'Sandhurst's motto the explained.
'How nice, Nicky, she murmered.
'I have always considered Nicholas to be more dignified and
appropriate he said.
'Yes, but Nicky is so sweet.'
the high, thin air the Twin Otter aircraft that took them on the last,
northern, leg pitched and yawed in the updraughts; from the mountains
below.
Although they were at fifteen thousand feet above sea level, the ground
was close enough for them to make out the, villages and the sparse areas
of cultivation around them. Subjected for so many centuries to primitive
agricultural methods and to the uncontrolled grazing of domestic herds,
the land had a thin, impoverished look, and the bones of rock showed
through the thin red fleshing of earth.
Abruptly ahead of them the plateau over which they were flying was rent
through by a monstrous chasm. It was as though the earth had received a
mighty sword-stroke that struck through to her very bowels.
'The Abbay river!' Tessay leaned forward in her seat to tap Royan's
shoulder.
The rim of the gorge was Clear-cut, and then the slope dropped away at
an angle of over thirty degrees. The bare plains of the plateau gave way
immediately to the heavily forested walls of the gorge. They could make
out the candelabra shapes of giant euphorbia rising above the dense
jungle. In places the walls had collapsed in scree slopes of loose rock,
and in others they were up-thrust into bluffs and needles that erosion
had sculpted with a monstrous artistry into the figures of towering
humanoids and other fantastic creatures of stone.
Down and down it plunged, and they winged out over the void until they
could look directly down, a mile and more, on to the glittering snake of
the river in the depths.
The funnel shape of the upper walls formed a secondary rim as they
reached the sheer cliffs of the sub-gorge five hundred feet above the
Nile water. Deep down there between its terrible cliffs the river gouged
dark pools and long slithering runs through the red sandstone. In places
the gorge was forty miles across, in others it narrowed to under ten,
but through all its length the grandeur and the desolation were infinite
and eternal. Man had made no impression upon it.
'You will soon be down there,' Tessay told them in a voice so awed that
it was almost a whisper, and they were both silent. Words seemed
superfluous in the face of such raw and savage nature.
.. Almost with relief they watched the northern wall rise to meet them,
and the high mountains of the Choke range stood up against the tall blue
African sky, higher than their fragile little craft was flying.
The aircraft banked into its descent and Tessay pointed over the
starboard wingtip.
'Lake Tana,' she told them. It was a wide and lovely body of water, over
fifty miles long, studded with islands on each of which stood a
monastery or an ancient church. As they dropped in over the water on the
final approach, they could make out the white-robed priests plying
between the islands on their traditional little boats made from bundles
