even able to recover their bodies. They are still down there somewhere.
I had to tell their parents-' he broke off as he remembered the agony of
it.
'Has anybody ever succeeded in navigating the Blue Nile gorge?'-she
asked, to distract him.
'Yes. I went back a few years later. This time not as leader, but as a
very junior member of the official British Armed Forces Expedition. It
took the army, the navy and the air force to beat that river.'
She stared at him with a feeling of awe. He had actually rafted the
Abbay. It was as though she had been led to him by some strange fate.
Duraid was right. There bably no man in the world better qualified for
the was pro work in hand.
'So you know as much as anybody about the real the gorge. I will try to
give you a general nature of indication of what Taita actually set down
in the seventh scroll. Unfortunately this section of the scroll had
suffered some damage and Duraid and I were obliged to extrapolate from
parts of the text. You will have to tell me how this agrees with your
own knowledge of the terrain.'
'Go ahead, he invited her.
'Taita described the escarpment very much the -way you did, as a sheer
wall from which the river emerged.
They were forced to leave their chariots, which were unable to cover the
steep and rugged terrain of the canyon. They were forced to go forward
on foot, leading the pack horses.
Soon the gorge grew so steep and dangerous that they lost, which fell
from the wild goat tracks some of these animal they were following and
plunged into the river far below.
This did not deter them and they pressed on at the orders of Prince
Memnon.'
'I can see it exactly as he describes it. It's a fearsome bit of
countryside.'
'Taita then describes coming to a series of obstacles, which he
describes as 'steps'. Duraid and I could not decide with certainty what
these were. But our best guess was that they were waterfalls.'
'No shortage of those in the Abbay gorge, either,' Nicholas nodded.
'This is the important part of his testimony. Taita tells us that after
twenty days' travel up the gorge they came upon the 'second step'. It
was here that the prince received a fortuitous message from his dead
father, in the form of a dream, in which he chose this as the site of
his own tomb.
Taita tells us that they travelled no further. If we are able to
determine what it was that stopped them, that would give us an accurate
measurement of just how far into the gorge they penetrated.'
'Before we can go any further we will need maps and satellite
photographs of the mountains, and I will have to go over my expedition
notes and diary,' Nicholas decided 'I try to keep my reference library
up-to-date, and so we should have satellite photographs and the most
recent maps on file here in the museum. If they are Mrs. Street is the
one to find them.'
He stood up and stretched, 'I will dig out my diaries this evening and
