Pharaoh

5

Major Edward Mayne of the Royal Engineers pushed the white cotton of his scarf up over his nose, leaving only a narrow gap beneath his headdress to see through, and pressed his heels into the flanks of his camel. He lurched forward as it swerved into a shallow gully, picking its way among the exposed bedrock that provided a surer footing than the loose shale and dust of the surrounding desert. Over the last two weeks he had learned to move in rhythm with the beast, becoming one with it as his guide had taught him, leaving him swaying like a sailor on land when he dismounted to take measurements and sketch the rocky course of the river through the cataracts, noting the places where boats might be hauled up against the current. The day before, a messenger had reached him with orders to return to the main camp of the river expedition and report to headquarters, and he and his guide had ridden hard that morning to reach the camp before the midday sun made travel intolerable. He knew that Corporal Jones would be waiting for him in the sangar dugout, where he had left him with the sentries overlooking the camp beside the Nile. As he got closer, he had made sure to avoid the deep gullies so that he was always exposed to view. Over the past weeks Mahdist sharpshooters had begun to inflict casualties on the river column, and he knew there would be jittery trigger fingers at the sight of anyone wearing Arab dress approaching on a camel.

He looked back to the east, where he had parted ways with his guide, Shaytan Ahmed al-Abaid, a chieftain of the Dongola people of upper Nubia, who had accompanied him on his foray into the desert. The previous evening they had huddled over the embers of their fire beside the wells of Umm Bayaid, concealed within a rocky gully from prying eyes, and had talked together until the last vestige of heat had left the rocks and they had lain to sleep on the hard ground, keeping close to their camels for warmth. Shaytan had been an interpreter for General Gordon in Khartoum, and had only left three weeks before, when Gordon had ordered him out of the city for his own safety. The Mahdi’s forces had blocked the main exit routes, and Shaytan had only made it through by disguising himself in the patched jibba robe of an Ansar warrior, the most fanatic followers of the Mahdi. He had travelled to General Wolseley’s headquarters at Wadi Halfa, some two hundred miles north on the Egyptian border, and offered his services to the expedition that was now inching its way south along the Nile in a forlorn attempt to relieve Gordon. In the careful ways of desert dialogue, in a wide-ranging discussion over cups of strong tea, Mayne had extracted from Shaytan all he could about Gordon’s state of mind. Shaytan’s account was dispassionate, the most up-to-date he had, and was not clouded by the prejudgements of British intelligence officers that had made it difficult for Mayne to get a good grasp of the man. That evening’s discussion had been the most valuable outcome of his foray into the desert; forward reconnaissance of the Nile had anyway seemed of dubious value in light of the probability that the river column would never reach Khartoum in time to save Gordon.

The camel snorted and tossed its head; Mayne knew he was close to the sangar now, just off to the west. Beyond that he saw the flash of the heliograph on a rocky outcrop above the far bank of the river, the signallers tilting the mirror in the sunlight to send out the long and short dashes of Morse code. The telegraph line from Khartoum had been cut as soon as the Mahdi’s forces had surrounded the city; some said that Gordon himself had done it in a fit of pique over the delay in sending a relief expedition to get his Egyptian and Sudanese staff and their families out of Khartoum before the Mahdi made escape impossible. The heliograph could only be used for the most basic information, for requests for supplies or reports of daily progress up the Nile; the Mahdi’s spies were perfectly able to read Morse code, and anything more sensitive would soon reach the ears of the sheikhs who commanded the force the British troops knew was waiting in the desert somewhere to the south. The only way to communicate securely was by courier, using local Sudanese tribesmen, who could ride swiftly and knew how to avoid the thieves and murderers of the desert oases. For weeks now it was the only way that messages from Gordon had reached them, messages that had infuriated Wolseley in their fickle vacillation between optimism and fatalism, and in the obscurity of Gordon’s intentions. Even the authenticity of the messages could be suspect, brought by messengers whose loyalty could never be certain. In the desert, the truth shifted like the sands, changing subtly in complexion with each gust of wind, then being swept away by storms that left a whole new landscape of reality to understand and navigate.

Mayne steered the camel towards the flashing light, knowing that the sangar now lay directly ahead above the near bank of the river. The message being sent out would be relayed down the heliograph posts to Korti, the advance camp on the Nile where the camel corps was assembling, and then on to Wadi Halfa. He smiled wryly to himself, remembering what Corporal Jones and the other soldiers had called Wadi Halfa: Bloody Halfway. It had become a standing joke for the men of the river column to ask each other how far they had gone at the end of each day, after another few hundred yards of backbreaking toil, hauling and rowing the boats to the next obstacle; the answer was always the same: bloody halfway. The joke had become strained as the level of the Nile had steadily fallen through December, and the channels he had spotted during his reconnaissance trips upstream had become trickles by the time the boats reached them. Sometimes it seemed as if they were caught in a Greek myth of the underworld, where no matter how hard they tried, their goal remained forever elusive. Yet Mayne knew that if this were the underworld, then they were only in the first circle of hell; somewhere ahead was an invisible barrier beyond which lay a deeper reach, a place where a force of darkness was marshalling that could obliterate them with the speed and ferocity of a sandstorm. And in the eye of that looming maelstrom was General Charles Gordon, their sole purpose for being here, a man whose future seemed increasingly doubtful as the chances of the relief expedition ever reaching him faded hour by hour.

He turned and watched Shaytan receding noiselessly in the distance, his camel wavering in the heat haze as it sauntered away. The sun glinted off the brass-covered flintlock pistol with a handle like a rat’s tail that Shaytan had taken from the dismembered corpse of an Ottoman Turkish official they had found in the desert a few days previously, whether the work of the Mahdi’s men or brigands was unclear. With his golden gun and his belted dagger, Shaytan seemed from another era, yet Mayne had learned that the desert had a timeless quality in which the past seemed to live with the present. It had seemingly rebuffed every attempt by the British to introduce new technology: the railway his fellow engineers had pushed as far as they could beyond Korti, until the supply of track and their own energy had been sapped; the river steamers that Gordon had used in the upper reaches of the Nile near Khartoum, constantly breaking down and immobilised for want of wood for fuel; the Gatling and Gardner machine guns that should have assured their supremacy on the battlefield, but that jammed in the dust and the heat. They had learned through bitter experience that the only way to broach the desert was to adapt to it and learn the ways of desert survival as Mayne had done from Shaytan, yet even that put interlopers at a disadvantage against those who had been born to it. It was impossible to know where Shaytan would go next, or which side he would now join. What was certain was that his time with Mayne had come to an end, and they both knew that if they were to meet again, they might be trying to cut each other’s throats. It was the way of the desert, and signified nothing more than that they were both part of the eternal course of history in these lands.

Shaytan had called Mayne ‘Nassr’ayin’, meaning ‘Eagle Eye’. It was the same name he had been given in Iroquioan by the Mohawk Indians when he had spent a year living among them as a boy on the Ottawa river in Upper Canada, when his uncle had been in charge of a Royal Engineers detachment maintaining the canal from Lake Ontario to the new capital. The Iroquioan name, ‘Kahniekahake’, had stuck when he had returned to Canada as a newly commissioned subaltern and joined the Mohawk scouts in Wolseley’s expedition up the Red River in 1870 to quash the rebellion of Louis Riel. It was an extraordinary fact that some of those same men, including his boyhood friend Charrière, were here today, employed by Wolseley for their expertise with river craft to help haul the hundreds of whaleboats to be used to transport soldiers up the Nile towards Khartoum.

To the followers of Islam, the eagle was a perfect creation of Allah; to the Mohawks it was the spirit of a young warrior on a vision quest. Yet Mayne knew that Shaytan wore Islam as lightly as his ancestors had worn the beliefs of others who had passed through the desert in the distant past, and that for the Mohawk the spirit world required no special belief; it was simply the world they inhabited. Spending time with Shaytan had allowed Mayne to understand the desert people in a way that the staff officers in Korti and Wadi Halfa never would. The call to jihad that lay at the core of the rebellion was not the main motivation for the majority of the Mahdi’s army, a vast and motley gathering of tribesmen drawn from all quarters of the Sudan, some of them from the deepest reaches of the desert, where the influence of Islam was peripheral at best. For many, their instinct was to fight each other rather than join in a common cause. And yet this truth, that they were not all converts to militant Islam, was not a weakness; in the hands of the Mahdi, it was a strength. The Mahdi himself was one of them, born on the Nile, and he knew what drove his people. He knew how to use his holy vision to attract and rally his core of fanatical followers, the Ansar, and how to use their suicidal courage to draw others to follow his banner. And the tribesmen were not simply fighting to expel foreigners – Turkish and British and Egyptian and even Arabs – in order to defend their families and their traditions. The Mahdi knew how to stir them so that they were fighting because they relished it, because their pulses quickened at the sight of blood, because they could not resist following when the Ansar surged forward screaming and brandishing their spears at the enemy. Mayne had realised that the war had become self-fuelling, and that the only hope the British would ever have of containing it would be to return with an army large enough to mount a campaign of attrition and annihilation.

He looked back one last time at the wavering form in the distance. A gust of wind took one end of Shaytan’s headscarf and unfurled it like a banner, until it seemed to join the distant streaks of black cloud that appeared above the horizon; his camel appeared to stretch outwards and upwards like a mirage, and then was gone. It was like this in the desert, a place of mirages, of illusions, where desperate thirst could feel like dust in the throat, where there was no moral compass, where cruelty could be as casual and transient as the camaraderie he had felt over the last few weeks. Of all the places where he had been on campaign, he had never experienced the insidious draining that he had felt in the desert. The worst of it was when your body dried up until you were like a camel; they said that if you survived that without going insane, you learned to feed it with just what was necessary to keep from collapsing. Mayne knew he had been there often over the past few days, that Shaytan had made him experience it to show him how to survive; but it had left him with a desiccated feeling that would take days to resolve, and he knew that his body would try to convince him he was sated when he needed to drink more than he ever had done before in his life.

He turned back, pulled hard on the reins to keep the camel’s head in the direction of the river and kicked its flanks again. He found the animal strangely reassuring, as if its plodding gait were taking him out of that world of mirages and anchoring him back in reality. Seeing the patches of solid bedrock under the sand reminded him of the ancient ruins that Shaytan had shown him, Nubian and Roman and Egyptian, some of them from the time when the pharaohs had ventured this far south and tried to tame the wilderness they believed had been the homeland from which their civilisation had sprung. The ruins had been vestigial, elusive – the tamped-down floors of desert corrals, crumbled watchtowers, temporary forts – and there had been no stratigraphy to them; with seeming whimsy the wind would blow sand away to reveal ruins that were three thousand years old, or so recent that Shaytan could remember those who had lived in them. As soon as people passed on, the desert seemed to swallow their history and reduce it to the same desiccated imprint, the fate that seemed to lie in store for their own endeavours just as it had for the expeditions of the pharaohs who had preceded them on this trek into the shadowlands of their own history.

Yet in those few elusive ruins Mayne had found a human presence stronger than he had ever done among the towering monuments of Giza or Luxor or Abu Simbel that he had visited on his voyage south through Egypt. The day before, he had seen strange pyramidal forms rising from the sand, sheer-sided outcrops of basalt from some ancient volcanic eruption that had resisted the wind and stood stark above the desert like the backbone of the earth itself. In a flash of insight he had understood the origin of the man-made pyramids of ancient Egypt, an interest spurred by his time spent visiting the archaeological sites of the Nile after his first posting to Cairo. Those people who had gone north, the ancestors of the first pharaohs, had taken with them this vision of their ancestral landscape and had attempted to re-create it in their burial monuments. He realised why he had found the wonders of ancient Egypt curiously unmoving, for all their grandeur and technical marvel. They were no more than imitations of nature, like the walled gardens of European aristocrats, constructed by a people who could only bear to inhabit a world that they controlled. To those who rebelled, those like the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, that world must have seemed artificial, claustrophobic, unbearable; Mayne could see why Akhenaten had come here in search of truth, rejecting the religion of the pharaohs and finding deeper meaning in the one God, the Aten.

