The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 118

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the mouth of the waiting gabion. Then he returned with his empty basket

down the hill to the quary.

As each gabion was filled, another team fitted the mesh lid and laced it

closed with heavy eight-gauge wire.

"Twenty dollars bonus to the team with the most baskets filled

today!'Nicholas bellowed. They shouted with glee and redoubled their

efforts, but they were unable to keep up with Sapper on the Contender.

He laid his stone piers artfully, working out from the shallow water

alongside the bank so that each gabion lay against its neighbour, keying

into the wall to give mutual support.

At first there was little evident progress, but as a solid reef was

built up beneath the surface the river began to react savagely. The

voice of the water changed from a low rustle to a dull roar as it tore

at Sapper's wall.

Soon the top of the wall of gabions thrust its head above the surface,

and the river was constricted to half its former width. Now its mood was

truculent. It poured through the gap in a solid green torrent, and crept

almost imperceptibly up the banks as it was forced to back up behind the

barriers The rive  worried the foundations of the dam, clawing at it to

find its weak spots, and the progress of the work slowed down as the

waters rose higher.

Up in the river in forests along the banks the axemen were at work, and

Nicholas winced each time one of the great trees toppled, groaning and

shrieking like a living creature. He liked to think of himself as a

conservationist, and some of these trees had taken centuries to reach

this girth.

"Do you want your bleeding dam, or your pretty trees?" Sapper demanded

ferociously, when Nicholas lamented in his hearing. Nicholas turned away

without replying.

They were all becoming tired with the unremitting labour. Their nerves

were stretching towards snapping point, and tempers were mercurial.

Already there had been a number of murderous fights amongst the workmen,

and each time Nicholas had been forced to duck in under the swinging

steel mattocks to break it up and separate the combatants.

lowly they squeezed the' river in its bed as the pier crept out from the

bank, and the time came when they had to transfer their efforts to the

far bank. It required the combined efforts of their entire labour force

to build a new road along the bank as far as the ford.

There they manhandled the front-ender into the water, and, with a

hundred men hauling on the tow ropes and her tall lugged rear wheels

spinning and churning the surface to a froth they. dragged her across.

Then they had to build another road back along the far bank to reach the

dam site. They cut out the treetrunks that obstructed them and levered

the boulders out of the way to get the tractor through, Once they had

her back at the dam site they could begin the same process of laying out

gabions from the far bank.

Gradually, a few metres each day, the two walls crept closer to each

other, and as the gap between them narrowed the water rose higher and

became more raucous, making the work more difficult.

In the meanwhile, two hundred metres upstream of the dam site, the

Falcons and the Scorpions were at work.

These two teams were building the raft of treetrunks that they had

hacked from the forest. The timbers were lashed together to form a

grating. Over this was laid heavy PVC sheeting to make it waterproof,

then a second grating of treetrunks went over this to form a gigantic

sandwich. It was all lashed together with heavy baling wire. Finally,

one end of the grating was ballasted with boulders.

Sapper arranged the ballast of boulders to make the raft one-side heavy,

so that it would float almost vertically in the water, with one end of

it scraping the bottom of the river and the other sticking up above the

surface. The dimensions of the completed raft were carefully related to

the gap between the two buttresses of the dam. And while the work on the

raft and the wall continued Sapper built up a stockpile of filled

gabions, which he stacked on both banks below the dam.

Three other full work teams, the Elephants, the Buffaloes and the

Rhinos,,comprising the biggest and strongest men in the force, laboured.

at the head of the valley. They were digging out a deep canal into which

the river could be diverted.

"Your hot-shot engineer, Taita, never thought of that little

refinement," Sapper gloated to Royan as they stood on the lip of the

trench. "What it means is that we only have to raise the level of the

river another six feet before it will start flowing down the canal and

into the valley.

Without it we would have had to lift the water almost twenty feet to

divert it."

"Perhaps the river levels were different four thousand years ago." Royan

felt a strange loyalty to the long-dead Egyptian, and she defended him.

"Or perhaps he dug a canal but all traces of it have been obliterated."

"Not bleeding likely," Sapper grunted. "The little perisher just plain

didn't think of it." His expression was smug and self-satisfied, "One up

on Mr Taita, I think."

Royan smiled to herself. It was strange how even the  practical and

down-to-earth Sapper felt that this was a direct personal challenge from

down the ages. He too had been caught up in Taita's game.

 dint of neither threat nor heavenly reward could the monks be inveigled

into working on Sundays. Each Saturday evening they knocked off an hour

earlier and trooped away down the valley on the trail to the monastery,

so as to be in time for Holy Communion the next day. Although Nicholas

grumbled and scowled at their desertion, secretly he was as relieved as

any of them for the chance to rest. They were all exhausted, and for

once there would be no chanting of lock the next morning.

matins to wake them at four ' So on Saturday night they all swore to

each other that

they would sleep late the next morning, but from force of habit Nicholas

found himself awake and fully alert at that same iniquitous hour. He

could not stay in his camp bed, and when he came back from his ablutions

at the riverside he found that Royan was also awake and dressed.

"Coffee?" She lifted the pot off the fire and poured a mugful for him.

"I slept terribly badly last night," she admitted. "I had the most

ridiculous dreams. I found myself in Mamose's tomb lost in a labyrinth

of passages-. I was searching for the burial chamber, opening doors, but

there were always people in the rooms that I looked into. Duraid was

working in one room and he looked up and said, "Remember the protocol of

the four bulls. Start at the beginning." He was so real and alive. I

wanted to go to him but the door closed in my face, and I knew I would

never see him again." Tears filled her eyes and glistened in the light

of the campfire.

Nicholas sought to distract her from the painful memory. "Who were in

the other rooms?" he asked.

"In the next room was Nahoot Guddabi. He laughed spitefully and said,

The jackal chases the sun," and his head changed into the head of

Anubis, the jackal god of the cemetery, and he yelped and barked. I was

so frightened that I ran."

She sipped her coffee. "It was all meaningless and silly, but von

Schiller was in the next room, and he rose in the air and flapped his

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