The Triumph Of The Sun

The Triumph of the Sun By Wilbur Smith

Synopsis:

In the Sudan decades of brutal misgovernment by the ruling Egyptian Khedive in Cairo precipitate a fierce and bloody rebellion and Holy War headed by a charismatic new religious leader, the Mahdi or Expected One’. The British are forced to intervene to protect their national interests and to attempt to rescue the hundreds of British subjects stranded in the country.

Along with hundreds of others, British trader and businessman Ryder Courtney is trapped in the capital city of Khartoum. It is here that he meets Captain Penrod Ballantyne of the 10th Hussars, as well as the British Consul, David Benbrook, and his three beautiful daughters. Against the vivid and bloody backdrop of the siege of Khartoum, in which British General Charles George Gordon is killed and the British retreat, these three powerful men fight to survive.

Rich with vibrant historical detail and infused with his inimitable powers of storytelling, The Triumph of the Sun is Wilbur Smith at his masterful best.

Also by Wilbur Smith

THE COURTNEYS

When the Lion Feeds

The Sound of Thunder

A Sparrow Falls

Birds of Prey

Monsoon Blue Horizon

THE COURTNEYS OF AFRICA

The Burning Shore Power of the Sword

Rage

A Time to Die Golden Fox

THE BALLANTYNE NOVELS

A Falcon Flies

Men of Men

The Angels Weep

The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

Also

The Dark of the Sun Shout at the Devil

Gold Mine The Diamond Hunters

The Sunbird

Eagle in the Sky

The Eye of the Tiger

Cry Wolf Hungry as the Sea

Wild Justice Elephant Song

River God

The Seventh Scroll

Warlock

WILBUR SMITH

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN

A Novel of African Adventure

This book is for

My helpmate, playmate, soulmate, wife and best friend, Mokhiniso Rakhimova Smith

Rebecca leant her elbows on the sill of the wide, unglazed window, and the heat of the desert blew into her face like the exhalation of a blast furnace. Even the river below her seemed to steam like a cauldron. Here it was almost a mile wide, for this was the season of High Nile. The flow was so strong that it created whirlpools and glossy eddies across the surface. The White Nile was green and fetid with the taint of the swamps through which it had so recently flowed, swamps that extended over an area the size of Belgium. The Arabs called this vast slough the Bahr el Ghazal, and the British named it the Sud.

In the cool months of the previous year Rebecca had voyaged upstream with her father to where the flow of the river emerged from the swamps. Beyond that point the channels and lagoons of the Sud were tract less and uncharted, carpeted densely with floating weed that was perpetually shifting, obscuring them from the eyes of all but the most skilled and experienced navigator. This watery, fever-ridden world was the haunt of crocodile and hippopotamus; of myriad strange birds, some beautiful and others grotesque; and of sitatunga, the weird amphibious antelope with corkscrew horns, shaggy coats and elongated hoofs, adapted for life in the water.

Rebecca turned her head and a thick blonde tress of hair fell across one eye. She brushed it aside and looked downstream to where the two great rivers met. It was a sight that always intrigued her, though she had looked upon it every day for two long years. A huge raft of water weed was sailing down the centre of the channel. It had broken free of the swamps and would be carried on by the current until it dispersed far to the north in the turbulence of the cataracts, those rapids that, from time to time, broke the smooth flow of the Nile. She followed its ponderous progress until it reached the confluence of the two Niles.

The other Nile came down from the east. It was fresh and sweet as the mountain stream that was its source. At this season of High Nile its waters were tinted a pale blue grey by the silt it had scoured from the mountainous ranges of Abyssinia. It was named for this colour. The Blue Nile was slightly narrower than its twin, but was still a massive serpent of water. The rivers came together at the apex of the triangle of land on which the City of the Elephant’s Trunk stood. That was the meaning of its name, Khartoum. The two Niles did not mingle at once. As far downstream as Rebecca could see they ran side by side in the same bed, each maintaining its own distinct colour and character until they dashed together on to the rocks at the entrance to the Shabluka Gorge twenty miles on and were churned into a tumultuous union.

“You are not listening to me, my darling,” said her father sharply.

Rebecca smiled as she turned to face him. “Forgive me, Father, I was distracted.”

“I know. I know. These are trying times,” he agreed. “But you must face up to them. You are no longer a child, Becky.”

“Indeed I am not,” she agreed vehemently. She had not intended to whine she never whined. “I was seventeen last week. Mother married you when she was the same age.”

“And now you stand in her place as mistress of my household.” His expression was forlorn as he remembered his beloved wife and the terrible nature of her death.

“Father dear, you have just jumped off the cliff of your own argument.” She laughed. “If I am what you say I am, then how can you prevail on me to abandon you?”

David Benbrook looked confused, then thrust aside his sorrow and laughed with her. She was so quick and pretty that he could seldom resist her. “You are so like your mother.” This statement was usually his white flag of defeat, but now he struggled on with his arguments. Rebecca turned back to the window, not ignoring him but listening with only half her attention. Now that her father had reminded her of the terrible peril in which they stood she felt the cold claws of dread in the pit of her stomach as she looked across the river.

The sprawling buildings of the native city of Omdurman pressed up to the far riverbank, earth-coloured like the desert around them, tiny as dolls’ houses at this distance, and wavering in the mirage. Yet menace emanated from them as fiercely as the heat from the sun. Night and day, the drums never stopped, a constant reminder of the mortal threat that hung over them. She could hear them booming across the waters, like the heartbeat of the monster. She could imagine him sitting at the centre of his web, gazing hungrily across the river at them, a fanatic with a quenchless thirst for human blood. Soon he and his minions would come for them. She shuddered, and concentrated again on her father’s voice.

“Of course, I grant that you have your mother’s raw courage and obstinacy, but think of the twins, Becky. Think of the babies. They are your babies now.”

“I am aware of my duty to them every waking moment of my day,”

she flared, then as swiftly veiled her anger and smiled again the smile that always softened his heart. “But I think of you also.” She crossed to stand beside his chair, and placed her hand on his shoulder. “If you come with us, Father, the girls and I will go.”

“I cannot, Becky. My duty is here. I am Her Majesty’s consul general. I have a sacred trust. My place is here in Khartoum.”

“Then so is mine,” she said simply, and stroked his head. His hair was still thick and springing under her fingers, but shot through with more silver than sable. He was a handsome man, and she often brushed his hair and trimmed and curled his moustache for him, proudly as her mother had once done.

