Taita broke the silence. 'The source of our very Mother Nile.'
'The end of the earth,' Kalulu said. 'There is nothing beyond those waters but the void and the Lie.'
Taita looked back at the fortifications of Tamafupa. 'We are in dangerous country, surrounded by hostile tribes. We will use it as our stronghold until we move on,' he told Meren. 'We will leave Hilto and Shabako here with their men to make the walls secure against attack.
While they attend to this, Kalulu will take us to see the mysterious Red Stones.'
In the morning they went on: the last short stage of the journey that had taken them more than two years to complete. They followed the riverbed, often riding in the middle of the wide dry dip. They came round another gentle bend and ahead of them sloped a glacis of water worn rocks. Surmounting it, like the fortification of a great city, rose a wall of solid red granite.
'In the holy names of Horus, the son, and Osiris, the divine father!'
Meren exclaimed. 'What fortress is this? Is it the citadel of some African emperor?'
'What you see are the Red Stones,' said Kalulu, quietly.
'Who placed them there?' Taita asked, as perplexed as any of his companions. 'What man or demon has done this?'
'No man,' Kalulu replied. 'This is not the work of human hands.'
'What, then?'
'Come, let me show it to you first. Then we can discuss it.'
Cautiously they approached the Red Stones. When at last they stood under the great wall of rock that blocked the course of the Nile from one bank to the other, Taita dismounted and walked slowly along the base.
Fenn and Meren followed him. They paused at intervals to inspect. It was flow-shaped, like the wax of a candle.; 'This rock was once molten,' Taita observed. 'It has cooled into these fantastic shapes.'
'You are correct,' Kalulu agreed. 'That is precisely how it was formed.'
'It seems impossible, but this is a single mass of solid stone. There are no joints between individual blocks.'
'There is at least one crack, Magus.' Fenn pointed ahead. Her keen eyes had spotted a narrow fissure that ran through the centre of the wall, from top to bottom. When they reached it, Taita drew his dagger and tried to work the blade into it, but it was too narrow. The blade went in only as deep as the first joint of his little finger.
'That is why my people call it the Red Stones, rather than the Red Stone,' Kalulu told them, 'for it is divided into two sections.'
Taita went down on one knee to examine the base of the wall. 'It is not built upon the old riverbed. It emerges from it as though it has grown up from the centre of the earth like some monstrous mushroom. The stone of this wall seems to differ from any other around it.'
'Again, you are right,' Kalulu told him. 'It cannot be chiselled or chipped like the rock that surrounds it. If you look closely you will see the red crystals in it that give it the name.'
Taita leant forward until the minute crystals of which the wall was composed caught the sunlight and sparkled like tiny rubies. 'There is nothing obscene or unnatural about it,' he said softly. He came back to where Kalulu sat on his litter. 'How did this thing come to be here?'
'I cannot say with any certainty, Magus, even though I was here when it happened.'
'If you witnessed it, how do you not know what happened?'
'I will explain it to you later,' said Kalulu. 'Suffice to say that many others witnessed it, as I did, yet they have fifty different legends to describe it.'
'This entire wall of stone is chimerical,' Taita pointed out. 'Perhaps seeds of the truth may be buried in the legends and fantasies.'
'That may be so.' Kalulu inclined his head in agreement. 'But let us first ascend to the summit of the wall. There is much still that you must see.' They had to retreat along the riverbed to find a place to climb out and to the top of the bank. Then they picked their way back to the base of the red-stone wall.
'I will wait for you here,' Kalulu said. 'The way up is too difficult.' He indicated the daunting climb over glassy and almost vertical rock to the
I THE QUEST
summit. They left him, and cautiously climbed upwards. In some places they were forced to crawl on hands and knees, but at last they stood on the rounded top of the Red Stones. From there they looked out across the lake. Taita shaded his eyes against the sun-dazzle that danced on the surface of the water. Close by there were a number of small islets, but he could see not the faintest trace of land beyond them. He looked back the way they had come. The foreshortened figure of the dwarf was far below. Kalulu was gazing up at him.
'Has anyone ever tried to cross to the far side of the lake?' Taita called down.
'There is no far side,' Kalulu shouted back. 'There is only the void.'
The surface of the water lapped the wall only four or five cubits below their feet. Taita looked back into the riverbed and made an approximate calculation of the discrepancy in the heights on each side of the wall.
'It is holding back forty or fifty cubits' depth of water.' He made a sweeping gesture, which took in the limitless extent of the lake's surface.
'Without this wall, all that water would have spilled over the cataract into the Nile and been carried down into Egypt. Little wonder that our land has been reduced to such straits.'
'We could sweep through the surrounding country, capture a host of slaves and set them to work on it,' Meren suggested.
