The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 28

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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

of papyrus.

The Otter touched down on the dirt strip beside the lake and rolled out

in a long trailing cloud of dust. It swung in -and stopped engines

beside the run-down terminal building of thatch and daub.

The sunlight was so bright that Nicholas pulled a pair of sunglasses

from the breast pocket of his khaki jacket and placed them on his nose

as he stood at the top of the boarding ladder. He took in the pock-marks

of bullets and shrapnel on the dirty white walls of the terminal, and

the burnt'out hull of a Russian T35 battle tank standing in the grass on

the verge of the runway. The' barrel of its turret gun pointed

earthwards, and grass had grown up between the rusted tracks.

The other passengers pushed forward impatiently behind him, jostling him

and jabbering with excitement as they saw friends and relatives waiting

to greet them under the eucalyptus trees that shaded the building. There

was only one vehicle parked out there, a sand-coloured Toyota Land

Cruiser. The roundel on the driver's do6r had at its centre the painted

head of a mountain nyala, with long corkscrew horns, and in a ribbon

below it the title "Wild Chase Safaris'. A white man lounged behind the

wheel.

As Nicholas came down the ladder behind the two women, the driver

slipped out of the truck and strode out on to the strip to meet them. He

was dressed in a faded khaki bush suit, and he was tall and lean and

walked with a spring to his step.

"Fortyish," Nicholas judged his age from the grizzling in his short

beard. "One of the hard men," Nicholas thought.

His ginger hair was cropped short, his eyes were pale killer blue. There

was a puckered white scar that ran across one cheek and up to twist and

deform his nose.

Tessay introduced `Royan to him first, and he made a short, choppy bow

as he shook her hand. "Enchant6, he told her in an execrable French

accent and then looked at Nicholas.

"This is my husband, Alto Boris," Tessay introduced him. "Boris, this is

Alto Nicholas."

"My English is bad," Boris said. "My French is better."

"Not much to choose between them," Nicholas thought, but he smiled

easily and said, "So we will speak French then. Bonjour, Monsieur

Brusilov. I am delighted to make your acquaintance." He offered the

Russian his hand.

Boris's grip was hard - too hard. He was making a contest out of the

greeting, but Nicholas had expected it He knew this type of old, and he

had taken a deep grip so Boris could not crush his fingers. Nicholas

held him without allowing any strain or effort to show on his lazy

smile. Boris was the first to break the handshake, and there was just

the trace of respect in those pale eyes.

"So you have come for a dikdik?" he asked, just short of a sneer. Most

of my clients come for big elephant, or at least for mountain nyala."

"Bit rich for my nerves," Nicholas grinned, "all that big stuff. Dik-dik

will suit me fine."

"Have you ever been down in the gorge?" Boris demanded. His Russian

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

their seats as the wheels bounced over the rough terrain.

"These damn blacks don't even think to repair the roads," Boris grunted.

"They are happy to live like animals." None of them replied, but

Nicholas glanced up into the rear-view mirror at the faces of the two

women. They were closed and neutral, hiding any hurt that either of them

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