He remembered something, and reached under the fold of his desert robe into his tunic pocket, taking out a small package. Shaytan had given him a hejab, a pouch containing an amulet on a leather necklace with verses of the Koran wrapped around it. He released the reins of the camel and untied the leather thong that kept the bag shut, dropping the amulet into the palm of his hand. The wrapping was diaphanous, insubstantial, and when he took it off, it seemed lighter than air. As he held it in his other palm, a wisp of wind suddenly took it from him. He snatched at it, but it was gone. For a moment he thought of dismounting and chasing it, but it was flying high above the desert, and it would be hopeless. He did not even know whether it truly had been verse from the Koran, or some more ancient wisdom of the Dongola transcribed into Arabic. But the amulet seemed more substantial, and he peered at it closely. He realised that it was an ancient carving in the shape of a scarab beetle, like ones he had seen for sale in the alleyway markets of Cairo, pillaged from ancient tombs. It was jet black, carved from hard volcanic stone, probably from some outcrop in the desert itself. Embedded in the wings were lines of gold wire and two tiny gemstones that he recognised as peridot, the beautiful green stone that the ancient Egyptians mined on St John’s Island in the Red Sea. The scarab must have been a prized possession in antiquity. Perhaps Shaytan had picked it up in one of those ruins, or it had been passed down to him through the generations of his ancestors since the pharaohs had turned their eyes away from this place. On its base Mayne could feel the ridges and indentations of carving, and turning it over he saw that it was hieroglyphics. When he had time, he would dig out the notebook he had filled with hieroglyphic symbols during two days of enforced leisure waiting for supplies when the expedition had encamped at Akhenaten’s ruined capital of Amarna, and see if he could find a match.

He saw a flash of reflected light up ahead, and quickly hung the scarab around his neck. The light had come from a bayonet poking above the wall of the sangar about two hundred yards away above the river gorge. He saw a wisp of smoke from a billycan fire, the universal sign of British soldiers brewing up. He pursed his lips. They were going to have to be more careful. Shaytan had spotted movement among the rocks above a few miles upstream, and Mayne knew that the British sentry posts would be prime targets for the Mahdi’s sharpshooters. He squinted at the western horizon beyond the smoke, just making out the distant ridge above the far bank of the river, but he could see nothing. He remembered the last time he and Shaytan had been this close to the Nile, when he had taken the Martini-Henry rifle out of its leather cover in front of the saddle and fired at a derelict shaduf, a water-lifting device, adjusting the sights for the range until he had shot the top of the pole away in three successive rounds, enough to know that the sights were correct should he have to do the same to a human target on the opposite ridge of the river as they worked their way up the cataracts. That was when Shaytan had called him Nassr’ayin, Eagle Eye; and it was for the same reason that he had acquired the name from the Mohawk years before. He had relished shooting the rifle in this elemental place, free from the superimpositions of civilisation. It was his constant, a tunnelling of his vision that excluded everything else, just as the river and the burning sun were the constants of the desert. And it was what he was here to do. He picked up the reins, ready to yank them. It was time he made his presence known.

6

Mayne pulled hard on the reins, steering the camel towards the sentry post overlooking the Nile. The wind-graded dust and gravel of the desert had given way to hamada, the hard igneous plateau that skirted the river where it had cut its way through the bedrock on its course north towards Egypt. He could see the Nile now, a hundred feet or so below the level of the plateau, sinuous rivulets of brown that curled around the outcrops of black rock that broke up the river as it ran down the cataract, the twists of white water showing where it was fast and dangerous. The men working below were not yet visible, but he could hear their cries echoing down the gorge as they hauled the boats past the rocks: the bellowed orders of the British sergeants and corporals; the undulating chant of the west African Kroomen singing in unison; and the distinctive nasal lilt of the Mohawk Indians, who spoke the archaic French of the voyageurs they had guided for generations through the Canadian wilderness.

He slid off the camel, took his saddlebag and rifle and left the beast snorting and chewing on some desert grass in a shallow gully about fifty yards from the sentry post. The sangar was a natural cleft in the clifftop, surrounded by the remains of an ancient masonry wall that the soldiers had fortified with rocks and mounded gravel to form a parapet around the edge. As he approached it, he could see the khaki pith helmets of half a dozen men and the long bayonets of rifles that had been left propped against the parapet. He had not yet been spotted, and he stopped for a moment to listen to the murmur of voices, among them the distinctive West Country burr of Corporal Jones, the sapper who was his servant, holding forth as usual to a rapt audience. ‘Camels,’ he heard Jones say. ‘Can’t stand ’em. My officer loves his, made me try to ride it. Horrible it was, spitting and belching and eating its own vomit. All those men volunteering to join the camel corps for the desert column, they don’t know what they’re in for.’

Another voice piped up. ‘Tell us more about the dervishes, Jonesy.’

Mayne heard the suck of a pipe, and saw a ring of tobacco smoke rise above the steam of the billycan that was boiling in the fire. Jones knew how to play his audience, how to build anticipation. He heard the pipe being knocked out, slowly, deliberately. ‘It’s the spears that puts the fear of God in a man,’ Jones said quietly. ‘As long as a lance they are, with metal points the length of your arm, sharper than those bayonets. After they’ve done with the killing, they go over the battlefield and dip their spears in the wounds, and then smear the blood all over themselves. That’s Johnny Fuzzy-Wuzzy for you.’ He paused, and Mayne heard the striking of a match, and then the suck of the pipe again. ‘Like the devil in battle they are, mark my words. Saw them myself, at El Teb in February. Like one of those medieval church paintings of the seven circles of hell, with little black demons serving Satan. That’s where we’re all going, I tell you, up this river to the gates of hell itself.’

‘I heard Colonel Burnaby speak of the battle when he arrived to join the desert column after recovering from his wounds.’ Mayne recognised the voice of the impressionable young infantry subaltern who had been left in charge of the sangar. ‘He was there as well, at El Teb.’

‘And he saw to them, hundreds of them,’ an Irish voice pitched in. ‘We’ve all heard the stories.’

‘Too right, mate,’ Jones asserted. ‘The colonel did for them good and proper, standing there on a rock above the battle wearing a Norfolk jacket and a stalking hat, looking for all the world like a country gent on a Sunday shoot. He had a fearsome weapon, a four-barrelled howdah pistol, like the ones they use in India to shoot tigers from the backs of elephants. It fires the same cartridge as the old Snider rifle, big enough to blow a hole clean through a man so you can see out the other side. Saw it with my own eyes, I did, the first dervish Burnaby killed, his innards flying and twirling out behind him like he was on fire, and still he kept coming. They’re devils, I tell you. Then the Colonel drops his pistol and fires pig-shot point blank with his double-barrelled twelve-bore. The dervishes knocked him up bad, but he kept on blasting. Twenty-three shells he fired, and he killed thirteen of them. And when his ammunition was finished, he laid about him something fearful with his sabre, and killed as many again. Saw it all with my own eyes.’

Mayne smiled to himself. Jones was a born raconteur who could reduce himself to the level of the coarsest of the soldiers, but as a street urchin in Bristol a benefactor had paid for him to go to the Bluecoat School, where he had picked up enough to converse more articulately with Mayne than some of the officers. He was in his late twenties, some ten years younger than Mayne, but had already bounced up and down the ranks several times, his natural abilities almost exactly counterbalanced by his transgressions, usually for speaking his mind in the presence of a less accommodating officer. He had been in India with the Madras Sappers and Miners, and had served in an arduous jungle campaign in the south before going to the war in Afghanistan in 1880, where he had picked up the surveying skills that had first brought him to Mayne’s attention. Before being despatched to the river column by an exasperated commanding officer, Jones had been in a Royal Engineers company attempting to build a railway into the desert from Suakin on the Red Sea coast; they had been present at the first major encounters of British forces with the Mahdi army at the bloody battles at El Teb and El Sid earlier that year. Whether he had actually seen Burnaby in action with his own eyes was a moot point that Mayne did not wish to explore, though there was enough corroboration to show that his account was essentially accurate.

‘Now there’s a soldier’s soldier for you, sir, Fred Burnaby, make no mistake,’ he heard Jones say. The pipe was sucked, and he caught a waft of tobacco smoke. ‘Some say old Burnaby has more brawn than brains, but mark my words, if he were in charge here, he’d hoick us out of the river and march us across the desert to where we could stand up to the fuzzy-wuzzies like real British soldiers, not like the sewer rats we are here. You can tell that to all your fancy friends in the press and your staff officers with their maps and plans, begging your pardon, sir.’

Mayne smiled again, in spite of himself. El Teb had been part of an abortive attempt to establish a Red Sea beachhead in order to approach Khartoum from the east, a plan that had bogged down in the fetid coastal swamps when the local Baggara tribesmen had rallied to the Mahdi’s cause and inflicted a series of disastrous defeats. But even that had not been enough of a wake-up call for some of the officers on the staff. One of the more tedious colonels, a man who had never been on the receiving end of a dervish charge, had heard stories of Burnaby’s Norfolk jacket and the shotgun, and had said it was not sporting. Not sporting. Few of them realised what they were up against. Even General Wolseley had assured the press that the appearance of a few dozen redcoats on a river steamer at Khartoum would cow the enemy into submission and relieve General Gordon and his Egyptian and Sudanese garrison. Yet it was Wolseley who had devised the plan they were currently executing, a scheme of astounding logistical complexity to inch a rescue force up the Nile against the flow, almost guaranteeing that they would not get there before the Mahdi’s forces overwhelmed Khartoum. Corporal Jones was right. If the will really existed to relieve Gordon, then the only course of action was a bold move across the desert, though whether a maverick like Burnaby was the right man to lead it was another moot point.

Mayne scraped the ground noisily with his boot and climbed the parapet. The knot of soldiers inside jerked their heads towards him, clutching at their rifles. He cleared his throat. ‘Speaking of more brawn than brains, I thought this was meant to be a lookout post.’ It hurt to talk, the first time he had done so in hours, his throat dry and coated with dust. The subaltern stood up quickly, disconcerted, straightening his tunic. ‘We never thought an enemy would come from that direction, sir. I have two sentries in the rocks with their eyes trained on the cliff above the opposite bank. That’s where we saw the dervishes watching us yesterday.’

Jones stood up, like Mayne a few inches over average height, put his hands on his hips and looked Mayne up and down, then shook his head. ‘You look a sight, sir. Every bit of you. I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Don’t bother.’ Mayne let the saddlebag drop, pulled off his headdress and tried to push his fingers through his thick dark hair, and then through his beard. He looked at his hands and knew his face must be the same, layered with a dark orange crust of desert like the bedrock he had just been riding over. He hardly dared think of his odour; fortunately he seemed to have lost his sense of smell after a few hours on the back of the camel. He swallowed hard, trying to wet his throat. ‘The messenger reached us yesterday evening at the Kordofan wells; I’m due at Korti tomorrow afternoon for a conference with General Wolseley. That’s thirty miles downriver, and there are about six hours of daylight left. There’s no moon at the moment and even the voyageurs won’t paddle through the cataracts when it’s pitch dark. I don’t have time to wash and change.’

‘You mean you don’t want to, sir. You know the general’s going to send you out into the desert again, and you don’t want to lose that look. It takes a while to grow a convincing beard. A few days’ stubble is a dead giveaway, as none of the Arabs have it.’