He sighed and gathered himself to protest further, but at that moment a shrill chorus of childish shrieks rang through the open window. They stiffened. They knew those voices, and they struck at both their hearts. Rebecca started across the room, and David sprang up from his desk. Then they relaxed as the cries came again and they recognized the tone as excitement, not terror.

“They are in the watch tower,” said Rebecca.

“They are not allowed up there,” exclaimed David.

“There are many places where they are not allowed,” Rebecca agreed, ‘and those are where you can usually find them.” She led the way to the door and out into the stone-flagged passage. At the far end a circular staircase wound up the interior of the turret. Rebecca lifted her petticoats and ran up the steps, nimble and sure-footed, her father following more sedately. She came out into the blazing sunlight on the upper balcony of the turret.

The twins were dancing perilously close to the low parapet. Rebecca seized one in each hand and drew them back. She looked down from the height of the consular palace. The minarets and rooftops of Khartoum were spread below. Both branches of the Nile were in full view for miles in each direction.

Saffron tried to pull her arm out of Rebecca’s grip. “The Ibisl’ she yelled. “Look! The this is coming.” She was the taller, darker twin. Wild and headstrong as a boy.

“The Intrepid this,” Amber piped up. She was dainty and fair, with a melodious timbre to her voice even when she was excited. “It’s Ryder in the Intrepid this.”

“Mr. Ryder Courtney, to you,” Rebecca corrected her. “You must never call grown-ups by their Christian names. I don’t want to have to tell you that again.” But neither child took the reprimand to heart. All three stared eagerly up the White Nile at the pretty white steamboat coming down on the current.

“It looks like it’s made of icing sugar,” said Amber, the beauty of the family, with angelic features, a pert little nose and huge blue eyes.

“You say that every time she comes,” Saffron remarked, without rancour. She was Amber’s foil: eyes the colour of smoked honey, tiny freckles highlighting her high cheekbones and a wide, laughing mouth. Saffron looked up at Rebecca with a wicked glint in those honey eyes. “Ryder is your beau, isn’t he?” “Beau’ was the latest addition to her vocabulary, and as she applied it solely to Ryder Courtney, Rebecca found it pretentious and oddly infuriating.

“He is not!” Rebecca responded loftily, to hide her annoyance. “And don’t be saucy, Miss Smarty Breeches.”

“He’s bringing tons of food!” Saffron pointed at the string of four capacious flat-bottomed barges that the this was towing.

Rebecca released the twins’ arms and shaded her eyes with both hands against the glare. She saw that Saffron was right. At least two of the barges were piled high with sacks of dhurra, the staple grain of the Sudan. The other two were filled with an assorted cargo, for Ryder was one of the most prosperous traders on the two rivers. His trading stations were strung out at intervals of a hundred miles or so along the banks of both Niles, from the confluence of the Atbara river in the north to Gondokoro and far Equatoria in the south, then eastwards from Khartoum along the Blue Nile into the highlands of Abyssinia.

Just then David stepped out on to the balcony. “Thank the good Lord he has come,” he said softly. “This is the last chance for you to escape. Courtney will be able to take you and hundreds of our refugees downriver, out of the Mahdi’s evil clutches.”

As he spoke they heard a single cannon shot from across the White Nile. They all turned quickly and saw gunsmoke spurting from one of the Dervish Krupps guns on the far bank. A moment later a geyser of spray rose from the surface of the river a hundred yards ahead of the approaching steamer. The foam was tinged yellow with the lyddite of the bursting shell.

Rebecca clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry of alarm, and David remarked drily, “Let’s pray their aim is up to the usual standard.”

One after another the other guns of the Dervish batteries burst into a long, rolling volley, and the waters around the little boat leapt and boiled with bursting shells. Shrapnel whipped the river surface like tropical rain.

Then all the great drums of the Mahdi’s army thundered out in full-throated challenge and the ombeya trumpets blared. From among the mud buildings, horsemen and camel riders swarmed out and galloped along the bank, keeping pace with the this.

Rebecca ran to her father’s long brass telescope, which always stood on its tripod at the far end of the parapet, pointing across the river at the enemy citadel. She stood on tiptoe to reach the eyepiece and quickly focused the lens. She swept it over the swarming Dervish cavalry, who were half obscured in the red clouds of dust thrown up by their racing mounts. They appeared so close that she could see the expressions on their fierce dark faces, could almost read the oaths and threats they mouthed, and hear their terrible war cry: “Allah Akbar! There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

These riders were the Ansar, the Helpers, the Mahdi’s elite bodyguard. They all wore the jibba, the patched robes which symbolized the rags that had been the only garb available to them at the beginning of this jihad against the godless, the unbelievers, the infidels. Armed only with spears and rocks the Ansar had, in the past six months, destroyed three armies of the infidels and slaughtered their soldiers to the man. Now they held Khartoum in siege and gloried in their patched robes, the badge of their indomitable courage and their faith in Allah and His Mahdi, the Expected One. As they rode they brandished their double-handed swords and fired the Martini-Henry carbines they had captured from their defeated enemies.

During the months of the siege Rebecca had seen this warlike display many times, so she swung the lens off them and turned it out across the river, traversing the forest of shell splashes and leaping foam until the open bridge of the steamboat sprang into sharp focus. The familiar figure of Ryder Courtney leant on the rail of his bridge, regarding the antics of the men who were trying to kill him with faint amusement. As she watched him, he straightened and removed the long black cheroot from between his lips. He said something to his helmsman, who obediently spun the wheel and the long wake of the this began to curl in towards the Khartoum bank of the river.

Despite Saffron’s teasing Rebecca felt no love pang at the sight of him. Then she smiled inwardly: I doubt I would recognize it anyway. She considered herself immune to such mundane emotions. Nevertheless she experienced a twinge of admiration for Ryder’s composure in the midst of such danger, followed almost immediately by the warming glow of friendship. “Well, there is no harm in admitting that we are friends,” she reassured herself, and felt quick concern for his safety. “Please, God, keep Ryder safe in the eye of the storm,” she whispered, and God seemed to be listening.

