On the way back down the side of the gorge, I walked beside my mistress to hold the sun-shade of ostrich feathers over her head, and she smiled at me more than once. Each smile was more precious to me than the heavy chain upon my shoulders.
The following morning we went back on board the Breath of Horns and turned our bows once more towards the south. The long voyage had begun.
WE FOUND THAT THE RIVER HAD changed its mien and character. It was no longer the broad and serene presence that had comforted and sustained us all our lives. This was a sterner, wilder being. There was little gentleness and compassion in its spirit. It was narrower and deeper.
The land on each side of it was steeper and more rugged, and the gorges and nullahs were crudely gouged from the harsh earth. The brooding and darkling cliffs frowned down upon us with furrowed brows.
In some places the bottom lands along the banks narrowed down so that the horses and cattle and sheep had to pass in single file along the crude track that the wild goats had trodden between the cliffs and the water. In other places the track disappeared completely, as the bluffs and the cliffs pushed boldly into the flood of the Nile. Then there was no way forward for our herds. Hui was forced to drive them into the river and swim them across the green expanse of water to the far bank, where the cliffs had retreated and left the way open for them to pass.
As the weeks wore on, we saw little sign of any human presence. Once, our scouts found the worm-eaten hull of a crude dugout canoe washed up on a sand-bank, and upon the bottom land an abandoned cluster of huts. The sagging roofs were thatched with reeds and the sides were open. There were the remains of fish-smoking racks and the ashes of the fires, but that was all. Not a shard of pottery or a bead to hint at who these people might be.
We were anxious to make our first contact with the tribes of Cush, for we needed slaves. Our entire civilization was based on the keeping of slaves, and we had been able to bring very few of them with us from Egypt. Tanus sent his scouts far ahead of the fleet, so that we might have good warning of the first human habitations in ample time to organize our slave-catchers. I found no irony in the fact that I, a slave myself, spent so much of my time and thought in planning the taking of other slaves.
All wealth can be counted in four commodities, land and gold and slaves and ivory. We believed that the land that lay ahead of us was rich in all of these. If we were to grow strong enough to return and drive the Hyksos from our very Egypt, then we must discover this wealth in the unexplored land to which we were sailing.
Queen Lostris sent out her gold-finders into the hills along the river as we passed. They climbed up through the gorges and the dry nullahs, scratching and digging in every likely spot, chipping fragments off the exposed reefs of quartz and schist, crushing these to powder, and washing away the dross in a shallow clay dish, hoping always to see the gleaming precious tail remaining in the bottom of the dish.
The royal huntsmen went out with them to search for game with which to feed our multitudes. They searched also for the first sign of those great grey beasts who carry the precious teeth of ivory in their monstrous heads. I made vigorous enquiry through the fleet for any man who had ever seen one of these elephant alive, or even dead. Though their teeth were a commonplace throughout the civilized world, there was not a single man who could help me in my enquiries. I felt a strange and unaccountable excitement at the thought of our first encounter with these fabulous beasts.
There was a host of other creatures inhabiting this wild land, some of them familiar to us and many that were strange and new.
Wherever reeds grew upon the river-bank, we found herds of hippopotami lying like rounded granite boulders in the shallows. After long and erudite theological debate, it was still uncertain whether these beasts above the cataract belonged to the goddess; as did those below, or whether they were royal game belonging to the crown. The priests of Hapi were strongly of one persuasion, and the rest of us, with an appetite for the rich fat and tender flesh of these animals, were of the opposite opinion.
It was entirely by coincidence that at this point the goddess Hapi chose to appear to me in one of my celebrated dreams. I saw her rise from *he green waters, smiling beneficently, and place in my mistress's hand a tiny hippopotamus no bigger than a wild partridge. As soon as I awoke, I lost no time in relaying the substance of this weird and thrilling dream to the regent. By now my dreams and divination were accepted by my mistress, and therefore by the rest of our company, as the manifest will and law of the gods.
That evening we all feasted on luscious river-cow steaks grilled on the open coals on the sand-bank against which the ships had moored. My reputation and popularity, which were already high throughout the fleet, were much enhanced by this dream. The priests of Hapi alone were not carried along by the general warmth of feeling towards me.
The river teemed with fish. Below the cataract, our people had fished the river for a thousand years and longer. These waters were untouched by man or his nets. We drew from the river shining blue perch heavier than the fattest man in our company, and there were huge catfish, with barbellate whiskers as long as my arm, that were too strong and weighty to be captured in the nets. With a flick of their great tails they ripped the linen threads as though they were the fragile webs of spiders. Our men hunted them in the shallows with spears, as though they were river-cows. One of these giants could feed fifty men with rich yellow flesh that dripped fat into the cooking- fires.
In the cliffs above the river hung the nests of eagles and vultures. From below they appeared like masses of driftwood, and the droppings of the huge birds painted the rocks beneath them with streaks of shining white. The birds floated above us on wide pinions, circling and swaying on the heated air that rose from the black rocks of the gorge.
From the heights, flocks of wild goats watched us pass with regal and disdainful mien. Tanus went out to hunt them on their airy crags, but it was many weeks before he succeeded in bringing back one of these trophies. They had the eyesight of vultures and the agility of the blue-headed rock lizards that could run effortlessly up a vertical wall of granite.
One of these old rams stood as tall as a man's shoulder. His beard flowed from his chin and throat to sweep the rock on which he posed. His horns curled upon themselves from mighty crenellated bases. When Tanus finally brought him down, it was with an arrow shot across a gorge a hundred paces deep, from peak to pinnacle of these rugged hills. The goat dropped into the gulf and twisted over and over in the air before it hit the rocks below.
Because of my passionate interest in all wild things, after he had skinned out and butchered the carcass, Tanus carried the head and the horns home for me. It took all his vast strength to bring down such a burden from those murderous crags. I cleaned and bleached the skull and set it up on the bows of our galley as a figurehead, as we sailed on into the unknown.
THE MONTHS PASSED, AND BELOW OUR keels the river began to dwindle away as the inundation abated. As we passed the sheer headlands, we could see the height of the river measured upon the cliff where all the previous inundations had left their watermarks.
