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Военное дело
The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 117
Nicholas and Sapper had drawn up in England. it was essential that they
knew where every item was stored, and that they had immediate access to
it when needed. In the meantime Sapper was at work on the dam site,
laying out his foundations, driving numbered wooden pegs into the banks
of the river, and taking his final measurements with the long steel
surveyor's tape.
During this preliminary work Nicholas was watching the performance of
the monks, and getting to know them individually. He was able to pick
out the natural leaders and the most intelligent and willing men amongst
them.
He was also able to identify those who spoke Arabic or a little English.
The most promising of these was a monk named Hansith Sherif, whom
Nicholas made his personal assistant and interpreter.
Once they were settled into the camp, and had worked out a relationship
with the monks, Mek Nimmur took of Nicholas aside out of earshot the two
women.
"From now on, my work will be the security of the site.
MOS Maa's :rllar WV.
We will have to be ready to prevent another raid like the one on your
camp, and the slaughter at St. Frumentius.
Nogo and his thugs are still out there. It won't take long for him to
hear that you are back in the gorge. When he comes, I will be waiting
for him."
"You are better with an AK-47 than with a pickaxes' Nicholas agreed.
"Just leave Tessay here with me.. I need her."
"So do I' Mek smiled and shook his head ruefully, "I am only just
learning how much. Look after her for me. I will be back every night to
check on her."
Mek took his men into the bush and deployed them in defensive positions
along the trail and around the campWhen Nicholas looked up from his own
work he could often make out the figure of one of Mek's sentries on the
high ground above the camp. It was reassuring to know that they were
there.
However, as he had promised, Mek was back in camp most evenings, and
often in the night Nicholas heard, coming from the shelter he shared
with Tessay, his deep rumbling laughter blending with her sweet silvery
tones.
Then Nicholas lay awake and thought about Royan in the hut so close, but
yet so far away from where he lay.
On the fifth day the second draft of three hundred labourers that Mai
Metemma had conscripted for them arrived, and Nicholas was astonished,
Things seldom worked that way in Africa.
Nothing ever happened ahead of the promised time. He
wondered what exactly they decided
that he didn't really want to know, for now main construction work could
begin.
These men were not monks, for St. Frumentius had already given its all
to the sacred labour, but villagers who lived up on the highlands of the
escarpment. Mai Metemma had coerced them with promises of religious
indulgences and threats of hellfire.
Nicholas and Sapper divided this work force into gangs of thirty men
each, and set one of the picked monks as foreman over each gang. They
were careful to grade the men by their physical appearance, so that the
big strapping specimens were all grouped together as the project
storm.troopers, while the smaller, more wiry men could be reserved for
the tasks in which brute strength was not a necessity.
Nicholas dreamed up a name for each gang - the Buffaloes, the Lions, the
Axes and so on. It taxed his powers of invention, but he wanted to
inspire in them a sense of pride and, to his own particular advantage,
to encourage the gangs to compete with one another. He paraded them in
the quarry, each group headed by its newly appointed ecclesiastical
foreman. Using one of the ancient stone blocks as a platform, and with
Tessay interpreting for him, he harangued them heartily and then told
them that they would be paid in silver Maria Theresa dollars. He set
their wages at three times the going rate.
Up to this stage the men had listened to him with a sullen air of
resignation, but now a remarkable transformation came over them. None of
them had expected to be paid for the work, and most of them were
wondering how soon they could desert and go home. Now Nicholas was
promising them not only money, but silver dollars. In Ethiopia for the
past two hundred years the Maria Theresa dollar had been regarded as the
only true coinage. For this reason they were still minted with the
original date of 1780 and the portrait of the old Empress, with her
double chin and her decolletage exposing half her great bust. One of
these coins was more prized than a sackful of the worthless paper birr
issued by the regime in Addis. To pay his labour bills, Nicholas had
included a chest of these silver coins in the first pallet load that
Jannie had dropped.
Celestial grins bloomed as they listened, and white teeth sparkled in
their ebony faces. Someone began to sing, and they all stamped and
danced and cheered Nicholas as they trooped off to queue for their
tools. With mattocks and shovels at the slope they filed off up the
valley to the dam site, still singing and prancing.
"St. Nicholas," Tessay laughed. "Father Christmas. They will never
forget you now."
"They may even enshrine you and build a monastery over you" Royan
suggested sweetly.
"What they don't know is that they are going to earn every single dollar
, the hard way."
From then onwards the work began as soon as it was light enough to see,
and stopped only when it was too dark to continue. The men came back to-
their temporary compound each night by the light of grass torches, too
weary to sing. However, Nicholas had contracted with the headmen from
the highland villages to supply a slaughter beast every day. Each
morning the women came down the trail driving the animal before them,
and with huge pots of tej balanced on their heads.
Over the days that followed, there were no deserters from Nicholas's
little army of workers.
ounted on the high seat of the front-ender, Sapper lifted the first
filled mesh gabion in the hydraulic arms. The mesh'bound parcel of
boulders weighed several tons, and all work on the site came to a halt
as the men crowded the banks of the Dandera river to watch. A hum of
astonishment went up as Sapper eased the yellow tractor down the steep
bank and, with the gabion held high, drove the vehicle in to the water.
The current, affronted by this invasion, swirled angrily around the high
rear wheels, but Sapper pushed in deeper.
The crowds lining the bank began to chant and clap encouragement as the
water reached as high as the belly of the machine, and louds of steam
hissed from the hot steel of the sump. Sapper locked the brakes, and
then lowered the heavy gabion into the flood before reversing back up
the bank. The men cheered him wildly, even though the first gabion was
instantly submerged and only a whirlpool on the river's surface marked
its position. Another filled gabion lay ready. The Contender waddled up
to it, lowered its- steel arms and picked it up as tenderly as a mother
gathering up her infant.
Nicholas shouted at the foremen to get their gangs back to work. The
long lines of men came up the valley, naked except for their brief white
loincloths. Sweating heavily in the heat of the gorge, their skin
glistened like anthracite freshly cut from the coal face. Each of them
carried on his head a basket of stone aggregate, which he dumped into
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