As she watched, a steel shard of shrapnel punched a jagged hole in the funnel just above Ryder’s head, and black boiler smoke spurted out of it. He did not glance round but returned the cheroot to his lips and exhaled a long stream of grey tobacco smoke that was whipped away on the wind. He wore a rather grubby white shirt, open at the throat, sleeves rolled high. With one thumb he tipped his wide-brimmed hat of plaited palm fronds to the back of his head. At a cursory glance, he gave the impression of being stockily built, but this was an illusion fostered by the breadth and set of his shoulders and the girth of his upper arms, muscled by heavy work. His narrow waist and the manner in which he towered over the Arab helmsman at his side gave it the lie.

David had taken the hands of his younger daughters to restrain them, and leant over the parapet to engage in a shouted conversation with someone in the courtyard of the consular palace below.

“My dear General, do you think you might prevail on your gunners to return fire and take their attention off Mr. Courtney’s boat?” His tone was deferential.

Rebecca glanced down and saw that her father was speaking to the commanding officer of the Egyptian garrison defending the city. General “Chinese’ Gordon was a hero of the Empire, the victor of wars in every part of the world. In China his legendary “Ever Victorious Army’ had earned him the sobriquet. He had come out of his headquarters in the south wing of the palace with his red flowerpot fez on his head.

“The order has already been sent to the gunners, sir.” Gordon’s reply was crisp and assertive, edged with annoyance. He did not need to be reminded of his duty.

His voice carried clearly to where Rebecca stood. It was said that he could make himself heard without effort across a raging battlefield.

A few minutes later the Egyptian artillery, in their emplacements along the city waterfront, opened up a desultory fire. Their pieces were of small calibre and obsolete pattern, six-pounder Krupps mountain guns; their ammunition was ancient and in short supply, much given to misfiring. However, to one accustomed to the ineptitudes of the Egyptian garrison, their accuracy was surprising. A few clouds of black shrapnel smoke appeared in the clear sky directly over the Dervish batteries, for the gunners on both sides had been ranging each other’s positions during all the months since the beginning of the siege. The Dervish fire slackened noticeably. Still unscathed, the white steamer reached the confluence of the two rivers and the line of barges followed her as she turned sharply to starboard into the mouth of the Blue Nile and was almost immediately shielded by the buildings of the city from the guns on the west bank. Deprived of their prey the Dervish batteries fell silent.

“Please may we go down to the wharf to welcome him?” Saffron was dragging her father to the head of the staircase. “Come on, Becky, let’s go and meet your beau.”

As the family hurried through the neglected, sun-bleached gardens of the palace, they saw that General Gordon was also heading for the harbour, with a group of his Egyptian officers scampering behind him. Just beyond the gates a dead horse half blocked the alley. It had been lying there for ten days, killed by a stray Dervish shell. Its belly was swollen and its gaping wounds heaved with masses of white maggots. Flies hovered and buzzed over it in a dense blue cloud. Mingled with all the other smells of the besieged city the stench of rotting horseflesh was sulphurous. Each breath Rebecca drew seemed to catch in her throat and her stomach heaved. She fought back the nausea so that she did not disgrace herself and the dignity of her father’s office.

The twins vied with each other in a pantomime of disgust. “Poof!” and “Stinky-woo!” they cried, then doubled over to make realistic vomiting sounds, howling with delight at each other’s histrionics.

“Be off with you, you little savages!” David scowled at them and brandished his silver-mounted cane. They shrieked in mock alarm, then raced away in the direction of the harbour, leaping over piles of debris from shelled and burnt-out houses. Rebecca and David followed at their best pace, but before they had passed the customs house they encountered the city crowds moving in the same direction.

It was a solid river of humanity, of beggars and cripples, slaves and soldiers, rich women attended by their slaves and scantily clad Galla whores, mothers with infants strapped to their backs, dragging wailing brats by each hand, government officials and fat slave traders with diamond and gold rings on their fingers. All had one purpose: to discover what cargo the steamer carried, and whether she offered a faint promise of escape from the little hell that was Khartoum.

The twins were rapidly engulfed in the throng so David lifted Saffron on to his shoulders while Rebecca grasped Amber’s hand and they pushed their way forward. The crowds recognized the tall, imposing figure of the British consul and gave way to him. They reached the waterfront only a few minutes after General Gordon, who called to them to join him.

The Intrepid this was cutting in across the stream and when she reached the quieter protected water half a cable’s length offshore she shed her tow lines and the four barges anchored in line astern, their bows facing into the strong current of the Blue Nile. Ryder Courtney placed armed guards on each barge to protect the cargoes against looting. Then he took the helm of the steamer and manoeuvred her towards the wharf.

As soon as he was within earshot the twins screeched a welcome: “Ryder! It’s us! Did you bring a present?” He heard them above the hubbub of the crowd, and had soon spotted Saffron perched on her father’s shoulders. He removed the cheroot from his mouth, flicked it overboard into the river, then reached for the cord of the boat’s whistle, sent a singing blast of steam high into the air and blew Saffron a kiss.

She dissolved into giggles and wriggled like a puppy. “Isn’t he the most dashing beau in the world?” She glanced at her elder sister.

Rebecca ignored her, but Ryder’s eyes turned to her next and he lifted the hat off his dense dark curls, sleeked with his sweat. His face and arms were tanned to the colour of polished teak by the desert sun, except for the band of creamy skin just below his hairline where his hat had protected it. Rebecca smiled back and bobbed a curtsy. Saffron was right: he really was rather handsome, especially when he smiled, she thought, but there were crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He’s so old, she thought. He must be every day of thirty.

“I think he’s sweet on you.” Amber gave her serious opinion.

“Don’t you dare start that infernal nonsense, Mademoiselle,” Rebecca warned her.

“Infernal nonsense, Mademoiselle,” Amber repeated softly and rehearsed the words to use against Saffron at the first opportunity.

Out on the river Ryder Courtney was giving his full attention to the steamer as he brought her into her mooring. He swung her nose into the current and held her there with a deft touch on the throttle, then eased the wheel over and let her drift sideways across the stream until her steel side kissed the matting fenders that hung down the side of the wharf. His crew tossed the mooring lines to the men on the jetty, who seized the ends and made her fast. Ryder rang the telegraph to the boiler room, and Jock McCrump stuck his head through the engine-room hatch. His face was streaked with black grease. “Aye, skipper?”

“Keep a head of steam in the boiler, Jock. Never know when we might need to run for it.”

“Aye, skipper. I want none of them stinking savages as shipmates.” Jock wiped the grease from his huge calloused hands on a wad of cotton waste.

“You have the con,” Ryder told him, and vaulted over the ship’s rail to the jetty. He strode towards where General Gordon waited for him with his staff, but he had not gone a dozen paces before the crowd closed round him and he was trapped like a fish in a net.

