The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 126

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puzzled as Nicholas played his torch out into the void.

"I think this is a cave-in area. There was probably a fault in the rock

strata running through here and here." He picked out the cracks in the

roof of the cavern.

"You think the flow of the water through the shaft has scoured it out?"

she asked.

"I would say so, yes."Nicholas turned the beam of light downwards. "The

floor has fallen out of the shaft also."

The rock had subsided in front of them, leaving a deep hole. Ten feet

below where they stood the hole was filled with water, forming a large

circular pool with vertical rock sides. Overhead the roof had fallen in

and was now a high dome of irregular rock, and the far side of the pool

was shrouded in shadows a hundred feet or more in front of them.

There was no apparent way around this obstacle without entering the

water. Nicholas shouted to Hansith to bring one of the long bamboo poles

that they had used for the scaffolding. The pole was thirty feet long

and they had to manoeuvre its length down the tunnel. Nicholas sounded

the pool with the bamboo, probing it down into the turbid water as

deeply as he could reach.

"No bottom." He shook his head. "Do you know what I think?" He retrieved

the pole and passed it back to Hansith.

"Tell me," Royan invited.

"I think that this is the natural fault that leads the water away to the

other side of the hills, and comes to the surface again at the butterfly

fountain. The river has carved its own path., "Why hasn't it drained,

then?" Royan looked down dubiously in the pool below them.

"A -bend in the shaft, probably. Water still trapped in the top of the

shaft like the bowl of a lavatory."

He probed the waters of the pool with the beam of his torch, and Royan

exclaimed with horror and disgust as on of the giant eels came racing to

the surface, attracted by the light.

"The filthy creatures!" She stepped back involuntarily.

"The whole river must be infested with them."

The long dark shape circled the pool swiftly and then disappeared back

into the depths as suddenly as it had appeared.

"If you are right, and a section of Taita's adit has collapsed, then the

continuation of his tunnel should be on the far side of this." She

pointed across the pool, and Nicholas lifted the beam of the torch and

shone it in the direction she indicated.

"Look,  icky!" she cried. "There it is."

The dark rectangular opening yawned at them from across the pool.

"How do we get across there?" Royan asked, disconsolate.

"The answer to that is, not very easily. Dammit to hell!" Nicholas swore

heartily. "This is going to cost us another couple of days that we, can

ill afford. We are going to have to build some sort of bridge across

it."

"What kind of bridge?"

"Get Sapper down here. This is his department."

Sapper stood at the brink of the sink-hole and glared across at the far

bank.

Pontoons," he grunted. "How many of those inflatable rafts have you got

squirrelled away?"

"Forget it, Sapper!" Nicholas shook his head. "You are not getting those

dirty great paws of yours on my rafts."

"Suit yourself' Sapper spread his hands in resignation.

"It would be the easiest and quickest way of doing it.

Anchor a raft in the middle and build a catwalk over the top of it. I

need something that floats high-'

"Baobab." Nicholas snapped his fingers. "That should do the trick very

nicely. When it's dried out, baobab wood is as light as balsa. Floats

just as well as one of my inflatable rafts."

"Plenty of baobabs growing along the hills," Sapper agreed. "Every

second tree in this valley seems to be a ruddy baobab."

hree hundred yards from the top of the cliff grew a massive specimen of

Adansonia digitata.

Its smooth bark resembled the skin of one of the great reptiles from the

age of the dinosaurs. Its girth was tremendous - twenty men with

outstretched arms could not have encircled it. The upper branches were

bare and twisted, and it looked as though it had been dead for a hundred

years. Only the heavy velvet-covered pods proved that it still lived;

they hung thickly from the high branches, bursting open to spill the

black seeds which were coated thickly with white cream of tartar.

"The Zulus say that the Nkulu Kulu, the Great Spirit, planted the baobab

upside down with its roots in the air to punish it," Nicholas told Royan

as they looked up at the enormous spread of its branches.

"Why would he want to do that?" she wanted to know.

"What did the poor old baobab do that was so bad?"

"It boasted that it was the.tallest and thickest tree of the forest, and

so the Nkulu Kulu decided to teach it a little lesson in humility."

One of the gigantic branches had snapped off under its own weight, and

lay on the rocky ground beneath the trunk. The wood was white and

fibrous, light as cork.

Under Nicholas's direction the axemen cut it into manageable lengths.

Once they had been carried down the adit shaft to the sink-hole, Sapper

stapled the logs together and floated them across the pool to form a

causeway. He anchored this to the rock face at either end, and then over

it he laid a catwalk of bamboo poles. The bridge of baobab logs floated

high, and although it bobbed and swayed, it could easily support the

weight of a dozen men at a time.

Nicholas was the first one across the sink-hole. He placed a roughly

made ladder against the high vertical bank, and scrambled up into the

mouth of the adit on the far side of the pool. Royan was close behind

him.

The two of them stood in the entrance to this continuation of the shaft,

and as soon as Nicholas shone  his torch into it they realized that the

nature of the construction had changed. This section had not been so

heavily scoured out and eroded by the rush of river water through it.

The main flow must have drained away through the sink-hole. The

dimensions were the same, three metres wide by two high, but the

rectangular shape was more precise and although the walls and roof were

rough, like IL

those of a mine, the marks of the tools that had shaped it were now

clearly visible. The footing of the tunnel was roughly paved with slabs

of crudely dressed stone, This whole length of the tunnel had also been

submerged, for it lay below the natural level of the river before it had

been dammed. The paving under their feet was wet and covered with a

slime that had not yet had time to dry out since it had been exposed by

the receding waters. The roof and walls of the tunnel ran with moisture,

and the air was dank and cold and smelled of mud and rot.

They waited for Sapper to string the cables for the lights across the

causeway. He set up the lamps and switched them on. At once they were

aware that ahead of them the shaft had begun to rise at an angle of

about twenty degrees.

"You can see what the old devil Taita. was up to here.

He has taken us down well below water level to flood the tunnel to a

length and depth that nobody would be able to swim along. Now he is

angling up again," Nicholas pointed out to Royan. They started forward,

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