Mayne said nothing, but unwound his headdress and scarf and stuffed them into the bag, then took off his hippo-hide belt and his robe. The robe had been another layer above his uniform and at first he had objected to it, but it had kept him cool while he was riding, the white cotton reflecting the desert sun. Beneath it he wore the standard attire of an officer in the desert campaign: a Sam Browne belt with a holster for his Webley-Pryse revolver, an ammunition pouch containing twenty rounds, a bag with his tinted sun-goggles, and a leather water bottle; and below that a grey serge jumper, yellow-ochre corduroy riding breeches, puttees wound up to his knees and brown ankle-length boots, all of it adapted from kit he had worn on the North-West Frontier of India. His pith helmet, dyed with Nile mud and acacia bark and with a cloth neck veil, was attached to the saddlebag. He would have liked to carry on wearing the headdress and scarf in this heat, but he needed to remain inconspicuous, keeping spying eyes from seeing anything singular about him. And there was another factor now too: the dervish sharpshooters who might be in the cliffs opposite. A headdress would show that he had been in the desert, probably gathering intelligence, and would suggest that he was an officer, so would make him a prime target. He did not want to invite a bullet before his mission had even begun.

Jones pointed to a khaki-coloured canvas roll-up the size of a cricket kitbag among their surveying gear on one side of the sangar. ‘I kept that beside me all the time, sir, as I promised you. Your special equipment.’

Jones knew what the bag contained, though not its true purpose. On the face of it, a sporting rifle was an unremarkable piece of gear for a British officer travelling abroad who might expect opportunities to hunt along the way; there were officers fired up by tales of African game who had brought with them entire arsenals, of every imaginable type and calibre. But Mayne’s gun was a make rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic, and he did not want to draw attention to himself. The wooden box inside the bag was sealed and weatherproofed so that it was not damaged in any way. He suspected that the time to test-fire and sight it in would be soon, perhaps immediately after his visit to Wolseley, so he would take it with him when he left the sangar for the river. He nodded his acknowledgement to Jones. ‘Is my boat ready?’

‘The bows were stoved in on a rock during the passage from Korti, and the sappers down below are patching her up. They’re going to signal me when they’re finished. Meanwhile Mr Tanner and Major Ormerod of the Canadian contingent have discovered something they thought you might want to see. They know about your interest in the ancient ruins, and they’ve come across some carvings in the cliff face below us.’

Mayne squinted at the ridge on the opposite side of the river. ‘I’ll stay up here, I think,’ he murmured. ‘If there are dervishes watching us, I’d rather try to do something about it than make myself a target at the base of that cliff. Judging by the difficulties I saw ahead in this cataract, the river column will probably still be camped here when I get back. Plenty of time then for exploring ruins.’

Jones looked at him shrewdly. ‘You’ve been away sometimes for weeks on end, and that’s just carrying out reconnaissance upriver. If General Wolseley wants you to go into the desert for him, then you’ll probably be away for a long time. We won’t be seeing you back here at this spot, sir, that’s my guess.’

Mayne pulled the Martini-Henry rifle out of the holster attached to his saddlebag, and picked up the cartridge box. ‘Then I’d better make the best use of my time while I’m here. My spotting scope and binoculars are in the saddlebag. Bring them to the parapet and we’ll see if we can’t spy out those dervishes of yours.’

‘You’re having something to eat and drink first, sir.’

Mayne grunted, then dropped into the sangar and leaned his rifle against the parapet. Jones was right. He was not yet ready for hard-tack biscuit and tinned bully beef, but he took the proffered leather mussak water bottle gratefully, wetting his lips and then swilling the water around his mouth as he had learned to do from the Dongolese, taking small sips before slaking his thirst. He left the bottle half full and passed it back, taking his first proper look at Jones, who was wearing regulation khaki but sporting a colourful bandanna under his helmet, its knotted end hanging down his back like a pigtail. Mayne recognised the cloth pattern of the Hudson’s Bay Company; it must have been given to him by one of the Canadian voyageurs recruited by Wolseley to navigate the boats up the cataracts. Unlikely friendships had formed among the motley crew assembled for this task.

Mayne waved away an open tin, but Jones succeeded in thrusting a rock-hard fragment of biscuit into his hand. ‘Was it as you expected, sir? The river, I mean?’

Mayne slumped back against the parapet. ‘The next stretch of open water begins about seven miles ahead. I’ve mapped out a possible route through the cataract in between, but the river was too muddy to see any underwater obstructions even from my vantage point high above the bank. It’ll be down to the Mohawks to navigate the way forward.’

‘They’ve got an uncanny ability, sir. We’ve been watching them in the rapids below us here. Your friend Charrière, he’s the best.’

‘Rivers are in their blood, and the canoe is like a second skin to them,’ Mayne replied. ‘They can sense the slightest change in the current, allowing them to detect rocks underwater as if the river had been stripped away.’ He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and took the water bottle again from Jones. ‘I’ve identified the best landing point for the flotilla when it reaches the foot of the next cataract at the end of the open water. It’s on the far bank, but the obvious route beyond that is a dead-end alley and they’d have to backtrack if they tried going up it, losing hours. They’ll need to cross the river and work their way up below the cliffs on this side. I’ll pass my sketches on to General Earle’s adjutant before I leave.’

‘Is the next cataract going to be as bad as this one, sir?’

Mayne took another swig. ‘Worse, probably. And there are four more stretches of cataract before the clear passage to Khartoum. That’s more than two hundred miles ahead, and by the time open water is reached, the river level will have dropped so much that even the clear sections between the cataracts will be full of shoals and exposed rock. Time is most definitely not on our side. At best it’s going to be a close-run thing.’

‘And a few good marksmen on the cliffs could slow us down even more,’ the subaltern said.

‘I thought the dervishes couldn’t shoot worth damn,’ the Irish soldier said, leaning up on his elbows from where he had been lying, staring intently at Mayne.

‘Don’t count on it,’ Mayne replied. ‘The true jihaddiyah, the Ansar, have forsworn modern weapons, and despise firearms as the tool of the infidel. But the Mahdi’s been very astute. He knows that the traditional tribal warrior of the Sudan equates courage and manliness with the sword and the spear, and by extolling that tradition he’s been able to recruit more tribal men to his cause. But the Remington rifles they captured from the Egyptians have been put to good use too. The Mahdi has raised a cadre of sharpshooters to provide long-distance fire over the heads of the advancing Ansar. The few Egyptian soldiers who were allowed to survive capture have taught them how to clean and maintain the rifles, and how to shoot.’

‘Soldiers that we trained ourselves, turning what we taught ’em back against us,’ the soldier grumbled.

‘Can’t say as I blame them,’ Jones said. ‘The Egyptian soldiers we massacred back at Tel-el-Kebir when we first arrived in Egypt only wanted freedom from Turkish rule, and we put the survivors in chains and sent them down here to the seventh circle of hell to get slaughtered. Joining with the dervishes isn’t just about saving their own skins; it’s about carrying on their fight against the Ottomans. I’m not saying as we should sympathise with the Mahdi, heaven forefend, sir, but I’ve seen the Ottoman officials on the way down here and the way they lord it over the Egyptians, and I can see their point.’

‘The Ottomans are our allies, Corporal Jones,’ the subaltern said. ‘Watch what you say.’

‘Begging your pardon, sir, I’m only saying what Tommy Atkins thinks, that is when he’s allowed to think, when he’s not digging holes and hauling on ropes and dodging crocodiles.’

‘Well, from what Major Mayne says about the work ahead, we’re going to need a lot more of that. And we can’t have you thinking, Jones.’

‘No, sir. Most definitely not, sir.’

Mayne grinned tiredly. ‘It’s not the Egyptians we have to worry about, it’s the Mahdists. And they don’t yet use firearms as we do in massed volleys, or employ handguns at close quarters.’

‘Colonel Burnaby put them to rights on that score,’ Jones said. ‘He showed them what a pistol in the right hands can do.’

Mayne slumped back, suddenly dead tired. At close quarters, a gun was only as good as the speed with which you could reload the chamber, and he knew that any battle with the dervishes would see these soldiers quickly reduced to bayonets and rifle butts and bare hands. He thought again of Burnaby, a man whose legend was matched by his physical stature and deeds. As a subaltern he had wreaked havoc in the officers’ messes of Aldershot and London, pushing the boundaries of boisterous play and earning the dislike of senior officers who had dogged his career ever since. He was an officer in the Household Cavalry, the Blues, a regiment that had seen no foreign service for decades but afforded its officers five months’ leave a year, and therefore scope for an energetic man with connections to appear on the spot wherever action was hotting up. This Burnaby did with flamboyant regularity, finding himself some tenuous attached position that allowed him to exercise his freewheeling nature while seeking out the thick of the action. After recovering from his wounds at El Teb, he had become one of the hotchpotch of officers attached to the river column, just as Mayne was now; and then he had found himself a position on Lord Wolseley’s staff, edging ever closer to where they all knew the next flashpoint would be, somewhere in the desert on the way to Khartoum. Burnaby had his admirers, Wolseley among them, Queen Victoria another, and he was the darling of the press, the epitome of the military hero in the popular imagination. But above all he was loved by the men. Tommy Atkins expected his officer to lead from the front, and if he did so with the bravura and dash of a Burnaby, he would follow him anywhere.

Burnaby had another role, too, one that had brought him into contact with Mayne on missions known only to a select few in the War Office intelligence department. They had last met in the field four years earlier, during the final months of the Afghan War, in a desolate frontier outpost in Baluchistan. Forays to Khiva in Russian Asia and to the eastern frontier of Asia Minor during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 had made Burnaby an expert on the Russian military, a specialisation that suddenly had huge cachet as Russia and Britain veered towards a proxy war in Afghanistan. When Mayne questioned him for the intelligence department in Baluchistan, he found him sharp and perceptive, inclined to cut to the point, qualities that were paramount for an intelligence observer in the field.

And Burnaby had been in the Sudan before, using another of his long leaves ten years earlier to report for The Times on Gordon’s first period as governor general in Khartoum. Mayne wished he could quiz him now on Khartoum and his time with Gordon, but in so doing he might be entering dangerous waters, leaving himself open to questions on his own role that even a fellow intelligence officer was to be denied. Mayne only ever worked in isolation, answering to one superior alone in the War Office; he never knew whether there were other operatives who were party to his missions, though he suspected it – those sent to take over if he failed; others perhaps tasked to execute the same directive as his own if his mission were to be compromised, to prevent him revealing the truth of a role that would shock the army and the nation if it were ever to come out.

He ran yet again over his own cover story, thinking of everything he had said and done since he had last taken stock, finding no new chinks in his armour. Corporal Jones had suspected that his missions into the desert might be preparation for something bigger, but he had no reason for thinking that it might be anything more than a deeper penetration of the desert ahead of the camel corps that was now assembling at Korti. Among his fellow officers, Mayne was unremarkable, a thirty-eight-year-old whose name had gone steadily up the gradation list until reaching major earlier that year, with none of the brevet promotions and temporary commands that singled out the rising stars. As a Royal Engineer, he was one of a corps of almost a thousand officers posted around the world who had trained and served together, and who often returned to their headquarters at Chatham for refresher courses and periods of study; as a survey officer specialising in forward reconnaissance, he was known more widely still, among the officers of infantry and cavalry and artillery he had served alongside in the field. The utter secrecy of his role was best served by his familiarity, as a skilled officer with a reputation for toughness and resilience who would go behind enemy lines and return without making a show of it.

His cover extended as far back as the beginning of his military career. As a subaltern in 1870, he had been plucked by Wolseley from the School of Military Engineering to join his expedition to Canada against Louis Riel. Back in Chatham, he had been visited by a Captain Wilson from the War Department, who had heard of his survival skills and his exceptional marksmanship, learnt as a boy from the Mohawks, and recruited him for a top-secret role. By the time he met Burnaby in Baluchistan, he had spent almost three years in Central Asia, living in disguise for long stretches in the mountains of the Hindu Kush while the Afghan War raged below, watching and waiting in case the British were routed as they had been forty years before. He had been with Wolseley for the invasion of Egypt in 1882, and with another river expedition in prospect, it was natural that Wolseley should call on him once more. Wilson was here too, acting as Wolseley’s intelligence chief. If Mayne were to be activated, there would be no word, no secret conference, just a handshake and a small folded code. Wilson’s presence was enough to put him on high alert; he knew that the call he had received to attend Wolseley would decide his role here one way or the other.