A struggling knot of Egyptians and other Arabs surrounded him, grabbing at his clothing. “Effendi, please, Effendi, I have ten children and four wives. Give us safe passage on your fine ship,” they pleaded, in Arabic and broken English. They thrust wads of banknotes into his face. “A hundred Egyptian pounds. It is all I have. Take it, Effendi, and my prayers for your long life will go up to Allah.”

“Gold sovereigns of your queen!” another bid, and clinked the canvas bag he held like a tambourine.

Women pulled off their jewellery heavy gold bracelets, rings and necklaces with sparkling stones. “Me and my baby. Take us with you, great lord.” They thrust their infants at him, tiny squealing wretches, hollow-cheeked with starvation, some covered with the lesions and open sores of scurvy, their loincloths stained tobacco-yellow with the liquid faeces of cholera. They shoved and wrestled with each other to reach him. One woman was knocked to her knees and dropped her infant under the feet of the surging crowd. Its howls became weaker as they trampled it. Finally a nail-shod sandal crushed the the eggshell skull and the child was abruptly silent and lay still, an abandoned doll, in the dust.

Ryder Courtney gave a bellow of rage and laid about him with clenched fists. He knocked down a fat Turkish merchant with a single blow to the jaw, then dropped his shoulder and charged into the ruck of struggling humanity. They scattered to let him pass, but some doubled back towards the Intrepid this, and tried to scramble across to her deck.

Jock McCrump was at the rail to meet them with a monkey wrench in his fist and five of his crew at his back, armed with boat-hooks and fire axes. Jock cracked the skull of the first man who tried to board and he fell into the narrow strip of water between the ship and the stone wharf, then disappeared beneath the surface. He did not rise again.

Ryder realized the danger and tried to get back to his ship, but even he could not cleave his way through the close pack of bodies.

“Jock, take her off and anchor with the barges!” he shouted.

Jock heard him above the uproar and waved the wrench in acknowledgement. He jumped to the bridge and gave a terse order to his crew. They did not waste time un mooring but severed the lines to the shore with a few accurate strokes of the axes. The Intrepid this swung her bows into the current, but before she had steerage way more of the refugees attempted to jump across the gap. Four fell short and were whipped away downstream by the racing current. One grabbed hold of the ship’s rail and dangled down her side, trying to lift himself aboard, imploring the crew above him for mercy.

Bacheet, the Arab boatswain, stepped to the rail above him and, with a single swing of his axe, neatly lopped off the four fingers of the man’s right hand. They fell to the steel deck like brown pork sausages. His victim shrieked and dropped into the river. Bacheet kicked the fingers over the side, wiped his blade on the skirt of his robe, then went to break out the bow anchor from its locker forward. Jock turned the steamboat out across the current, and ran out to anchor at the head of the line of barges.

A wail of despair went up from the crowd, but Ryder glowered at them, fists clenched. They had learnt exactly what that gesture presaged, and backed away from him. In the meantime General Gordon had ordered a squad of his soldiers to break up the riot. They advanced in a line with their bayonets fixed and used their rifle butts to club down any who stood in their way. The crowd broke before them, and disappeared into the narrow alleys of the city. They left the dead baby, with its bleeding mother wailing over it, and half a dozen moaning rioters sitting, stunned, in puddles of their own blood. The Turk who Ryder had floored lay quiescent on his back, snoring loudly.

Ryder looked about for David and his daughters, but the consul had shown the good sense to get his family away to the safety of the palace at the first sign of rioting. He felt a lift of relief. Then he saw General Gordon coming towards him, stepping through the litter and bodies. “Good afternoon, General.”

“How do you do, Mr. Courtney? I am pleased to welcome you. I hope you had a pleasant voyage.”

“Very enjoyable, sir. We made good passage through the Sud. The channel is well scoured out at this season. No necessity to kedge our way through.” Neither deigned to remark on the gauntlet that the steamboat had run through the Dervish batteries, or the riot that had welcomed it to the city.

“You are heavily laden, sir?” Gordon, who was fully six inches shorter, looked up at Ryder with those remarkable eyes. They were the steely blue of the noonday sky above the desert. Few men who looked into them could forget them. They were hypnotic, compelling, the outward sign of Gordon’s iron faith in himself and his God.

Ryder understood the import of the question instantly. “I have fifteen hundred sacks of dhurra sorghum in my barges, each bag of ten can tars weight.” A can tar was an Arabic measure, approximating a hundredweight.

Gordon’s eyes sparkled like cut sapphires, and he slapped his cane against his thigh. “Well done indeed, sir. The garrison and the entire population are already on extremely short commons. Your cargo might well see us through until the relief column from Cairo can reach us.”

Ryder Courtney blinked with surprise at such an optimistic estimate. There were close to thirty thousand souls trapped in the city. Even on starvation rations that multitude would devour a hundred sacks a day. The latest news they had received before the Dervish cut the telegraph line to the north was that the relief column was still assembling in the delta and would not be ready to begin the journey southwards for several weeks more. Even then they had more than a thousand miles to travel to Khartoum. On the way they must navigate the cataracts and traverse the Mother of Stones, that terrible wilderness. Then they must fight their way through the Dervish hordes who guarded the long marches along the banks of the Nile before they could reach the city and raise the siege. Fifteen hundred sacks of dhurra was not nearly enough to sustain the inhabitants of Khartoum indefinitely. Then he realized that Gordon’s optimism was his best armour. A man such as he could never allow himself to face the hopelessness of their plight and give in to despair.

He nodded his agreement. “Do I have your permission to begin sales of the grain, General?” The city was under martial law. No distribution of food was allowed without Gordon’s personal sanction.

“Sir, I cannot allow you to distribute the provisions. The population of my city is starving.” Ryder noted Gordon’s use of the possessive. “If you were to sell them they would be hoarded by wealthy merchants to the detriment of the poor. There will be equal rations for all. I will oversee the distribution. I have no choice but to commandeer your entire cargo of grain. I will, of course, pay you a fair price for it.”

For a moment Ryder stared at him, speechless. Then he found his voice. “A fair price, General?”

“At the end of the last harvest the price of dhurra in the souks of this city was six shillings a sack. It was a fair price, and still is, sir.”

“At the end of the last harvest there was no war and no siege,” Ryder retorted. “General, six shillings does not take into account the extortionate price I was forced to pay. Nor does it compensate me for the difficulties I experienced in transporting the sorghum and the fair profit to which I am entitled.”

