through his lung that she would find a secure burial site for him, and
that she would lay him in it with all his vast treasure. When they reach
Khartoum she determines that the time has at last come for her to make
good her promise to him. She sends out her son, the fourteen-year-old
Prince Memnon, with a squadron of chariots to find the burial site.
Memnon is accompanied by his mentor, the narrator of the history, the
indefatigable Taita.'
'Okay, I remember this section. Memnon and Taita consult the black
Shilluk slaves they have captured, and on their advice decide to follow
the left-hand fork of the rivet, or what we know as the Blue Nile.'
Royan nodded and continued the story. 'They travelled eastwards and were
confronted by formidable mountains, so high that they were described as
a blue rampart.
So far what you read in the book is a fairly faithful rendition of the
scrolls, but at this point,' she tapped the open page, we come to
Duraid's red herring. In his description of the foothills-'
Before she could continue, Nicholas interjected, 'I remember thinking
when I originally read it that it didn't accurately describe the area
where the Blue Nile emerges from the Ethiopian highlands. There are no
foothills. There is only the sheer western escarpment of the massif. The
river comes out of it like a snake out of its hole. Whoever wrote that
description doesn't know the course of the Blue Nile.'
'Do you know the area?' Royan asked, and he laughed and nodded.
'Alhen I was younger and even more stupid than I am now, I conceived the
grandiose plan of boating the Abbay gorge from Lake Tana down to the dam
at Roseires in the Sudan. The Abbay is the Ethiopian name for the Blue
Nile., 'Why did you want to do that?'
'Because it had never been done before. Major Cheesman, the British
consul, had a shot at it in 1932, and nearly drowned himself. I thought
I could make a film, and write a book about the voyage and earn myself a
fortune , from the royalties. I talked my father into financing the
expedition. It was the kind of mad escapade that appealed to him. He
even wanted to join the expedition. I studied the whole course of the
Abbay river, not only on maps. I also bought myself an old Cessna 180
and flew down the gorge, five hundred miles from Lake Tana to the dam.
As I said, I was twenty-one years old and crazy.'
'What happened?' She was fascinated. Duraid had never told her about
this, but it was the type of adventure that she would have expected this
man to launch into.
'I recruited eight of my friends from Sandhurst, and we devoted our
Christmas holidays to the attempt. It was a fiasco. We lasted two days
on those wild waters. The gorge is the most hellish corner of this earth
that I know of It's almost twice as deep and as rugged as the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado river in Arizona. It smashed up our kayaks before
we had covered twenty miles out of the five hundred.
We had to abandon all our equipment and climb the walls of the gorge to
reach civilization again.'
He looked serious for a moment, 'I lost two members of our party. Bobby
Palmer was drowned, and Tim Marshall fell on the cliffs. We were not