He looked at the medal ribbons on the tunic of the soldier nearest to him, among them the Khedive’s Star for the invasion of Egypt in 1882. The Khedive was the Egyptian puppet of the Ottoman Turks, the sultanate in Constantinople that ruled an empire stretching from Cairo and Jerusalem to Damascus and Baghdad. The British were forever tottering towards war with the Ottomans, but for the time being they were allies, for as long as the Ottomans provided a buffer against the Russian threat. When the British had invaded Egypt in 1882, it had been to secure their interests in the Suez Canal, to ensure that their new gateway to India was kept open and free from the venality and financial mismanagement of the Ottoman regime in Cairo. Yet after defeating the dissident Egyptian army at Tel el-Kebir, they had propped up the old regime, reinstating the Khedive and ostensibly handing back the reins of power to the Ottomans; they had even supported the Khedive in his renewed attempts to control the Sudan, an exercise that had begun ten years before when the War Office in London had allowed Colonel Charles Gordon to be appointed governor general in Khartoum, supported by the motley collection of European and American adventurers that Gordon gathered around himself.

The Sudan had been the last great bastion of the African slave trade, and Gordon’s appointment had met with approval among the moral crusaders of England, among them no less a person than Queen Victoria herself. If anyone could sort it out, it was Gordon, a man of near-suicidal courage who as a young officer had stood exposed on the parapets in the Crimea in order to attract Russian fire and pinpoint enemy positions, and whose Christian fervour seemed to match the growing evangelical mood of the country. Yet as Gordon himself realised soon after taking up his appointment, supporting Ottoman expansionism in the Sudan was a recipe for disaster, with ominous consequences. The slave trade may have been abhorrent to Victorian sensibility, but it was a mainstay of the Sudanese economy and so deeply embedded in tribal loyalties and hierarchies that to suppress it suddenly would require massive military intervention. To the horror of his admirers, Gordon had come out in favour of maintaining the trade in the short term. He had realised that the tribes of Sudan were a complex mosaic of alliances and visceral enmities; the one thing they shared in common was a hatred of Ottoman rule, a hatred that had spread among some to include all outsiders, providing a fertile breeding ground for fundamentalist Islam, and a new cry for jihad fanned by the emergence of a charismatic local Sufi known as the Mahdi, the chosen one.

Yet it was Gordon, not the Mahdi, who was now the nub of the problem, and the reason why Mayne was here. The British imperial system that had so often succeeded by giving free rein to talented individualists was also prey to their whims, to their occasional instabilities and bouts of insanity. Much depended on the shared culture of moral decency and gentlemanly behaviour, of unswerving loyalty to Queen and country that allowed the Colonial Office to send out men to administer vast tracts on their own, confident that their discretion and judgement would accord with the wishes of Her Majesty’s government. The men who occupied these positions of power with restraint were the genius of the British system, but where restraint fell away, they could be its greatest weakness. With the expansion of the empire, a secret office had been established in Whitehall under the remit of military intelligence to develop a safety net, a series of checks and balances. Much of the work involved intelligence-gathering, character assessment, advice to government on whom to appoint and where, but there was also a contingency for what to do if things went wrong.

For six months now, all eyes had been on Gordon in Khartoum, and everything hung in the balance. The British government had supported the Egyptian Khedive’s regime in the Sudan, but Prime Minister Gladstone’s new Liberal government had no intention of dispatching a military force of the size that would be required to defeat the Mahdi. There was, however, a need to evacuate Europeans and Egyptian officials and their families from Khartoum, and Gordon was the man for the job. He had seemed to agree to this brief, but then something had gone wrong. He had become increasingly cut off in Khartoum, holed up in the Governor’s palace. The messages that came out were terse, infrequent, increasingly erratic. Whitehall began to fear the worst. Gordon’s highly individual form of Christianity allowed him to empathise with Islam in a way that some found disturbing, to the extent of wondering whether he himself might go over to the Mahdi as some Europeans captured by the dervishes had done. The prospect was a nightmare for Gladstone’s government, and would be a catastrophe for Britain’s reputation abroad. If rescue were impossible, better that Gordon die a martyr.

Mayne took a swig of water, and shut his eyes. He thought of the men below the cliff struggling up the river, the nearly impossible nature of the task; not for the first time he wondered whether there were other forces at play here, whether this excruciating exercise was deliberate, a very public attempt to rescue Gordon that was surely doomed to failure. At the moment, the likely success of the expedition and the nature of his own involvement hung in the balance, but he knew that with the clock ticking and Khartoum starving, something would have to give way very soon.

He himself was as deeply implicated in empire as any of them. His father had been an Irish indigo planter in Behar, in the shadow of the Himalayas. As a small child Mayne had thought nothing of the thousands of men and women they employed like slaves in the crushing mills, and the opiate splendour of their villa and the gardens where he had played. It was the only world he had known, and it seemed the natural order of things. When he was eight, at boarding school in England, his parents and brother and sister had been hacked to death by mutineers of the Bengal Army in Cawnpore, their bodies thrown down with those still living into a well. His beloved ayah had survived long enough to tell the story of their brutal torture and deaths to the British soldiers who had arrived too late to rescue any of them, but who had exacted a terrible vengeance. Mayne thought of Burnaby’s four-barrelled howdah pistol and the slaughter at El Teb. Any lingering sense of chivalry and sport in war was long gone now, expunged by the Zulu slaughter at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, by the bloodbaths of Colonel Hicks’ last stand and the Red Sea battles, which could only be a foretaste of what was to come.

He opened his eyes and raised himself up so he could see over the parapet to the ridge opposite. He was looking for a telltale flash of light off a blade or a gun barrel, but he knew that the reconnaissance scouts of the Ansar were too good for that; they had blackened the barrels and receivers of their Remingtons, and with the sun behind them on that ridge they would give off no reflection. He squatted on his knees, keeping his head below the parapet, feeling better after his rest. The soldier tending the fire below the billycan took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke. ‘General Wolseley came to talk to us last week. He claimed that no amount of dervishes could withstand the smallest of our columns.’

‘Bosh,’ exclaimed Jones, propping himself up from where he had been lying against the parapet. ‘Hicks’ army of ten thousand two years ago was annihilated. Annihilated. All of the wounded were murdered with those spears, and the prisoners they took had their eyes gouged out and their manhoods ripped off before being crucified, when the dogs ate them alive. I heard it myself from a Dongolese who had been there and seen it all.’

Mayne tightened his bootstraps, and paused. It sounded like a typical soldier’s exaggeration, except that it was true. ‘Hicks’ army was made up of Egyptian conscripts, fellahin from the Nile valley,’ he said. ‘About the least likely soldiers you can imagine, and terrified of the desert. Quite a few of them had been in the rebel Egyptian army that we defeated at Tel el-Kebir when we first invaded Egypt in ’83, and some of them were still prisoners in chains when they were conscripted for the Sudan. But we have to hope that Wolseley is right. After all, he was talking about British soldiers. About the best. About soldiers like you, Jones.’

Jones stiffened. ‘Johnny Fuzzy-Wuzzy won’t take me without a fight.’

‘Indeed. Now let’s get cracking and set up a fire position on that parapet. I want to be ready when the sun drops out of our eyes and we can see that ridge clearly.’

7

Mayne lay against the parapet overlooking the Nile and extended his telescope. High above him he heard the sound of birds flying north, huge flocks of flamingos migrating from the desiccated marshlands below Khartoum, a whistling and whooshing that followed the flow of the river rather than working against it, as the expedition was. For a moment he felt a chill down his spine, as if he were watching the remaining life force of that place bleeding away past him. He shook off the thought and scanned the opposite clifftop with his telescope, tracing the jagged line of rock from the crag where the signallers had set up the heliograph to the furthest point he could see in the dust haze to the south, well beyond rifle range. The afternoon sun was arching west and framed the line of the ridge with absolute clarity, but made it impossible to see through the cracks and gaps where Mahdist sharpshooters might be lurking. He lowered the telescope and shaded his eyes. In this light all they could hope to see was a puff of smoke, and that would give them less than a second before the bullet whined overhead or smacked into the rock, or into one of them. Shaytan had told him that some of the Madhi’s men had become highly proficient with their Remingtons, and they would have the advantage of the sun behind them. Mayne realised that he might be watching and waiting interminably. He would give it half an hour longer, until the sun had dropped below the level of the hills on the horizon, and then he would leave the sangar and make his way down the scree slope below the cliff towards the river.

He left the two sentries at the parapet and slid down a crack in the ancient masonry wall that concealed him from the opposite cliff but gave a clear view of the scene below. A pair of rocks jutting out into the river formed a natural gateway into the cataract, constricting the river to a muddy torrent as it flowed into the pool where the whaleboats were collecting. Confronting the torrent was a solitary man in a canoe, inching his way up against the flow, a hawser line coiled behind him. Once he had made it through, he would find a place to tie the rope off, and then teams of men would use it to haul up the whaleboats, dozens of which were now milling below the cataract, waiting their turn to follow. Mayne could tell that the man in the canoe was a voyageur, from his measured stroke along one side of the boat, the paddle twisted each time to act as a rudder, rather than the frantic paddling from side to side of the British soldiers, who had little idea how to control a canoe. He well remembered his own first efforts as a nine-year-old boy on the Ottawa river, and that moment when he suddenly realised he was one with the boat; that he could use it as an extension of himself.

As he watched the voyageur work his way up the torrent, unswerving and utterly focused, he saw a man on the jutting rock above him hurl a stone trailing a thin line to the rock on the opposite side, where it was caught by another man and then passed to a team of sailors, who hauled across a thick hawser that had been attached to the line, looping it around a rock and making it fast. At the same time, a procession of soldiers stripped to the waist, followed by west African Kroomen, shiny black and wearing only loincloths, made their way up among the rocks to the point where the canoeist would shortly attach his rope, beyond the torrent and in the first pool above the rapids that would provide the next staging post. On a rock above it all, the sergeant major in charge of today’s efforts had positioned himself ready to bellow orders and encouragement as the first whaleboat was brought into position. After weeks of trial and error they had brought the procedure to a fair state of perfection, but even so every day brought new challenges, new obstacles to overcome in the rocky bed of the river, and all the time the level of the Nile was dropping inexorably, making any kind of progress a challenge at best.

Mayne recognised the man who had hurled the line as his friend Charrière, the foreman of the Mohawks. He was wearing the corduroy trousers and check shirt that Wolseley had provided for them, and his long black hair was braided down his back. Among the Mohawks, Charrière was known by his Iroquoian name, Teonihuapataman, meaning ‘he whose blood flows like the river’, but he also bore the French name he had inherited from his grandfather, a voyageur who could trace his ancestry back to the first adventurers from France who’d gone to the New World more than two centuries before. As part of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks had fought alongside the British in the American War of Independence, and again in the war of 1812, but since then their reputation for brutality had softened as they intermingled with the Algonquian people of the Ottawa valley, becoming voyageurs in the fur trade and logmen on the river. To Mayne, though, who had lived with them and watched them hunt and explore, they still had an edge to them, men whose forefathers had been steeped in the blood of savage war.

Mayne remembered Charrière’s disquiet when they had met again on the Red River expedition. Mayne had been away at school and then at the military academy in England, and he had cut the long hair that he had grown as a boy. To the Mohawks, hair retained memories, and to cut it was to sever a link with a past in which Mayne had been adopted into the tribe and shared the coming-of-age rituals with Charrière as they became adolescents. Their friendship had endured, and had been rekindled here in this most unlikely of places, but there had been a distance between them; Charrière had never again called him by the Mohawk name that Mayne had been given as a boy.

He watched a sailor curl his body around the hawser and begin to pull himself across the gorge towards Charrière, inching his way over the torrent. On Charrière’s belt he could see the coiled kurbash, the hippo-hide whip that Shaytan had given him when he joined Mayne on a previous foray into the desert. It had belonged to Shaytan’s ancestors, passed down from distant antiquity; in return, Charrière had given him a polished stone macehead he carried in his leather bag, a weapon his grandfather had used during the American War of Independence. Where the whip had once had a metal tip, long since rusted away, Charrière had spliced in a razor-sharp flint he had brought from Canada.