“I am certain, Mr. Courtney, that six shillings will return you a handsome profit.” Gordon stared at him hard. “This city is under martial law, sir, and profiteering and hoarding are both capital crimes.”

Ryder knew that the threat was not an idle one. He had seen many men flogged or summarily executed for any dereliction of their duty, or defiance of this little man’s decrees. Gordon unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and brought out his notebook. He scribbled in it swiftly, tore out the sheet and passed it to Ryder. “That is my personal promissory note for the sum of four hundred and fifty Egyptian pounds. It is payable at the treasury of the Khedive in Cairo,” he said briskly. The Khedive was the ruler of Egypt. “What is the rest of your cargo, Mr. Courtney?”

“Ivory, live wild birds and animals,” Ryder replied bitterly.

“Those you may off load into your go down At this stage I have no interest in them, although later it may be necessary to slaughter the animals to provide meat for the populace. How soon can you have your steamer and the barges ready to depart, sir?”

“Depart, General?” Ryder turned pale under his tan: he had sensed what was about to happen.

“I am commandeering your vessels for the transport of refugees downriver,” Gordon explained. “You may requisition what cordwood you need to fuel your boilers. I will reimburse you for the voyage at the rate of two pounds per passenger. I estimate you might take five hundred women, children and heads of families. I will personally review the needs of each and decide who is to have priority.”

“You will pay me with another note, General?” Ryder asked, with veiled irony.

“Precisely, Mr. Courtney. You will wait at Metemma until the relief force reaches you. My own steamers are already there. Your famed skill as a river pilot will be much in demand in the passage of the Shabluka Gorge, Mr. Courtney.”

Chinese Gordon despised what he looked upon as greed and the worship of Mammon. When the Khedive of Egypt had offered him a salary of ten thousand pounds to undertake this most perilous assignment of evacuating the Sudan, Gordon had insisted that this be reduced to two thousand. He had his own perception of duty to his fellow men and his God. “Please bring your barges alongside the jetty and my troops will guard them while they are offloaded, and the dhurra is taken to the customs warehouse. Major al-Faroque, of my staff, will be in command of the operation.” Gordon nodded to the Egyptian officer at his side, who saluted Ryder perfunctorily. Al-Faroque had soulful dark eyes, and smelt powerfully of hair pomade. “And now you must excuse me, sir. I have much to attend to.”

As the official hostess to Her Britannic Majesty’s consul general to the Sudan, Rebecca was responsible for the running of the palace household. This evening, under her supervision, the servants had laid the dinner table on the terrace that overlooked the Blue Nile so that David’s guests might enjoy the breeze off the river. At sunset the servants would light braziers of eucalyptus branches and leaves. The smoke would keep the mosquitoes at bay. The entertainment would be provided with the compliments of General Gordon. Every evening the military band played and there was a fireworks display: General Gordon intended the show to take the minds of Khartoum’s population off the rig ours and hardships of the siege.

Rebecca had planned a splendid table. The consular silver and glassware had been polished to dazzling brilliance and the linen bleached white as an angel’s wing. Unfortunately the meal would not be of comparable quality. They would start with a soup of blackjack weeds and rose hips from the ruins of the palace garden. This would be followed by a pate of boiled palm-tree pith and stone ground dhurra, but the piece de resistance was supreme of pelican.

Most evenings David took his station on the terrace above the river with one of his Purdey shotguns at the ready, and waited for the flights of waterfowl to pass overhead as they flew in to their roosts. Behind him the twins waited with the other guns. Such a matching trio of firearms was known as a garnish of guns. David believed that any woman who lived in Africa, that continent of wild animals and wilder men, should be competent in the use of firearms. Under his tutelage Rebecca was already an expert pistol shot. At ten paces she was usually capable with six shots from the heavy Webley revolver of knocking at least five empty bully-beef cans off the stone wall at the bottom of the terrace to send them spinning out across the waters of the Nile.

The twins were still too small to withstand the recoil of a Webley or Purdey, so he had trained them to serve the spare shotguns until they had become as quick and dexterous as a professional loader on a Yorkshire grouse moor. The moment her father had fired both barrels, Amber snatched the empty gun from him and, at almost the same instant, Saffron thrust the second into his hands. While he picked his birds and fired again, the girls reloaded the empty weapon and were ready to serve him with it as soon as he reached for it. Between them they could keep up an impressive rate of fire.

David was a celebrated shot and seldom wasted a cartridge. While the girls squealed encouragement he might on occasion bring down five or six birds in quick succession from a flight of teal speeding high overhead. In the first weeks of the siege wild duck had regularly come within range of the terrace, teal, shovellers and more exotic species, such as Egyptian geese and garganey, all of which had provided important additions to the palace larder. But the surviving duck learnt quickly, and now the flocks habitually gave the terrace a wide berth. It was only the more stupid and less palatable birds that could still be brought to table by David’s marksmanship. A brace of heavily billed pelicans were his most recent victims.

The accompanying dish Rebecca planned to serve was the boiled leaves and stems of the sacred Egyptian waterlily. When he had recommended this plant to her Ryder Courtney had told her that its botanical name was Nymphaea alba. He had a vast fund of knowledge of all the natural world. She used the lovely blue blossoms as a salad -their peppery flavour helped to disguise the pervading fishy taste of pelican flesh. These plants grew in the narrow canal that cut off the city from the mainland. At this season the water in the canal was waist deep, but in the Low Nile period it dried out. General Gordon had set his troops to widening and deepening the canal into a moat to bolster the city’s fortifications and, much to Rebecca’s annoyance, they were destroying the source of this nutritious delicacy in the process.

The consular cellars were almost bare, except for a single case of Krug champagne that David was saving to celebrate the arrival of the relief force from the south. However, when Ryder Courtney sent Bacheet up to the consulate to accept the dinner invitation, he also sent three calabash gourds of Tej, the powerful native honey beer, which tasted like poor-quality cider. Rebecca intended serving it in crystal claret decanters to give it an importance it did not normally warrant.

Now she was putting the finishing touches to the dinner arrangements, and the table’s floral decoration of oleander from the neglected gardens. The guests would start arriving in an hour and her father had not yet returned from his daily meeting with General Gordon. She was a little worried that David might be late and spoil her evening. However, she was secretly relieved that General Gordon had refused the invitation: he was a great and saintly man, a hero of the Empire, but scornful of the social graces. His conversation was pious and arcane, and his sense of humour, to be charitable, was impaired if not totally lacking.

