accent overpowered the French words and made them difficult to follow.
'Sir Nicholas was one of the leaders of the 1976 river expedition,'
Royan intervened sweetly, and Nicholas was amused by her unexpected
intervention. She had picked up the antagonism between them very
quickly, and come to his rescue.
Boris grunted, and turned to his wife. 'Have you got all the stores I
ordered?' he demanded.
'Yes, Boris,' she answered meekly. 'They are all on board the aircraft.'
She is afraid of him, Nicholas decided, probably with good reason.
'Let's get loaded up, then. We have a long journey ahead of us.'
The two men rode in the front seats of the Toyota, and the women sat
behind them with many of the packages of stores packed in around them.
Good African protocol, Nicholas smiled to himself: men first, women fend
for themselves.
'You don't want to do the tourist run, do you?' Boris made it sound like
a threat.
'The tourist run?'
'The outlet from the lake, and the power station,' he explained. 'The
Portuguese bridge over the gorge and the point where the Blue Nile
begins,' he added. But before they could accept he warned them, 'If you
do, we won't get into camp until long -after dark.'
'Thanks for the suggestion,) Nicholas told him politely, 'but I have
seen it all before.'
'Good.' Boris made his approval evident. 'Let's get out of here.'
The road swung away into the west, below the high mountains. This was
the Goiam, the land of the aloof mountaineers. It was well-populated
country, and they passed many tall, thin men along the roadside as they
strode along behind their herds of goats and sheep, with their long
staffs held crossways over their shoulders. Both men and women wore
shammas, woollen shawls, and baggy white jodhpur pants, with their feet
in open sandals.
They were people with proud and handsome features, their hair dressed
out into thick, bushy halos, and their eyes fierce as those of eagles.
Some of the younger women in the villages they passed through were truly
beautiful.
Most of the men were heavily armed. They carried twohanded swords in
chased silver scabbards, and AK-47 assault rifles.
'Makes them feel like big men,' Boris chuckled. 'Very brave, very
macho.'
The huts in the villages were circular walled tukuls, surrounded by
plantations of eucalyptus and spiky-headed sisal.
Bruised purple storm clouds boiled over the high peaks of the Choke and
swept them with squalls of rain. Like silver coins, the huge drops
rattled against the windscreen of the Land Cruiser and turned the road
to a running river of mud under their wheels.
The condition of the road surface was appalling; in places it
deteriorated into a rocky gully which even the four-wheel drive Toyota
could not negotiate, and Boris was forced to make his own track across
the rocky hillside.
Often reduced to walking speed, they were nevertheless tossed about in