Something had distracted Charrière’s attention from the sailor on the hawser. Mayne watched him unhitch the whip from his belt and uncoil it, and then saw the tip flicker across the pool below and snap against the surface, causing a ripple to spread out towards the boats around the edge. Mayne raised his telescope and trained it on the pool, uncertain whether he had seen a dark shape beneath the muddy surface where the whip had struck. Two shots rang out from below, the bullets hissing into the water to no obvious effect. No one had yet with certainty seen a crocodile in this pool, but the soldiers believed one was lurking there, making washing and drawing water a hazardous enterprise. Mayne was not entirely convinced, but it was another reason why he had decided to forgo any attempt to cleanse himself before setting out for Wolseley’s camp at Korti.

Jones came up beside him and peered down. ‘I’m sure I saw it,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘It’s the monster the Sudanese river men talk about.’

‘You can’t be sure,’ Mayne said. ‘It could have been a whirlpool, or one of those giant river carp.’

Jones shut his eyes, reciting. ‘“When he raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid. Round about his teeth is terror. In his neck abideth strength, and terror danceth before him. His neesings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Upon earth there is not his like, that is made without fear.” The leviathan, sir, from the Book of Job.’

Mayne lifted his eyebrows. ‘You remember that well. You’ve missed your vocation. You should have been a preacher.’

‘The leviathan’s not some ancient mythic creature, sir, it’s a crocodile. That word neesings, in King James’ time it meant snortings, well almost. I recited it to our Egyptian interpreter, and he said that’s what crocodiles do, they have a habit of inflating themselves and discharging heated vapour through their nostrils in a snorting kind of way, and in the sunlight it sparkles.’

‘It seems you’ve become a natural historian, too. You ought to take care. Natural history and preaching rarely mix, I find. Your congregation will want the fire-spitting dragon of the deep, Satan at hell’s mouth.’

‘It’s that picture Mr Tanner showed me, sir. I just can’t get it out of my head.’

Mayne turned back to the river, amused. One of the officers, Lieutenant Tanner, the engineer in charge of the boatbuilding detachment, had brought along a small library of Greek and Latin literature dealing with the Nile, and one evening the more literary among the officers had amused themselves looking up references to crocodiles in Pliny and Plutarch and Herodotus. Several of them, including Mayne, had left the expedition camp on the way south through Egypt to explore Akhenaten’s capital at Amarna, and had been shown a towering image of the crocodile god Sobek carved into a rock face. Since then it had been imperative among the more sporting officers to bag one, as yet to no avail. Mayne had invited Jones to join them that evening because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, virtually the only literature he had been exposed to as a boy, and he had quoted those lines from memory. As the port wine flowed and he grew bolder, he told them a story he had heard of how a giant Nile crocodile thrashing its tail to pick up speed had leapt on land and chased a woman up a tree, dragging her down and into the water, never to be seen again. Tanner had gone one better and pulled out a print cut from The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, hot off the press when he had left London; entitled ‘A Frightful Incident’, it showed a voluptuous naked woman swooning on her back on a rocky islet in the Nile, a crocodile the size of a dinosaur poised as if to ravish her. Jones had sat speechless, staring at the image with his mouth open, and then had rushed with it down to his mates around the fires a safe distance from the river, all of them in equal measure terrified of crocodiles and starved of female company in the six weeks since they had been allowed to visit the dens of Cairo on the voyage south.

There was a yell from the rocks, and Mayne looked back at the gorge. The sailor crossing the hawser had slipped and was hanging by his hands, his feet bouncing off the torrent below. The hawsers had been taken from Royal Navy ships at Alexandria and were impregnated with tar, a constant problem as the scorching sun melted it into a slippery mess. With another yell he dropped into the torrent and disappeared, swept into the pool below. Charrière kicked off his boots and dived in after him, arching powerfully off the rock and plunging in close to where the dark shape had appeared. It was not the first time he had rescued sailors of dubious swimming ability, but this time Mayne knew there was a special imperative: just out of sight downriver was a vicious whirlpool which would suck anyone caught in it to their death. He quickly scanned the edges of the river, hoping that the crocodile, if that was what it was, had been given enough of a bloody nose by the whip to keep out of the way.

Charrière and the sailor surfaced simultaneously, the man thrashing and yelling, and Charrière grabbed him by his chin and began to swim hard across the pool. He did not try to fight the current but let it take him, edging diagonally towards the far shore, reaching a rock just before he would have been swept beyond Mayne’s sight. A cluster of soldiers who had been running along the bank abreast of them reached in and pulled the two men out, lying the sailor down and leaving Charrière to strip off his shirt and walk back towards the boats.

It was an unremarkable incident, repeated every day or two in some form as they toiled up the Nile, but Mayne was thankful that his friend had not given his life in such a trivial way, only hours before he was due in front of Wolseley; the message Mayne had received in the desert had also told him to bring Charrière along. Yet these episodes seemed like a warning, a reminder that the river was not just an impediment but was also treacherous, lethal; it was as if the Nile itself were pushing them to turn with the flow and go north like the birds, to leave this land where river and desert ruled all. Mayne had heard the Mohawks talk about it among themselves in Iroquoian, not wanting the English to overhear, but he remembered enough of the language to understand. Many of them had already left the expedition, their contract with Wolseley having expired, and only a few of those who remained wished to stay longer. They had said that with each cataract they felt slower, heavier, as if the earth itself were pulling them in; and that to go further would be to reach places where men who fell into the water would no longer be rescued, where the invisible enemy along the cliffs would make the river into a gauntlet of death, where they would pass into another, darker world from which few could ever return.

He took another swig from the bottle. With the worst of his thirst now slaked, he could let the water linger in his mouth, and he tasted the mud of the Nile. It was always a risk drinking water from the river; it was less safe than water you had drawn yourself from a well, but safer than water offered to you by a stranger, water that might be tainted. In the desert, it was no slight on hospitality to refuse an offer of water from a passer-by, and to wait instead until the next well or cistern. The river water he was drinking had washed past Gordon, had drained something from Khartoum, though whether it was lifeblood or something malign, a seeping poison, he could not tell. He stared at the pool where Charrière had rescued the man, trying to see through the depths as a Mohawk would, to sense the shape of the riverbed. He had often wondered what it was like beneath, whether it still harboured any of the history that had passed this way or whether it was just a rush of blackness over a scoured bottom, everything cleansed by the annual flood that irrigated Egypt and kept the river uncluttered by human debris. Shaytan had told him that only when the river had been tamed would the land to the south ever be conquered by outsiders, or the forces unleashed by the Mahdi spill out to the north and threaten the world beyond. It was only the saying of an old Sufi mystic, but it held a kernel of truth, and that truth was the advent of new technology: just as plans were afoot to build a dam at Aswan to control the Nile, so railways were being driven ever further south into the desert from Egypt and the Red Sea that would allow an army to move in rapidly, and at the same time provide weapons and communication that would enable the jihadists to break free from their medieval world and spread their fire to places that many of those with the Mahdi today scarcely knew existed.

When he had first arrived in the Sudan, Mayne had been taken by the extraordinary clarity of the gorge, as if the water that had swept away the sand to reveal the carapace of rock beneath had also cleansed the air above the river, leaving it visible from a distance as a shimmering, glistening snake coiling its way through the desert from the lowering darkness to the south. In the early weeks, when he had little to do, he had occupied his time making sketches of the river column, sending them to the Illustrated London News, where they had been inked up and published as the work of an anonymous officer. Those images had given the British public what Wolseley had wanted them to see: visions of heroic endeavour, of soldiers and sailors and colonials working together for a noble cause, of the allure and danger of the desert beyond.

Then, the limpid air had seemed to extend far over the river to the south, magnifying everything and foreshortening the distance they had to cover, drawing them on in a fever of activity. Now he saw the illusion for what it was; it felt as if they had been seduced, lured deep into the desert by a promise on the horizon that was forever receding, as if in a bad dream. The air beyond the cataract was obscured by the same sand mist he had seen in the desert, and the silvery stream of clarity had been reduced to a bubble above the men and the boats, one that seemed to close in the further they went on; it was as if the light they had taken with them as they pressed south could no longer penetrate the dust and obscurity, and now only illuminated their own toil. He felt that if an ill wind from the south were to sweep over the scene and obscure it, he would look again and they would all be gone, swept from history like the ancient army of the pharaohs, whose traces only remained where they had carved their marks deep into the rocks of the river gorge.

‘Major Mayne, sir.’ Jones lay down beside him again. ‘The boat looks close to being ready. Seems your friend got there a bit faster than he might have liked.’

Mayne glanced towards the river. Charrière had made his way along the shore to the landing point where the boat had been repaired, and was now wading around it in the water, inspecting the hull. Mayne raised his telescope and peered along the cliffs yet again, still seeing nothing. He felt uneasy, but there was nothing he could do. With the whaleboats now assembling in greater numbers, a sharpshooter could have his choice of targets; with more troops coming into the camp, he might be waiting until more senior officers appeared. General Earle fortunately was out of the picture, having left to join Wolseley at Korti the day before. And it was always possible that there was no sharpshooter at all, that the movements they had seen among the rocks were mere tricks of the light or perhaps curious local tribesmen, not necessarily with anyone in their sights. Even if there were a danger and Mayne could make a difference, it was only a matter of time before they would scout ahead and see not just a solitary marksman but a horizon filled with dervish spears and banners. The soldiers in the sangar beside him who had only ever heard Corporal Jones tell of battle would soon experience the full horror for themselves. That was to be their war; his was to be another, far to the south. He knew that Jones could look after himself, whether in the thick of battle or more sensibly occupied in support work. He would have a word with Tanner before leaving to ensure that the corporal was attached to an engineer company, to keep him from being remustered as infantry when the time came for a fight.

He rolled against the parapet and stared back out over the desert. The pellucid light of the early morning when he had woken at the wells with Shaytan had given way to a dusty haze, a mist of sand that lay low over the desert floor; it seemed to cut off anything that rose above it, leaving the pyramidal outcrops he had seen earlier hanging in the distance like a mirage, and his camel standing fifty yards away partly disembodied, as if its head were peering above a diaphanous veil of red. It was a disconcerting effect, part reality, part mirage, but it was also alluring, and he could see how men had been tempted to ride off into the desert and disappear, caught in an embrace that only those who knew what they were seeking and had learned its ways could survive.

The heliograph flashed above the opposite bank, and he snapped back to reality. He turned to the river and saw that the boat was now being rowed out, tested by the sappers who had repaired it. He peered at the line of the cliff one last time. He could not wait any longer and he would have to take his chances. He retracted the telescope, put it in its case and slung it round his neck beside the binoculars, then handed the Martini-Henry rifle and the cartridge box to Jones. ‘Take this. It’s the most accurate rifle the engineer quartermaster could find for me when I arrived. It’s sighted for four hundred yards over the river.’

‘Nobody up here could take a shot like that except you, sir.’

‘Then you’ll need to keep your heads down.’ He stooped over and picked up the khaki bag that Jones had been looking after for him, checking that it was wrapped and secure.

Jones watched him, his voice hesitant. ‘So you really are leaving us for good, sir?’

Mayne paused. ‘I don’t know. But look out for me.’

‘Sir.’ The subaltern offered his hand, and Mayne shook it. ‘We’ll be on guard next time, sir. The next time a British officer appears out of the desert disguised as an Arab.’

Mayne turned to Jones. ‘That reminds me. My camel.’

‘Sir?’

‘I won’t be needing her again. She’s yours.’

Jones stared at Mayne, then out at the chewing, grunting form beyond the parapet, then back at Mayne, his face a picture of horror. ‘But sir.’