At that moment she heard her father’s familiar tread reverberating down the cloisters and his voice raised as he summoned one of the servants. She ran to greet him as he stepped out on to the terrace. He returned her embrace in a distracted, perfunctory manner. She stepped back and studied his face. “Father, what is it?”

“We are to leave the city tomorrow night. General Gordon has ordered all British, French and Austrian citizens to be evacuated at once.”

“Does that mean you will come with us, Daddy?” These days she seldom used the childish term of endearment.

“It does indeed.”

“How are we to travel?”

“Gordon has commandeered Ryder Courtney’s steamer and barges. He has ordered him downriver with all of us on board. I tried to argue with him, but to no avail. The man is intractable and cannot be moved from his chosen path.” Then David grinned, seized her round the waist and spun her into a waltz. “To tell the truth, I am vastly relieved that the decision has been taken out of my hands, and that you and the twins will be conveyed to safety.”

An hour later David and Rebecca stood under the candelabrum in the reception lobby to greet their guests, who were almost entirely male. Months before, nearly all the white women had been evacuated north to the delta, aboard General Gordon’s tin-pot steamers. Now those vessels were stranded far south at Metemma, awaiting the arrival of a relief force. Rebecca and the twins were among the few European females who remained in the city.

The twins stood demurely behind their father. They had prevailed on their elder sister to allow them to be there when Ryder arrived and to watch the fireworks with him before Nazeera, their nurse, took them to the nursery. Nazeera had been Rebecca’s nurse too and was a beloved member of the Benbrook household. She stood close behind the twins now, ready to spring into action at the first stroke of nine. Much to the twins’ disappointment, Ryder Courtney was last to arrive, but when he did they giggled and whispered together.

“He’s so handsome,” said Saffron, and did her swooning act.

Nazeera pinched her and whispered in Arabic, “Even if you are never to be a lady, you must learn to behave like one, Saffy.”

“I have never seen him in full fig before.” Amber agreed with her twin: Ryder wore one of the new dinner jackets that the Prince of Wales had recently made fashionable. It had watered satin lapels and was nipped in at the waist. He had had it copied from an picture in the

London Illustrated News by an Armenian tailor in Cairo, and carried it off with a casual elegance far from his rumpled workaday moleskins. He was freshly shaven and his hair shone in the candlelight.

“And, look, he has brought us presents!” Amber had seen the telltale bulge in his breast pocket. She had a woman’s eye for such details.

Ryder shook hands with David and bowed to Rebecca. He refrained from kissing her hand in the Frenchified gesture that many members of the diplomatic corps, who had arrived before him, had affected. Then he winked at the twins, who covered their mouths to suppress giggles as they dropped him a curtsy in return.

“May I have the honour of escorting you two beautiful ladies to the terrace?” He bowed.

“Wee wee, Moonseer,” said Saffron, grandly, which was almost too much for Amber’s self-control.

Ryder took one on each arm, stooping a little so that they could reach, and led them out through the french windows. One of the servants in a white robe and blue turban brought them glasses of lemonade, made from the few remaining fruits on the trees in the orchard, and Ryder presented the twins with their gifts, necklaces of ivory beads carved in the shape of tiny animals: lions, monkeys and giraffes. He fastened the clasps at the backs of their necks. They were enchanted.

Almost on cue the military band down on the maid an beside the old slave market began to play. The distance muted the sound to a pleasing volume, and the musicians succeeded in embellishing the familiar repertoire of polkas, waltzes and marching tunes of the British Army with beguiling Oriental cadences.

“Sing for us, Ryder, oh, please do!” Amber begged, and when he laughed and shook his head, she appealed to her father, “Please make him sing, Daddy.”

“My daughter is right, Mr. Courtney. A voice would add immeasurably to the pleasure of the occasion.”

Ryder sang unselfconsciously, and soon had them all tapping their feet or clapping in time to the music. Those who fancied their own vocal prowess joined in with the chorus of “Over the Sea to Skye’.

Then the firework display began, General Gordon’s nightly treat. The sky cascaded with sheets of blue, green and red sparks from the ship’s signal rockets, and the watchers oohed and aahed in wonder. Over on the far bank of the Nile the Dervish gunner whom David had dubbed the Bedlam Bedouin fired a few shrapnel shells at the point from where he guessed the rockets were being set off. As usual, his aim was awry and nobody sought shelter. Instead, everyone booed his efforts with gusto.

Then the twins were led away, protesting vainly, to the nursery, and the company was summoned to the table by one of the robed Arab footmen tapping on a ringer drum. Everyone was in fine appetite: if not yet starving, they were at least half-way there. The portions were minuscule, barely a mouthful each, but Herr Schiffer, the Austrian consul, declared the blackjack weed soup to be excellent, the palm-pith pate nourishing and the roast pelican ‘quite extraordinary’. Rebecca convinced herself that this was meant as a compliment.

As the meal drew to a close, Ryder Courtney did something to confirm his status as the hero of the evening. He clapped his hands and Bacheet, his boatswain, came out on to the terrace grinning like a gargoyle and carrying a silver tray on which reposed a cut-glass bottle of VSOP Hine Cognac and a cedar wood box of Cuban cigars. With their glasses charged and the cigars drawing until the tips glowed, the men were transported into an expansive mood. The conversation was diverting, until Monsieur le Blanc joined in.

“I wonder that Chinese Gordon refused such fine entertainment.” He giggled in a girlish, irritating manner. “Surely it is not possible to save the mighty British Empire twenty-four hours of every day. Even Hercules had to rest from his labours.” Le Blanc was head of the Belgian delegation sent by King Leopold to initiate diplomatic contact with the Mahdi. So far his efforts had not been crowned by success and he had ended up a captive in the city like the rest of them. The Englishmen at the table looked upon him pityingly. However, as he was a foreigner and knew no better, he was excused the solecism.

“The General refused to attend a banquet while the populace was starving.” Rebecca rose to Gordon’s defence. “I think that was very noble-minded of him.” Then she hurried on modestly, “Not that I claim my humble offering as a great banquet.”

Following her example David initiated a eulogy to the General’s inflexible character and his marvelous achievements.

Ryder Courtney was still smarting from Gordon’s last demonstration of his adamantine character and did not join in the chorus of praise.

