almost directly above the falls and could go no further. Then he slid
down to where Royan and Tamre waited.
'Nothing?' she anticipated, and he shook his head.
'No, but you can't really expect that there would be anything left after
nearly four thousand years. These cliffs have been exposed to wind and
weather for all that time. I think our best bet will be to look for any
surviving blocks from the dam wall that might have been carried away
when Taita. breached it to flood the chasm again.'
They started down the valley, where Royan came upon a chunk of stone
that seemed to be of a different type from the surrounding country rock.
It was the size of an oldfashioned cabin trunk. Although it was
halfcovered by undergrowth, the uppermost end - the one that was exposed
- had a definite right-angled corner to it. She called Nicholas across
to her.
'Look at that.' Royan patted it proudly. 'What do you think of that?'
He climbed down beside herand ran his hands over the exposed surface of
the stab. 'Possible,' he repeated. 'But to be certain we would have to
find the chisel marks where the 'old masons started the fracture. As you
know, they chiselled a hole into the stone, and then wedged it open
until it split.'
Both of them went over the exposed surface carefully, and although Royan
found an indentation that she declared was a weathered chisel mark,
Nicholas gave her only four out of ten on the scale of probability.
'We are running out of time,' he said, enticing her away from her find,
'and we still have a lot of ground to cover.'
They searched the valley floor for half a kilometer further, and then
Nicholas called it off. 'Even in the heaviest flood it is unlikely that
any blocks would have been carried down this far. Let's go back and -see
if anything was washed over the falls into the mouth of the chasm.'
They returned to the bank of the Dandera and worked their way down as
far as the falls. Nicholas peered over.
'It's not as deep here as it is further down,' he estimated. 'I would
guess that it is less than a hundred feet.'
'Do you think you could get down there?' she asked dubiously. Spray blew
back out of the depths into their faces, and they had to shout at each
other to make themselves heard over the thunder of the waters.
'Not without a rope, and some muscle men to haul me back out of there.'
He perched himself on the brink and focused the binoculars down into the
bowl. There was a jumble of loose rock down the - small, rounded
boulders, and one or two very much larger. Some of them were angular,
and some with a little imagination could be called rectangular. However,
their surfaces had been smoothed by the rushing waters, and were
gleaming wet. All of them seemed partially submerged or obscured by
spray.
'I don't think we can decide anything from up here, and to tell the
truth I don't fancy going down there - not this evening anyway.'
Royan sat down beside him and hugged her knees to her chest. She was
dispirited. 'So there is nothing we can be certain about. Did Taita dam
the river, or didn't he?' Quite naturally he placed his arm around her
