crushes beneath its rim. 'Yes, I recognize the quotation,' he said.
'On the other hand, these parts of the text that I have highlighted in
yellow are original Taita writings, or at least are not quotations from
the Book of the Dead or any other source that I am aware of This
paragraph here in particular is the one that I wanted to bring to your
attention.'
She traced a section with her forefinger as she read it aloud, ''The
daughter of the goddess has conceived. She has been impregnated by the
one who is without seed. She has begotten her own twin sister. The fetus
lies forever -coiled in her own womb. Her twin shall never be born. She
will never see the light of day. She will five for ever in the darkness.
In the womb of the sister her bridegroom claims her in eternal marriage.
The unborn twin becomes the bride of the god, who was a man Their
destinies are intertwined. They shall live for ever. They Sul not
perish.''
She looked up from the notebook. 'When I first read it, I was satisfied
that the daughter of the goddess was the Dandera river, as we had
already agreed. I was also pretty sure that the god that was once a man
must be Pharaoh.
Mamose was only deified on his ascension to the throne of Egypt. Before
that he was a man.'
Nicholas nodded. !The seedless one is obviously Taita himself. He makes
repeated references to the fact that he was a eunuch. But now,' he
suggested, 'if you have some new ideas about the mysterious twin sister,
let's hear them.'
The twin of the river would most likely be a branch, or a fork of the
stream, wouldn't it?'
'Ah, I see what you are driving at, You are suggesting that the
sink-hole is the twin. Down there in the gorge it will never see the
Llight of day. Taita, the seedless one, claims paternity, So he is
telling us that he is the architect.'
'Exactly, and he has married the twin of the river to Pharaoh Mamose for
all eternity. Putting that all together, I have come to the conclusion
that we will never find the location of Pharaoh Mamose's tomb until we
explore thoroughly that sink-hole that nearly drowned you.'
'How do you suggest we do that?' he asked, and she shrugged.
'I am not the engineer, Nicky. I leave that to you to arrange. All I
know is that Taita devised some way of doing it - not only of getting
there but of working down there. If our interpretation of the stele is
correct, then he carried out extensive mining operations at the bottom
of the pool.
If he could do it, then there is no reason why you can't do it also.'
'Ah!' he dernurred. 'Taita was a genius. He says so repeatedly. I am
just an old plodder.'
'I have got all my bets on you, Nicky. You won't let me down, will you?'
There was no call for intensive bushcraft to follow this spoor. His
quarry had taken very few anti-tracking precautions. Quite openly they
were following the main trail down the Abbay gorge, heading directly
westwards towards the Sudanese border.
