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

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

read over them. My great-grandfather also hunted and collected in

Ethiopia in the last century. I know he crossed the Blue Nile near Debra

Markos in 1890something. I'll get out his notes as well. They are

preserved in our archives. The old boy may have written something there

that could help us."

He walked with her to the old green Land Rover in the car park, and as

she started the engine he told her through the open window, "I still

think that you should stay over here at the Hall. It must be an

hour-and-a-half's drive across to Brandsbury - each way that's three

hours a day. We are going to have a lot of work to do before we can even

think of leaving for Africa."

"What would people think?" she asked, as she let out the clutch.

"I have never given a damn about people," he called after her. "What

time will I see you tomorrow?"

I have to stop off to see the doctor in York. He is going to take the

stitches out of my arm. I won't be here before eleven," she stuck her

head out of the window to yell back at him.

The wind tossed her dark hair around her face. His fancy had always run

towards dark-haired women. Rosalind had had that mysterious Eastern

look. He felt guilty and disloyal making the comparison, but the memory

of Royan was hard to shake off.

She was the first woman who had interested him since Rosalind had gone.

The admixture of her blood drew him.

She was exotic enough to pique his taste for. the oriental, but English

enough to speak his language and understand his sense of humour. She was

educated and knowledgeable about those things that interested him, and

he admired her spirit. Usually Eastern women were trained from birth to

be self-effacing and compliant. This one was different.

eorgina had phoned her doctor in York to make an appointment to have the

stitches removed from Royan's arm. They left after breakfast from the

cottage in Brandsbury. Georgina was driving and Magic sat between them

on the bench seat.

As they turned into the village street, Royan noticed a large MAN truck

parked down near the post office, but she thought no more about it.

Once they were out in the countryside they found there were patches of