“He wields an almost messianic power over his men,” David told them earnestly. “They will follow him anywhere, and if they don’t he will drag them by their pigtails, as he did with his Ever Victorious Army in China, or kick their backsides black and blue as he does to the Egyptian riffraff with which he is forced to defend the city at the moment.”

“Your language, Daddy,” Rebecca chided him primly.

“I am sorry, my darling, but it is true. He is completely fearless. Alone, mounted on a camel and in full dress uniform, he rode into that murderous rogue Suleiman’s encamped army of rebels and harangued them. Instead of murdering him out of hand Suleiman abandoned the rebellion and went home.”

“He did the same with the Zulus in South Africa. When he walked alone among their warlike imp is and turned his extraordinary eyes upon them, they worshipped him as a god. At that, he thrashed their induna for blasphemy.”

Another spoke up: “Kings and potentates of many nations have competed to secure his services the Emperor of China, King Leopold of the Belgians, the Khedive of Egypt and the premier of the Cape Colony.”

“He is a man of God before he is a warrior. He scorns the clamour of men, and before he makes any fateful decision he enquires in solitary prayer what his God requires of him.”

I wonder that God required him to steal my dhurra, Ryder thought bitterly. He did not voice the sentiment but changed the direction of the conversation dramatically: “Is it not remarkable that in many ways the man who faces him now across the Nile shares many characteristics with our gallant general?” A silence followed this remark, which was almost as bad as Le Blanc’s gaucherie, not at all worthy of a man of the calibre of Ryder Courtney.

Even Rebecca was aghast at the idea of comparing the saint with the monster. Yet she noticed that when Ryder spoke other men listened. Even though he was the youngest man at the table, the others deferred to him for his fortune and reputation were formidable. He had travelled indefatigably where few men before him had ventured. He had reached the Mountains of the Moon and sailed on all of the great lakes of the African interior. He was a friend and confidant of John, the Emperor of Abyssinia. The Mutesa of Buganda and the Kamrasi of Bunyoro were his familiars and had granted him exclusive trading rights in their kingdoms.

His Arabic was so fluent that he could debate the Koran with the mullahs in the mosque. He spoke a dozen other more primitive tongues and could bargain with the naked Dinka and the Shilluk. He had hunted and captured every known species of the wild beasts and birds of Equatoria, and sold them to the menageries of the kings, emperors and zoological gardens of Europe.

“That is an extraordinary notion, Ryder,” David ventured cautiously. “It strikes me that the Mad Mahdi and General Charles Gordon stand at opposite poles. But perhaps you can point out some characteristics they have in common.”

“First, David, they are both ascetics who practise self-denial and abstain from worldly comforts,” Ryder replied easily. “And both are men of God.”

“Different Gods,” David challenged.

“No, sir! One and the same God: the God of the Jews, Muslims, Christians and all other monotheists is the same God. It is simply that they worship Him in different ways.”

David smiled. “Perhaps we can debate that later. But for now tell us what else they have in common.”

“They both believe that God speaks directly to them and that therefore they are infallible. Once their minds are set they are unwavering and deaf to argument. Then again, like many great men and beautiful women, they are both betrayed by their belief in the cult of personality. They believe that they are able to carry all before them by the blue of their eyes or by the gap between their front teeth and their eloquence,” Ryder said.

“We know who possesses the blue and compelling eye,” David chuckled, ‘but to whom belongs the gap-toothed grin?”

“To Muhammad Ahmed, the Mahdi, the Divinely Guided One,” said Ryder. “The wedge shaped gap is called the falja and his Ansar consider it a mark of the divine.”

“You speak as though you are familiar with him,” said Le Blanc. “Have you met the man?”

“I have,” Ryder confirmed, and they all stared at him as though he had admitted to supping with Satan himself.

Rebecca was the first to rouse herself. “Do tell us, Mr. Courtney, where and when? What is he truly like?”

“I knew him first when he lived in a hole in the bank of Abbas Island, forty miles up the Blue Nile from where we now sit. Often when I passed the island I would go ashore to sit with him and speak of God and the affairs of men. I could not claim that we were friends, nor would I ever wish to do so. But there was something about him that I found fascinating. I sensed that he was different, and I was always impressed by his piety, his quiet strength and unruffled smile. He is a true patriot, as is General Gordon another trait they have in common.”

“Enough of General Gordon. We all know of his virtues,” Rebecca interjected. “Tell us rather of this terrible Mahdi. How can you say he has in him a grain of the same nobility?”

“We all know that the domination of the Sudan by the Khedive in Egypt has been iniquitous and brutal. Behind the magnificent facade of imperial dominion has flourished unspeakable corruption and cruelty. The native population has been subject to greedy and heartless pashas, and an army of occupation forty thousand strong, which was used to collect the extortionate taxes the pashas imposed. Only half went to the Khedive in Cairo and the rest into the personal coffers of the pashas. The land was ruled by bayonet and kurbash, the vicious hippo-hide whip. The effete pashas sitting here in Khartoum delighted in devising the most savage tortures and executions. Villages were razed and their inhabitants slaughtered. Arab and black man alike cowered under the shadow of the hated “Turk’, but no man dared protest.

“The Egyptians, while aspiring to civilization, fostered and encouraged the trade in slaves, for that was how the taxes were paid. I have seen such horrors with my own eyes, and I was amazed by the forbearance of the population. I discussed all this with the hermit in his hole in the riverbank. We were both young men, although I was by some years the younger. We attempted between us to discover why this situation persisted, for the Arab is a proud man and has not lacked provocation. We decided that two essential elements of revolution were missing, and the first of these was the knowledge of better things. General Charles Gordon, as the governor of the Sudan, provided this. The other missing element was a uniting catalyst among the oppressed. In the fullness of time Muhammad Ahmed provided this. It was how the new Mahdist nation was born.”

They were silent, until Rebecca spoke again, and hers was a woman’s question. The political, religious and military facets of the Mahdi’s history interested her very little. “But what is he really like, Mr. Courtney? What of his appearance and his demeanour? How does his voice sound? And tell us more of this strange gap between his teeth.”

