masons and the workers in stone!'
'Pharaoh Mamose was a god. The river has swallowed up a god with her -
with her stone archway.' She was equally excited. 'I must admit that I
would not have made the association if you hadn't explored the interior
of the cavern, and found those niches in the wall.' She shook his arm.
'Nicky, we have to get in there again. We have to get a clearer look at
that has-relief you found on the cavern wall.'
'It will take some preparation,' he said dubiously. 'I will have to
splice the ropes and make some sort of pulley system, and I will have to
drill Aly and the other men to avoid a repetition of my last little
fiasco. We won't be ready to make the attempt until tomorrow morning at
the very earliest.'
'You get on with it. I will have plenty to keep me occupied with the
translation of the stele.' Then she stopped and looked up at the sky.
'Listen!' she whispered.
He cocked his head and above the sound of the river, heard the whining
flutter of rotors in the air.
'Dammit!' he snapped. 'I thought we had lost the Pegasus presence. Come
on!' He grabbed her arm and hustled her off the bridge. When they
reached the land he jumped down on to the beach, and she followed him.
The two of them crept under the hanging eaves of the bridge.
They sat quietly on the white sandy beach and listened to the Jet Ranger
helicopter approaching swiftly, and then circling back over the hills
beyond the pink cliffs. This time the pilot had not spotted them, for he
turned away and began to patrol up and down the line of the chasm.
Suddenly the engine-beat changed dramatically as the pitch altered and
the pilot pulled up the collective.
'Sounds as if he is going in for a landing up there in the hills,,
Nicholas said as he crawled out from under the bridge. 'I would feel a
lot easier without them snooping around.'
'I don't think we have too much to worry about,' Royan disagreed. 'Even
if they are connected with Duraid's killers, we are still way out ahead
of them. Obviously they have not tumbled to the importance of the
monastery, and the stele.'
'I hope you are right. Let's get back to camp. We must not let them see
us in the vicinity of the chasm again. It will be too much of a
coincidence for them to find us hanging around here every time they come
this way.'
while Royan went to her hut and pored over her photographs and etchings,
Nicholas worked with the trackers and skinners. He spliced the
unravelled end of the nylon rope to the second Thank, to make a single
length five hundred feet long. Then he cannibalized the canvas fly of
the cooking hut, cutting it up and whipping the raw edges to make a
sling seat. He fashioned the ends of the rope into a harness which he
spliced into the four corners of the canvas seat.
He had no block and tackle, so he put together a crude gantry of poles
which could be extended out over the cliff edge to keep the rope clear
of the rock. The rope would run through the groove that he drilled in
the end of the central beam with a red-hot iron. He lubricated it with
