him over the cliff. As he swung down around the overhang of the cliff,
the chair swung awkwardly against the rock and the thumb of his right
hand was trapped between the wooden seat of the chair and the wall. He
exclaimed with the pain and, when he wrenched it free, he found that the
skin had been torn from the knuckle and that blood was oozing up and
dripping down his legs. It was painful -but not serious, and he sucked
the wound clean. It was still weeping drops of blood but he had, no time
to attend to the injury now.
He was around the overhang, and the abyss opened under him, sombre and
repellent. His eye was drawn irresistibly to the engraving on the wall,
etched between the vertical rows of niches. Now that he knew what to
look for, he could make out the outline of the maimed hawk. It cheered
and encouraged him. Since their flight from the gorge over a month
previously he had often been haunted by the feeling that they had
imagined it all, that the cartouche of Taita was a hallucination, and
that when they returned they would find the cliff wall smooth and
unblemished. But there it was, the signpost and the promise.
He peered down past his own feet to the bottom of the gorge, and saw at
once that the waterfall above the pool had been reduced to a trickle.
The water still coming down the smooth black chute of polished rock was
that which was filtering through the gaps and chinks in the dam wall
upstream and the last drainage from the sandbanks and the pools higher
up the gorge.
The level of the great Pool under him had fallen drastically. He could.
make out the highwater level by the wet markings on the rock cliff.
Fifty feet of the wall that had previously been submerged was now
exposed. Another eight pairs of chiselled niches were visible in the
face Where once he had been forced to swim down to them, they were now
high and dry.
However, the pool was not completely drained. It was dished below the
level of the downstream outlet, so that it was unable to empty itself by
gravitational flow. There was still a puddle of black water trapped in
the centre, with a narrow ledge surrounding it. Nicholas landed on this
ledge and stepped out of the bosun's chair. It was strange to stand on
firm rock down here where last he had struggled for his life and very
nearly been sucked under and drowned.
He looked up to where beams of sunlight penetrated the upper levels of
the chasm. It was like being in the bottom of a mineshaft, and he
shuddered at the feel of the clammy air on his bare arms and the eerie
sensation in the pit of his stomach. He tugged on the line to send the
rope chair back to the surface, and then edged his way along the
slippery rock ledge towards the cliff face where the rows of dark niches
stood out clearly against the lighter stone.
Now he could make out the shape of the opening in the wall that had so
nearly sucked him down into its dark and slimy throat. It was almost
completely submerged in a deeper corner where the pool flowed back
against the cliff.
All that was visible above the surface was the top arch of an irregular
entrance at the foot of the descending rows of niches. The rest of it
