'Crushed limestone!' he muttered. 'Although it has of acid. Vinegar,
perhaps, or even Isoonakgedagitowdirtihedsoomuetfoarnmd lost any odour,
Taita probably urine would have done the trick. As it broke down the
limestone, it formed carbon dioxide.'
'So it was another deliberate trap,' Royan exclaimed.
'Even so many thousands of years ago, Taita must have understood the
processes of decay. He knew what gases those mixtures would produce.
Amongst all the other accomplishments he boasts of, he must also have
been a nifty chemist.'
Furthermore, he must have known that without a draught or any movement
of air, these heavy inert gases amber indefiould hang here in the bottom
of the ch agreed. 'I expect that this shaft is designed like nitely,'
she
' she pointed a ,trap. I bet that the passage rises again at the
mysterious doorway in the far wall, 'in fact I can see the first steps
even from here.'
'We will soon find out if you are right,' he told her, because that's
exactly where we are heading right now up those stePS.'
apper had placed caims of stones at the water's edge to monitor the
river level. He watched es his ticker them the way a stockbroker watch
tape.
It had been six hours since the last rain squall had passed. The clouds
over the valley had burned away in the Ithough they still hung densely
over hot, bright sunlight, a the northern horizon. Their great
dun'coloured thunderheads reared to the heavens, menacing and ominous,
fonning their own mighty ranges that dwarfed the mountains beneath them.
At any time the downpour might ed, begin up there in the highlands. Once
that happen Sapper wondered how long it would take the flood waters to
reach them here in the Abbay gorge.
He dismounted stiffly from the tractor, and went down the bank to
inspect his stone markers. The water level had fallen almost a foot in
the past hour. He forced himself not to let his optimism bubble over -
after all, it had taken only fifteen minutes for the river to -rise the
same amount.
would come.
The final outcome was inevitable. The rains rst. He looked The river
would spate. The dam would bu at the dam wall, and shook his head with
fill downstream resignation.
He had done as much as possible to delay that moment. He had raised the
level of the dam wall almost four feet, and packed in another buttress
behind the wall to strengthen it. There was nothing further for him to
do, and he could only wait.
Climbing up the bank, he leaned wearily against the yellow steel of his
machine and looked across at his team of Buffaloes, strewn along the
bank like casualties on a battlefield. They had worked for two days to
hold back the waters, and now they were exhausted. He knew that he could
not call on them for another effort; the next time the river attacked,
it would overwhelm them.
He saw some of the men stir and sit up, and their faces turned upstream.
