already given its all

to the sacred labour, but villagers who lived up on the highlands of the

escarpment. Mai Metemma had coerced them with promises of religious

indulgences and threats of hellfire.

Nicholas and Sapper divided this work force into gangs of thirty men

each, and set one of the picked monks as foreman over each gang. They

were careful to grade the men by their physical appearance, so that the

big strapping specimens were all grouped together as the project

storm.troopers, while the smaller, more wiry men could be reserved for

the tasks in which brute strength was not a necessity.

Nicholas dreamed up a name for each gang - the Buffaloes, the Lions, the

Axes and so on. It taxed his powers of invention, but he wanted to

inspire in them a sense of pride and, to his own particular advantage,

to encourage the gangs to compete with one another. He paraded them in

the quarry, each group headed by its newly appointed ecclesiastical

foreman. Using one of the ancient stone blocks as a platform, and with

Tessay interpreting for him, he harangued them heartily and then told

them that they would be paid in silver Maria Theresa dollars. He set

their wages at three times the going rate.

Up to this stage the men had listened to him with a sullen air of

resignation, but now a remarkable transformation came over them. None of

them had expected to be paid for the work, and most of them were

wondering how soon they could desert and go home. Now Nicholas was

promising them not only money, but silver dollars. In Ethiopia for the

past two hundred years the Maria Theresa dollar had been regarded as the

only true coinage. For this reason they were still minted with the

original date of 1780 and the portrait of the old Empress, with her

double chin and her decolletage exposing half her great bust. One of

these coins was more prized than a sackful of the worthless paper birr

issued by the regime in Addis. To pay his labour bills, Nicholas had

included a chest of these silver coins in the first pallet load that

Jannie had dropped.

Celestial grins bloomed as they listened, and white teeth sparkled in

their ebony faces. Someone began to sing, and they all stamped and

danced and cheered Nicholas as they trooped off to queue for their

tools. With mattocks and shovels at the slope they filed off up the

valley to the dam site, still singing and prancing.

"St. Nicholas," Tessay laughed. "Father Christmas. They will never

forget you now."

"They may even enshrine you and build a monastery over you" Royan

suggested sweetly.

"What they don't know is that they are going to earn every single dollar

, the hard way."

From then onwards the work began as soon as it was light enough to see,

and stopped only when it was too dark to continue. The men came back to-

their temporary compound each night by the light of grass torches, too

weary to sing. However, Nicholas had contracted with the headmen from

the highland villages to supply a slaughter beast every day. Each

morning the women came down the trail driving the animal before them,

and with huge pots of tej balanced on their heads.

Over the days that followed, there were no deserters from Nicholas's

little army of workers.

ounted on the high seat of the front-ender, Sapper lifted the first

filled mesh gabion in the hydraulic arms. The mesh'bound parcel of

boulders weighed several tons, and all work on the site came to a halt

as the men crowded the banks of the Dandera river to watch. A hum of

astonishment went up as Sapper eased the yellow tractor down the steep

bank and, with the gabion held high, drove the vehicle in to the water.

The current, affronted by this invasion, swirled angrily around the high

rear wheels, but Sapper pushed in deeper.

The crowds lining the bank began to chant and clap encouragement as the

water reached as high as the belly of the machine, and  louds of steam

hissed from the hot steel of the sump. Sapper locked the brakes, and

then lowered the heavy gabion into the flood before reversing back up

the bank. The men cheered him wildly, even though the first gabion was

instantly submerged and only a whirlpool on the river's surface marked

its position. Another filled gabion lay ready. The Contender waddled up

to it, lowered its- steel arms and picked it up as tenderly as a mother

gathering up her infant.

Nicholas shouted at the foremen to get their gangs back to work. The

long lines of men came up the valley, naked except for their brief white

loincloths. Sweating heavily in the heat of the gorge, their skin

glistened like anthracite freshly cut from the coal face. Each of them

carried on his head a basket of stone aggregate, which he dumped into

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