‘A little desert grass, some water. You’ll find she’s very loyal. Once you feed her, she won’t look at any other man. And if you get cold at night, hobble her and snuggle up tight. You won’t notice the smell after a while.’

The Irish soldier jostled Jones. ‘Go on, Jonesy. You was telling us how good you was with the Egyptian ladies in Cairo. Well, here’s one for you now, and a chance for you to show us what you’re worth.’

Jones’ face had turned from horror to despair. Mayne grinned at him, then picked up his saddlebag and slung the khaki wrap over his back, feeling the hard wooden case inside, and turned towards the parapet.

It was time to go.

8

‘Get down, sir!’

There was a crack as a bullet whined by, so close that the air it displaced pushed Mayne off balance and sent him tripping and stumbling back into the sangar. The report of the gunshot echoed and rumbled down the gorge below, and he heard yells and commands from the men on the river as they took cover. He quickly doffed his bags and crawled to the parapet beside Jones, who handed back the rifle he had taken from him only moments before. The other soldiers had dropped what they were doing and crouched with their heads under the parapet. The sound of the report had come about half a second behind the bullet; for a .43 calibre Remington that meant the shooter was about four hundred yards away, perhaps five hundred over the river where the air was cooler and less dense, slowing the bullet by a fraction. He twisted his head to one side, listening as another bullet whined by. He could also gauge the distance a Remington bullet had travelled by its noise, whether a snap or a buzz or a whine, and what he heard confirmed his estimate: four hundred, perhaps four hundred and fifty yards, exactly the distance from the ridge opposite where he had expected a sharpshooter to appear. He whipped out his telescope and trained it on the ridge. Another bullet whined over, followed by another sharp report, the noise overlaying the distant echoes of the previous report and resounding through the gorge. He lowered the telescope, searching for the telltale puff of white smoke. Another shot rang out, but he could see nothing. The man had waited until there was enough haze coming off the desert to obscure the smoke, and until the sun was directly behind him, dazzling any onlookers from the opposite bank. He was good, too good to allow himself to be caught by the soldiers who would already be clambering up the rocks from below to search for him, but likely to hold his ground until he had inflicted serious casualties among the men by the river or here in the sangar.

‘It’s a harassing fire,’ the subaltern said, his voice high pitched with excitement and fear. ‘They can’t be aiming at us individually, from that far off.’

‘There’s only one of them,’ Mayne replied. ‘The dervish sharpshooters only ever work alone, like any good marksmen. And I wouldn’t be sure it’s just harassing fire. He’s going to get his range soon enough, and then we might be in for some trouble.’

The subaltern slid further down into the sangar, holding his helmet on to his head. ‘What do you propose to do?’

‘He’s using the sun behind him as cover, but he’s left it a little late in the day. Pretty soon the sun will drop and we might have a chance of seeing him on that ridge. Until then we sit tight.’

‘Do you intend to have a go? At this range?’

Mayne pursed his lips, looking at the others. ‘Everybody hold their fire. I’ll only have one chance. As soon as he knows we’ve spotted his position, he’ll be gone and that’ll be it.’ He glanced at the wrapped box, and then dispelled the thought. The Sharps was more accurate at a longer range, but he had yet to sight it in, and to use it now would be to compromise himself, to open himself to questioning that he did not want. The Martini-Henry would be at the limit of its effectual range but he had got to know its foibles in the desert, and he felt confident with it. He glanced through the crack in the parapet masonry and saw the men of the river column running around and diving for cover, sheltering behind rocks and overhangs, the sentries fixing bayonets and holding their rifles at the ready, blindly scanning the rocks above them. He glanced at the subaltern, who had taken out his revolver and was gripping it hard, his knuckles white and his hand shaking, popping his head up to look and then quickly slipping down again, breathing fast and hard. Mayne opened up his cartridge box. ‘At the moment he’s targeting us because he knows he’s got us at a disadvantage in this light, and it’s always good to put the wind up a sentry post like this so that the men inside keep their heads down and fail to see what’s coming next.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the subaltern, alarm in his eyes. ‘The Mahdi army?’

Mayne grunted, not listening, eyeing the river again. ‘We don’t want him shifting his position behind a rock where we can’t see him but he can shoot at the river column below. Their progress is slow enough as it is, but being under fire will seize it up completely. The Kroomen and voyageurs are not members of Her Majesty’s armed forces and I doubt whether being shot at was in their contract with Wolseley.’

‘How long?’ asked the subaltern, his voice hoarse.

Mayne narrowed his eyes, looking towards the orb of the sun to the west, beyond the ridge. He remembered the days he had spent with Shaytan, observing everything about the desert, learning to gauge the remaining daylight by the position of the sun above the horizon, a crucial survival skill. He had needed to prepare himself for what might lie ahead in the days and weeks to come, but it was paying off here as well. ‘About half an hour,’ he murmured. ‘We need to catch him just as the sun drops and before he realises he’s visible. That might be a matter of moments.’

The subaltern had slid down the sloping edge of the parapet on his back, and was now gripping the revolver with both hands, trying to control his shaking. ‘I’m going to watch the desert on this side. He could be distracting us while others sneak up from the east.’

Mayne looked at the subaltern, a terrified young man under fire for the first time, his back to the enemy, trying to convince himself and his soldiers that he was not a coward. Every soldier had to go through his trial by fire, and it was especially hard in the sangar, where there was nothing they could do except wait. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Corporal Jones, watch the southern flank.’

Mayne trained his telescope on the opposite cliff once more, seeing only the glare of the sun, then lowered it and turned over, his back against the parapet. Two of the soldiers were still crouched at the rear of the sangar, vulnerable to bullets that would be falling in an arched trajectory at this range, and he waved them urgently forward, making space so that they could squeeze up alongside him. Another bullet whined overhead and struck a rock, moaning like a spent firework as it tumbled off into the distance. The rock was only yards from where his camel stood in open view, munching away oblivious to the danger. He thought for a moment. Exposing himself would be an additional risk, but he was sure the marksman had not yet pinpointed the range well enough to shoot accurately. He would need to hit a visible target before he had done that, and repeat his point of aim. Mayne turned to Jones. ‘I’m going out. I won’t be long.’

Jones stared at him, horrified. ‘Where?’

‘The camel. Your camel. A good camel like that’s worth its weight in gold.’

Jones seemed incapable of response. Mayne crawled to the ancient masonry wall at the far end of the sangar, quickly vaulted over and ran below the ridge line of the cliff until he was some thirty yards away and about the same distance from the camel. He dropped below a slight rise in the plateau that put him out of sight of the opposite side of the river, then threw himself flat, hugging the ground, and crawled across on his elbows. Just as he came within range, the beast emptied its bowels in a vile spray, filling the air with a brown mist; then it bent its neck round, staring down at him with that expression of disdain and indifference unique to the camel. A bullet struck with a deadening thud somewhere in its midriff, only a few feet above Mayne’s head. He rolled over just as another whined by, and saw where the first bullet had embedded itself and flattened into the camel’s harness, the bone-dry leather already beginning to smoulder with the heat of the lead. He whacked the harness with one hand to extinguish it and swivelled round to kick the camel hard behind its front right knee, bringing it down with a groan on its forelegs. He quickly did the same to the hind legs, then took a coil of braided leather rope from the harness to hobble it. The camel was still vulnerable to falling bullets and ricochets, but at least it was no longer a visible target. He crawled back the way he had come, feeling the brush of air as another round buzzed past. The marksman was getting better; these seemed more like targeted shots. He reached the wall and leapt over, then quickly crawled up beside Jones and peered out through the embrasure in the parapet. Jones stared at him, wincing and going red in the face, then let out a loud exhalation. Mayne stared, alarmed. ‘Are you all right? Are you hit?’

‘No, sir.’ The voice sounded strangulated. ‘It’s you, sir. It was bad enough when you first joined us; now it’s a lot worse. That smell, sir. That stench.’

Mayne sniffed, smelling nothing, and then glanced at the sleeve of his tunic, seeing the spatter of brown. ‘Ah. Occupational hazard for the cameleer, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to get used to that, Corporal Jones.’

He positioned his rifle against the parapet and took a round from the ammunition pouch, examining it carefully and wiping around the narrow upper end of the brass case that clenched the bullet to ensure that it was free from dirt. He pulled down the lever of the rifle to open the breech, put the cartridge on the loading block and pushed it home with his thumb, then closed the breech with the lever. As there was no safety on the Martini-Henry, it was now cocked and ready to fire. He lay on his front, nestled against the edge of the embrasure, and slid the rifle out until the muzzle was resting on the parapet, invisible to an observer four hundred or more yards away; then he shouldered it and aimed along the sights, traversing across the stretch of ridge where he would have positioned himself had he been the sharpshooter, where the profile was broken up by jagged spurs and ridges that would provide good concealment. He relaxed, breathing in deeply a few times, focusing his mind, remembering how good he had always felt when he had a target in his sights and knew he could kill, how it had made him feel when he had first done it and all the grief and anger at the death of his parents and brother and sister had finally seemed to lift from him, if only for a precious moment.

‘Sir, I’m going for ammunition.’ He heard the Irish soldier speak to the subaltern, and then a shuffling noise as the man crawled across to the stack of gear at the back of the sangar. He felt uneasy for a moment, knowing that the man would be vulnerable to a bullet on an arching trajectory, but he was in position now and did not want to lose his concentration, even to shout out a warning. The sun was dropping, and he knew he would only have one chance.

Suddenly there was a deafening metallic clang beside him. A bullet had smashed into the receiver of the rifle of the soldier next to him and ricocheted off in fragments, peppering the loose folds of his tunic but miraculously missing flesh. The soldier knelt up, stunned, head and shoulders above the parapet, and Jones screamed at him to get down, but it was too late. A bullet burst out from him in a spray of blood and shredded cloth, and he fell backwards with a neat black hole in the front of his neck, his eyes wide open and lifeless. Behind him Mayne heard the sickening thump of lead striking flesh, and then another a few seconds later, followed by a blood-curdling cry and a string of Anglo-Saxon curses. He kept focused on the ridge, his right forefinger feathering the trigger, panning the rifle in a tiny arc to cover the twenty or thirty metres of cliff where he thought the shooter would be. Another round whined overhead and crashed into the rock behind. The sharpshooter had got their range and was firing fast, dropping rounds into the sangar as quickly as he could work the lever of his rifle and reload. Mayne knew that this was his chance: there would be small movements in the rocks, moments of incaution as the shooter exposed himself, misplaced confidence that there could be nobody opposite to match his skill.

He sensed something different, a barely perceptible change in the light. He blinked, and it was still there. The sun had dropped. And then he saw it, a minuscule wobbly reflection among the rocks, the white of a headdress, a briefly elevated rifle barrel. He held himself steady, staring down the sights, both eyes open, focusing on the target. There was no wind, and he could aim dead-on. He adjusted infinitesimally to the left, an instinct, no more, and then slowly exhaled until there was nothing left, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle jumped and cracked, and through the smoke he saw the figure rise upwards as if standing, but then crumple sideways and hang head first over the ledge in front of him, arms dangling, blood gushing and splatting down the cliff and his rifle falling with a clatter to the rocks beneath.

He was conscious of a ragged cheer from the men by the river below. He barely felt the need to breathe, and when he did so it was as if he had taken a lungful of the strongest tobacco, leaving his heart pounding and the blood rushing to his head. It had been a long time since he had done that. He let go of the rifle and turned to look at the scene in the sangar. The man who had been beside him was lying on his back in a pool of blood, already coagulating and dotted with flies. The other two bullets had hit the same man, the Irish soldier who had gone back for more ammunition. He was lying on his back, surrounded by a group of men, with his trousers torn off, his legs drenched with blood and shaking convulsively. One round had ploughed into a calf, shearing off the muscle and leaving it curled up in a lurid yellow and red mass below his knee. The other had gone through both thighs and severed the arteries, leaving him bleeding to death in agony. The subaltern was propping his head up while the other men worked feverishly to staunch the blood, Jones holding his hand and feeding him dribbles of water from his bottle. The soldier was moaning and weeping, his face deathly grey and contorted, his lips saying something that only the subaltern could hear. Mayne could have told him that he had got the man who had shot him, but it seemed irrelevant. He swung open the loading lever on the rifle to eject the spent cartridge, and then closed it up and laid it beside Jones’ gear. He watched as the man’s face relaxed and his eyelids drooped, and his breathing became a rasping, snoring rattle, and then he was dead.

