'Then I want your remaining men moved down to the foot of the
escarpment. Tell them to avoid contact with Mek Nimmur's men, but to be
in a position to move forward very quickly and seize the dam area, and
to block off the ravine below the dam as soon as I give you the word.'
When will that be?'Nogo asked.
'We will continue to watch him carefully. If he makes a discovery, he
will start moving the artefacts out. Many of them will be too large to
conceal. Your informer will know about it. That is when we will move in
on him.'
'You should move in now, Herr von Schiller,' Nahoot advised him, 'before
he gets a chance to open the tomb.'
'Don't be an idiot,' von Schiller snarled at him. 'If we strike too
soon, we might never discover what he obviously has learned about the
whereabouts of the tomb.'
'We could force him-'
'If I have learned anything in my life, it is that you. cannot force a
man like Harper. There is a certain type of Englishman - I remember
during the last war with them' He broke off and frowned. 'No. They are
very' difficult people. We must not rush it now. When Harper makes a
discovery in the ravine, that will be the time to pounce.'
The frown faded and he smiled a small, cold smile. 'The waiting game. In
the meantime, we play the waiting game.'
The debris that filled the shaft was not so tightly packed that it
completely blocked the flow of water through it. If it had done so,
Nicholas would never have been sucked in by the current, as he had been
on his first dive into the pool. There were still gaps in the blockage
where the larger boulders had lodged or where a treetrunk en sucked in.
and jammed sideways across the width of the tunnel. Through these
sections the water had found the weak spots and kept them open.
Nevertheless, the debris had taken centuries to wedge itself in, and it
required back-breaking effort to prise it apart. The clearing operation
was further hampered by the lack of working space in the shaft. Only
three or four of the big men from the Buffaloes were able to work in the
shaft at -any one time. The rest of the team were employed in passing
back the rubble as it was levered out.
Nicholas changed the shifts every hour. They had more labour than they
needed, and changing them often meant that the men at the face were
always rested and strong, and eager to earn the bonus of silver dollars
that Nicholas promised them for their progress along the shaft.
At each change of shift, Nicholas disappeared into the mouth of the
tunnel with Sapper's steel tape and measured the advance.
'One hundred and twenty feet! Well done, the Buffaloes,' he told Hansith
Sherif, the foreman monk, and then watched the water tric ing past is
feet. The floor of the tunnel was still sloping downwards at a constant
angle. He looked back along it towards the pool, and now in the
floodlights the rectangular shape of the walls was very clear to see. It
was obvious that the tunnel had been designed and surveyed by an
engineer.
He transferred his attention back to the floor of the tunnel and watched