The subaltern remained hunched over, unable to move, and the two men beside his legs sat back, their arms and tunics dripping blood. Jones got up and came over to him, offering the water bottle. Mayne took it gratefully, drinking in great gulps, feeling suddenly very much alive. ‘That was a good shot, sir,’ Jones said, eyeing him. ‘Not even the Afghans could shoot like that.’

Mayne wiped his mouth and handed the bottle back. ‘It’s what we soldiers are out here for, isn’t it, Jones? To kill the enemy.’

‘Kill the enemy,’ Jones repeated thoughtfully. ‘That’s right, sir. To kill the enemy.’ He jerked his head towards the others in the sangar, all of them sitting in various stages of shock, two of them with their heads in their hands. ‘Don’t worry about them, sir. I well remember the first time it happened to me, when a mate died in my arms. It was at Maiwand in Afghanistan, back in ’80. Now there was a battle for you.’

‘I know. I was there. In the mountains, watching.’

‘Forward reconnaissance, sir?’

‘Something like that.’

Jones paused. ‘I’ll tell my story to the others, then.’

Mayne picked up his bags again and shouldered them. ‘I’d give it a while. Let them get over this little battle first.’

‘This time you’re leaving for good, sir?’

‘The boat’s waiting, and I’ve already lost time. There’s nothing more I can do here. I’ll pass the word to send up a burial detachment. And Jones?’

‘Sir?’

Mayne jerked his head towards the recumbent snorting form in the desert. ‘Don’t forget.’

Jones closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Sir.’

‘She’s hobbled by her back legs. You’ll need to take a bayonet to cut her loose.’

Jones eyed him suspiciously. ‘Rear legs means rear end, right? Up close?’

Mayne took out his headscarf and tossed it over. ‘Wear this. It’ll protect you.’

Jones caught it, sighed, and then held out his hand. ‘Godspeed, sir.’

Mayne shook it. ‘And to you.’ He shifted his load, and started up the edge of the parapet. It had been a half-hour delay that he could ill afford, but he felt better for it. His mind was sharp, focused, and everything he had been doing over the past weeks, the preparation in the desert, suddenly seemed worthwhile. He was suddenly itching to be downriver at Korti and ready for whatever Wolseley had planned for him.

9

Mayne picked his way over the parapet and began to descend the rough path the soldiers had made up the slope from the river, scrambling down the rocky abutments that became more sharply angled the closer they were to the cliff face on his right. The friable rock of the plateau gave way to the hard igneous substrate of the river gorge, providing a surer footing as he followed the small piles of rock the soldiers had made to mark the trail. At the base of the rocky outcrop was a sandy scree slope angled at forty-five degrees towards the river, curving round to the base of the cliff about a hundred yards from the water’s edge. As he began to slip and slide down the sand he saw two men making their way in his direction among the boulders between the river and the base of the scree, occasionally stopping to watch his progress. They were both officers, dressed in khaki and pith helmets, and as he neared them he recognised Lieutenant Tanner of the engineer detachment and Major Ormerod, the commander of the voyageurs. He came to a halt in a cloud of dust in front of them, unslinging his saddle bag and the khaki wrap and laying them on the sand. Ormerod, a burly Scotsman with a handlebar moustache, proffered his hand. ‘Christ, Edward, you look as if you’ve been through the wars.’

‘Just the desert.’ He shook hands with both of them, and then drew his fingers over the matted mass of his hair. He regretted now giving Corporal Jones his headscarf; he would get another at Korti. He jerked his head up towards the top of the slope. ‘They need a burial detail.’

‘It’s on its way,’ Tanner said. ‘We saw the soldier at the parapet get hit. A damned poor show.’

‘There are two dead,’ Mayne said, uncorking his water bottle and sipping from it, then squinting at the river, where Charrière was still up to his waist beside the boat. He gulped, wiped his mouth and pointed towards him. ‘He should watch out for the crocodile.’

‘It won’t attack him,’ Tanner said. ‘Not after he gave it a bloody nose with his whip.’

‘You saw it?’

‘I know it’s there. We all do.’

‘The moment it rears its ugly snout, it’s mine,’ Ormerod said gruffly. ‘I’ve got a double-barrelled express rifle mounted on a tripod overlooking that pool, and a servant watching day and night. I don’t want my voyageurs to return home and say one of their number was taken by a leviathan of the deep. That would be the last time we’d see them on an imperial adventure, and probably the last time we’d see them in church. The Mohawks would probably put their buckskins on and disappear back into the forests.’

Mayne capped his water bottle. ‘Corporal Jones is convinced that the leviathan of the Bible was not a Satanic monster but a Nile crocodile.’

‘That’s bad enough,’ Ormerod grumbled. ‘A twelve-foot killing machine.’

‘And you?’ Tanner asked.

Mayne looked at him. ‘Me?

‘What do you think?’

Mayne paused. ‘I think this expedition needs to disencumber itself of as much baggage as possible, and I think we are in danger of being weighed down by a leviathan of the mind.’

Ormerod grunted, then gestured towards the clifftop. ‘If that was you, it was a hell of a shot, Mayne. The Mohawks talk about your shooting from the Red River expedition, but that’s the first time I’ve seen it.’

‘Service rifle, that’s all,’ Mayne said. ‘It shows what our soldiers could do if we trained them properly in long-distance marksmanship.’ He reslung his water bottle and reached for his bags, but Ormerod put out a hand to stay him. ‘There’s something we want you to see first. At the base of the cliff.’

‘Jones told me. But I don’t have time.’

‘You’ve got half an hour. The boat leaked during the trial, and Charrière’s caulking it with some foul mixture the Dongolese concocted from camel dung and grass. There’s nothing you can do to help, so you might as well take a look.’

Mayne glanced at the green-brown smudges from his camel’s greeting on his tunic, mingling with the dark spots of blood from the soldier who had been shot beside him. He had probably had enough of camel dung for one day. ‘All right. But let’s make it quick.’

He followed them about twenty yards along the base of the cliff, stopping where a cluster of shovels and picks had been leant against the rock beside a portable gas lantern. Tanner, in the lead, pointed to an opening about two yards wide and a yard deep, evidently revealed by recent digging. It was the upper part of an ancient doorway, hewn out of the living rock. He picked up the lamp and sat on the sand, sliding himself feet first into the entrance. ‘It was completely buried when we arrived, but one of the officers’ dogs got up here and dug his way to the slab covering the entrance,’ he said, his voice edged with excitement. ‘I don’t think it had been opened up since the time of the pharaohs. Follow me.’

Mayne sat down on the sand beside Ormerod and they pushed themselves in after Tanner, ducking under the rock. It was suddenly cool, so much so that Mayne caught his breath, and the air was damp. They were on a slope of sand that had evidently poured into the chamber since it had been opened, cascading down to the floor and nearly filling it. Inside, the only light came from the narrow slit at the entrance, and as they slid further down they descended into gloom. ‘There’s about two feet of water at the bottom,’ Tanner said from ahead of them, his voice sounding distant and hollow. ‘It’s below the level of the Nile, and would have been in antiquity too. I think it was deliberately built that way. The water’s surprisingly clear, and I’m sure there’s a lower entranceway buried under the sand that must come out on the edge of that pool in the river, though I haven’t found it yet.’

Mayne caught a waft of gas as Tanner opened up the lamp, and heard the clicking of the flint as he tried to ignite it. The hiss turned to a roar and suddenly they were bathed in orange light, too dazzling to see anything. Tanner turned down the flame until it was white, and then Mayne could make out the walls, their own forms looming as shadows cast by the lamplight, giant and overarching. The chamber was about the size of the nave of an English country church. Where the walls had been cut from sedimentary rock it was eroded and covered in green slime, but the right side directly in front of Mayne was black basalt, polished smooth and free from growth.

He stared at what he suddenly saw, astonished. ‘Good God,’ he murmured. He took the lantern from Tanner and slid down the sand closer to the wall, sloshing in the cold water that filled the edges of the chamber. The wall was covered in relief carving, deeply etched into the stone. He put his hand on it, feeling the cool, clammy surface, drawing his fingers along the lines. He remembered from his geology instruction at the School of Military Engineering how difficult it had been to chisel igneous rock, and he marvelled at the ancient masons who had managed such a prodigious feat in this desolate place, so far away from their homeland in the lush flood plains of the Nile to the north.

He backed off a few steps to take in the whole image, sitting down on the sand. It was unquestionably carved by the ancient Egyptians, its shapes and hieroglyphic symbols familiar from others he had seen at Luxor and Amarna to the north. It showed a procession of skirt-clad Egyptian soldiers heading into battle; ahead of them was a naked enemy with spears and little round shields, running and lunging at the Egyptians. Tanner slid down beside him. ‘That’s what first amazed me when I came down here,’ he said. ‘I was at El Teb with Burnaby. Those look just like the Beya we were fighting.’

Mayne raised the lantern and peered closely. Tanner was right. The enemy had their hair in plumes and rat-tails, exactly as the Beya wore theirs, greased with animal fat. These were Corporal Jones’ fuzzy-wuzzies, fighting off intruders three thousand years ago just as they were now, and just as terrifying. The scene seemed suddenly immediate, as if past, present and future were caught together in one image. But there was more, and he moved a few steps to the right, slipping back and holding up the lamp to stop it from falling into the water. The next scene showed men with raised hatchets and swords, hacking at a jumble of bodies and at prisoners with arms raised in supplication. The victors were exacting their usual price; in the register below was a ghastly melange of severed heads and limbs and genitalia, the carvings half submerged by the edge of the water, as if they were floating in it.

But there was something wrong. This was not the usual picture of Egyptian conquest. It was not the Egyptians who were the victors; it was the enemy. The prisoners were receiving the same treatment they were shown inflicting on enemies in countless other wall reliefs in Egypt, depicting conquests real or glorified. And yet this had clearly been carved by Egyptian hands, by masons who had toiled here in this chthonic place under instruction from someone who wanted to celebrate defeat, not victory. What was going on? Mayne stared at the awful image in the lower register and remembered Jones’ account of General Hicks’ last stand two years before, of the Mahdi’s men ripping the genitalia off Egyptian prisoners before they fed them to the dogs. Seeing this image sent a chill through him, as if he were looking not at the ancient past but at history foretold, at the fate that lay ahead of them now.

And there was yet more. Tanner pointed further along, and Mayne raised the lantern. Filling the entire wall at the head of the army was the huge figure of their leader, striding forward. It had none of the usual appurtenances of kingship, but Mayne instantly recognised the bulbous belly and distended chin he had seen on wall carvings at Amarna. He remembered the scarab he had been given by Shaytan, hanging round his neck now, and where he had seen the inscription on the base before: it was the hieroglyphic cartouche of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh shown here wearing nothing but a robe and sandals. Akhenaten had led his army south and yet seemed divorced from his soldiers, turning away from the carnage of defeat and striking off alone, his eyes determinedly ahead. And in front of him, radiating from the corner of the chamber, was his most characteristic symbol of all, the Aten sun-disc, its rays extending outwards towards the pharaoh and seeming to embrace and draw him forward, each ray ending in a hand with palm outstretched.

Mayne stared at the image. He had seen the fragmentary remains of a wall carving like this somewhere else, two weeks earlier, near the wells of Jakdul, not in an underground chamber but scattered over a windswept ruin scarcely visible above the surface of the desert, its walls reduced to foundation courses and the spread of rubble buried in dust and sand. Shaytan had told him that eight years earlier he had guided Gordon Pasha himself to the place, when Gordon was touring the Sudan during his first period as governor general and had a burning passion to discover the antiquities of the place. He had been accompanied by a flamboyant American, Charles Garner Wright, an army officer and adventurer who still wore the uniform of the Confederate South, one of several Civil War veterans who had sought employment with the Khedive’s army; and by a German archaeologist who Mayne realised from Shaytan’s description was Dr Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, a man greatly admired by Gordon. The three men had spent days at the site, digging into the sand yet revealing little more than the fragments that were almost completely buried when Shaytan showed it to Mayne.

Tanner nudged him. ‘You haven’t seen the best. Look at the wall opposite the entrance.’

Mayne turned and raised the lantern, and then gasped. Leering out of the gloom high above was the head of a giant standing sculpture, or more accurately the snout. He could see that it was a figure striding forward, carrying a staff in one hand and the ankh symbol in the other, a statue in the round carved out of the living basalt. But it was the head that was extraordinary. It was not a man’s head, but the head of a crocodile, with eyes carved deeply on either side and jagged teeth encircling the mouth, the fourth incisor from the front on either side lodged in the upper jaw.

‘It’s Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god,’ Tanner said, his voice hushed. ‘The built-over recess behind it is cracked at the top, so you can see inside. It’s filled with mummies. Crocodile mummies, that is. I think this was a temple that adjoined the pool in the river, with a channel running into it. During the annual flood of the Nile it would have provided refuge for crocodiles from the rushing water of the cataract. I think crocodiles actually lived here.’

Mayne stared at the statue. He remembered the evening he had spent with Tanner and Jones picking through the ancient sources for mention of crocodiles, and what Plutarch had said about them: the Egyptians worship God symbolically in the crocodile, that being the only animal without a tongue, like the Divine Logos which stands not in need of speech. They had checked it themselves on a rotting carcass they had found downstream, and it was true: the Nile crocodile had no tongue, and a top jaw that could detach itself to accommodate prey far larger than itself, like a snake. The divine word that shall not be spoken. It struck him that the early Christians who reviled the Egyptians for making idols, and all those since who thought they worshipped animal deities, were wrong, and should return to the ancient authors to seek the truth. Sobek was not a god, but the divine presence manifesting itself through the crocodile. Just as the Mahdi and his followers saw Allah in the works of man, so the ancient Egyptians perceived the divine presence in all the facets of nature. In his mind’s eye, Mayne saw Akhenaten, the pharaoh who had experienced the revelation more strongly than any other, marching ever southward to free himself from the shackles of the priests and the old religion that had empowered those images, drawing from them and taking with him the divine presence. Perhaps he had built this temple on the very edge of the Egyptian world beside the crocodile pool as a last gesture to the old ways before leaving it all behind and plunging into the desert. It was out there that the archaeologists should be searching for him, not at Amarna or in the monuments to the north, yet Mayne knew it was a place where little evidence of his passing would ever be found: no ruins or statues or temples, except the distilled desolation of the desert and the brilliance of the sun.

Tanner turned to him, his face flushed in the lamplight and his voice edged with excitement. ‘I have a theory, Mayne. I think they were doing something here that they couldn’t do in Egypt, something that the priests would have banned, an ancient ritual from their prehistoric past. I think that’s why Akhenaten came here and had this place carved out far beyond the control of the priests, back in the land of his ancestors. I think this was a sacrificial chamber. And look at those images of dismembered bodies. I mean human sacrifice.’

Mayne stared at the wall, his mind reeling. Human sacrifice. Did that scene of violence show a real battle, or was it allegorical? He looked at the procession of soldiers again, and then at the image of the pharaoh. He realised that there was something missing: images of Egyptian military expeditions always showed priests. There were none here, and the image of Akhenaten lacked the usual priestly equipment of a pharaoh, the staff and the ankh symbol and the crown. Had he cast them off, and come to the desert already divested of the old religion? Or had he done so here, beyond the borders of Egypt, having reached a place sacred to his early ancestors where only the river and the desert held sway? Had the sacrificial victims been the priests?

Mayne remembered Corporal Jones and the leviathan, his description from the Book of Job: His neesings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. He strained to see the head of the crocodile, raising the lamp as high as he could. The eyes were made of crystal, a deep red, perhaps agate, but the nostrils were crystal as well, brilliant pellucid stones cut in facets that reflected a dazzling light even from the sputtering flame of the gas lamp. He looked back at the slit of light through the entrance, realising that the chamber was aligned east–west. Now, with the sun on the horizon, the light was shining high above the statue, close to the roof. But an hour ago, about the time he had been waiting for the sun to drop enough to see the sharpshooter, it would have shone directly into the eyes and nostrils of the crocodile, reflecting a brilliant, shimmering light, as if the crocodile itself were emitting a beam towards the sun. He thought of what this place might have been like three thousand years ago: down below, beneath the sand that now obscured it, a passageway through the rock to the river for the crocodiles, and up above, far above the reach of anyone sealed in the chamber, a slit just wide enough to let that flash of light through, a beam of red and green that those watching outside might have seen as the beginning of a new dawn, as the last ray of a godhead who had consumed the victims needed to release his energy in one flash towards the divine light of the Aten, allowing the chamber and the last exhalations of the old religion to be sealed up for ever.

‘Good Lord,’ murmured Ormerod after they had stood in silence for several minutes, hearing only the dripping of condensation from the walls, tiny splashes magnified in the chamber as it fell into the water. ‘Not a word of this to the men. They’re jittery enough about crocodiles as it is.’

Mayne heard a hollering outside; it was Charrière, calling his name from the river. Tanner and Ormerod began to make their way up the slope towards the entrance, but he lingered, staring at something he had seen in the wavering light of the lantern. It was a small slab of stone about eight inches square, partly detached from the wall; it had once been fixed into a depression below the image of Akhenaten, but the mortar around its edges had evidently crumbled in the dampness of the chamber. The decoration on its surface seemed continuous with the surrounding image, a series of radiating lines from the sun symbol, and in the top left corner an acute angle overlaying the lines that corresponded to the lower hem of Akhenaten’s robe. Yet with the slab detached from the wall, it also seemed as if it might form part of something else, one quarter of a larger square with lines that radiated out from a shape in the centre, formed from the acute angle. He picked it up, feeling the weight of the basalt. He remembered Shaytan’s account of Gordon and Schliemann and the American excavating the temple in the desert. They had been looking for a carving, something that might be like this. On a whim he decided to take it. Someone at headquarters might know its meaning, perhaps Kitchener, another engineer officer who had been close to Gordon and shared his archaeological interests.

As he pocketed the slab, he accidentally caught and broke the thong around his neck that held the scarab that Shaytan had given him. He cursed under his breath, scrabbling around where it had fallen into the water at the edge of the sand, knowing that he was probably only digging it in deeper. He heard the hollering again, and looked up to the sunlight streaming in from the entrance, seeing the silhouetted forms of the two men waiting for him. He would look for it when he returned. If he returned. He held the weight of the slab in his pocket, and struggled upright in the sand. He seemed to be taking one artefact at the expense of another, the one in his pocket of uncertain meaning and the other a sacred relic from a man he rated highly, a gift to protect him in the desert. It was as if something within was pulling him away from the bonds that tied men to each other; ever since his parents’ death he had been destined to live as an outsider. He had begun to understand better what had made him sit at night with his back to the fire while Shaytan was asleep and stare into the darkness of the desert, wishing he could walk out and let it enfold him, to disappear forever from the affairs of men.

He felt himself sink further into the sand. Below him the ground was saturated, and he realised that there was no certainty that the floor of the chamber continued at the same level, that it might be a deeper pit full of quicksand that could suck him down. He hauled one leg out, then the other, and began to make his way laboriously up the slope. He remembered what the Mohawks had said when he overheard them talking apprehensively about the river ahead, about the feeling of heaviness; perhaps that was what they had meant. He laboured on, making little progress, his heart pounding. It occurred to him that Tanner and Ormerod could dislodge the sand and it could slide down like an avalanche and engulf him, entombing him forever with the crocodile god. He remembered his mission to Wolseley; disappearing in a place like this was decidedly not the fate that he had envisaged.

He took one last look back, then released himself from the grip of the sand and scrambled up to the chamber entrance until he stood outside beside the other two, blinking in the waning sunlight. He walked over to his gear, opened up his saddlebag and pulled out the robe he had been wearing in the desert, then unsheathed the knife he kept on his belt and cut into one edge of the cloth. After replacing the knife, he tore off a strip, then took the stone slab out of his pocket and wrapped it in the material, tying it with a length of cord from his pocket and handing it to Tanner. ‘See that this gets to Corporal Jones, would you? He looks after my belongings. We’ll have a good look at it when I get back. And I’d like him reassigned to the Railway Company at Korti. You’ll be the senior remaining Royal Engineer with the river column after I’ve left, so he’s your responsibility. Can you see to that?’

Tanner took the package and tucked it into his tunic. ‘Right away. I’m heading up to the sangar now.’ He paused, gesturing back at the entrance to the chamber. ‘What do you think of it?’

Mayne nodded towards the river. ‘I think with what might be lurking in the pool, that’s one god you can’t afford to ignore.’

Tanner grinned, shaking his head. ‘If I survive this little jaunt, I might just try to wangle a number like the one Kitchener had in Palestine and come back here as an archaeological surveyor. If there’s more like this to be found, we might be on to the greatest treasure trove from antiquity.’

Mayne shouldered his bags and shook hands with Tanner. ‘Soldier first, engineer second. You remember what they drummed into us at Chatham? And archaeologist third. But I wish you the best of luck. The cataract ahead will be hard work, but by the time I’m back, the column should be well past it. And that sharpshooter won’t be the last. Where there are sharpshooters, there’s an army somewhere beyond.’

Tanner nodded, his smile gone. He was ten years older than the subaltern in the sangar, due for promotion to captain that year, and had been in Afghanistan. ‘We’ve posted more picquets along the riverbank ahead of us, and a company of infantry has been put on alert to act as skirmishers should the need arise. Before he left for Korti, General Earle instructed us to proceed with extra caution. Direct orders from Lord Wolseley.’

Mayne shook Ormerod’s hand, and watched the two men trudge up the scree slope. That was the problem with this expedition: too much caution. High overhead, half a dozen vultures circled, smelling the blood of fresh corpses. On the opposite cliff, two soldiers had reached the body of the marksman and tipped it off into the river. It came floating by now, down the torrent between the two rocks and into the pool, where soldiers crowded along the edge, peering at it as it rolled over and over in the current, unmolested by crocodiles. The sharpshooter had undoubtedly been disguised as a desert Arab, just as Mayne had been on his travels with Shaytan, but he had revealed his true colours before opening fire: the body was wearing the patched jibba of the Ansar, the white robe with the embroidered patches that made it look like the dress of a poor Sufi; and above the gaping hole where his face had been, Mayne could see that the man had been shaven headed. He had seen the Ansar before, fleetingly with Shaytan far to the south when they had watched a Mahdist force surge by in the distance, a storm of dust with banners above and the occasional flash of white as men disengaged from the main force to get out of the dust, riding their camels along the near flank. But seeing a jibba this far north was unnerving, as if the man had broken through the invisible membrane that still divided their world from the darkness ahead.

He looked at the two rocks again, where Charrière had been standing when he had first seen him from the sangar. Down here, close to the river, they looked more impressive, like sentinels guarding a gateway to an unknown world. Through them he could see where the pellucid light over the pool, with everything sharply delineated, gave way to a haze and then an impenetrable miasma, the rocks of the cataract seeming to wobble and shimmer and then disappear from view entirely, as if he were looking into a mirage. He knew that his destiny lay somewhere out there, but for now he was glad to be turning north for a day or two, for a respite. He was desperately tired, and struggling up that slope in the chamber had given him a raging thirst.

He heard a shout, then turned and saw Charrière standing in the boat in the pool, waving at him.

It was time to go.