“He possesses the same vast charisma as Charles Gordon, another trait they have in common. He is of medium height and slim in stature. He has always dressed in robes of spotless white, even when he lived in the hole in the ground. On his right cheek is a birthmark in the shape of a bird or an angel. This is seen by his disciples and adherents as a touch of the divine. The gap between his teeth rivets your attention when he speaks. He is a compelling orator. His voice is soft and sibilant, until his ire is aroused. Then he speaks with the thunder of one of the biblical prophets, but even in anger he smiles.” Ryder drew out his gold pocket-watch. “It lacks only an hour of midnight. I have kept you late. We should all get a good night’s rest, for as you have been told it is my duty, allotted to me by General Gordon, to make certain that none of you here tonight will ever be forced to listen to the voice of Muhammad Ahmed. Remember, please, that you are to be aboard my steamer at the Old City wharf before midnight tomorrow. It is my intention to sail while it is still too dark for the Dervish gunners to pick us out clearly. Please restrict your luggage to the minimum. With good fortune we may run clean away from them before they get off a single shot.”

David smiled. “That will require a certain amount of luck, Mr. Courtney, for the city is crawling with Dervish spies. The Mahdi knows exactly what we are up to almost before we know it ourselves.”

“Perhaps this time we will be able to outwit him.” Ryder half rose and bowed to Rebecca. “I apologize if I have overstayed my welcome, Miss Benbrook.”

“It is still far too early for you to leave. None of us will sleep yet. Please sit down, Mr. Courtney. You cannot leave us high and dry. Finish the story, for you have intrigued us all.”

Ryder made a gesture of resignation and sank down again on his chair. “How can I resist your command? But I fear you all know the rest of the story, for it has been often told and I do not wish to bore you.”

There were murmurs of protest down the length of the table.

“Go on, sir. Miss Benbrook is right. We must hear out your version. It seems that it differs greatly from what we have come to believe.”

Ryder Courtney nodded acquiescence, and went on: “In our western societies we pride ourselves in glorious traditions and high moral standards. Yet in savage and uneducated peoples ignorance provides its own source of great strength. It engenders in them the overpowering stimulus of fanaticism. Here in the Sudan there were three giant steps on the road to rebellion. The first was the misery of all the native peoples of the country. The second was when they looked about them and recognized that the source of all their ills was the hated Turk, the minions of the Khedive in Cairo. It needed but a single step more before the mighty wave of fanaticism crashed over the land. That was the moment when there arose the man who would become the Mahdi.”

“Of course!” interjected David. “The seed had been sown long ago. The Shukri belief that one day, in the time of shame and strife, a second great prophet would be sent by Allah, who would lead the faithful back to God and sustain Islam.”

Rebecca looked sternly at her father. “It’s Mr. Courtney’s story, Father. Please let him tell it.”

The men smiled at her fire, and David looked guilty. “I did not mean to usurp your tale. Pray go on, sir.”

“But you are right, David. For a hundred years the people of the Sudan have always looked in hope to any ascetic who rises to prominence. As this one’s fame spread, pilgrims began flocking to Abbas Island. They brought valuable gifts, which Muhammad Ahmed distributed to the poor. They listened to his sermons, and when they left to return to their homes they took with them the writings of this holy man. His fame spread throughout the Sudan until it reached the ears of one who had waited eagerly all his life for the coming of the second prophet. Abdullahi, the son of an obscure cleric and the youngest of his four brothers, journeyed to Abbas Island in wild expectation. He arrived at last on a saddle-galled donkey, and he recognized instantly the devout young hermit as the true messenger of God.”

David could not restrain himself longer: “Or did he recognize the vehicle that would convey him to power and wealth undreamed?”

“Perhaps that is more accurate.” Ryder laughed in accord. “But, be that as it may, the two men formed a powerful alliance. Soon news reached the ears of Raouf Pasha, the Egyptian governor of Khartoum, that this mad priest was preaching defiance to the Khedive in Cairo. He sent a messenger to Abbas to summon Muhammad Ahmed here to the city to justify himself. The priest listened to the messenger, then stood up and spoke in the voice of a true prophet: “By the grace of God and his prophet, I am the master of this land. In God’s name I declare jihad, holy war, on the Turk.”

“The messenger fled back to his master and Abdullahi gathered around him a tiny band of ragged wretches, then armed them with sticks and stones. Raouf Pasha sent two companies of his best soldiers by steamer upriver to capture the troublesome priest. He believed in the incentive method of conducting warfare. He promised promotion and a large reward to whichever of his two captains made the arrest. At nightfall the steamboat captain landed the soldiers on the island, and the two companies, now in competition with each other, marched by separate routes to surround the village in which the priest was reported to be sheltering. In the confusion of the moonless night the soldiers attacked each other furiously, then fled back to the landing. The terrified steamboat captain refused to let them embark unless they swam out to his boat. Few accepted this offer for most could not swim, and those who could feared the crocodiles. So the captain abandoned them and sailed back to Khartoum. Muhammad Ahmed and Abdullahi, with their tatterdemalion army, fell upon the demoralized Egyptians and slaughtered them.

“The news of this extraordinary victory spread throughout the land, that men with sticks had routed the hated Turk. Surely it must have been the Mahdi who led them. Knowing that more Egyptian troops would be sent to kill him, the newly self-proclaimed Mahdi began a

hegira, very much like the exodus of the One True Prophet from Mecca a thousand years before. However, before the retreat began, he appointed the faithful Abdullahi as his khalifa, his deputy under God. This was in accordance with precedent and prophecy. Soon the retreat became a triumphal progress. The Mahdi was preceded by tales of miracles and prodigious omens. One night a dark shadow obliterated the crescent moon, the symbol of Egypt and the Turk. This message from God high in the midnight sky was plain for every man in the Sudan to see. When the Mahdi reached a mountain fastness far to the south of Khartoum, which he renamed Jebel Masa in accordance with the prophecy, he deemed himself safe from Raouf Pasha. However, he was still within striking distance of Fashoda: Rashid Bey, the governor of the town, was braver and more enterprising than most Egyptian governors. He marched on Jebel Masa with fourteen hundred heavily armed troops. But, scornful of this rabble of peasants, he took few precautions. The intrepid Khalifa Abdullahi laid an ambush for him. Rashid Bey marched straight into it, and neither he nor any single one of his men survived the day. They were slaughtered by the ragged ill-armed Ansar.”

Ryder’s cigar had gone out. He stood up, took a glowing twig from the brazier of eucalyptus branches and relit it. When it was drawing brightly again he returned to his chair. “Now that Abdullahi had captured rifles and vast military stores, not to mention the treasury of Fashoda in which was deposited almost half a million pounds, he had become a formidable force. The Khedive in Cairo ordered that a new army be raised here at Khartoum and gave the command of it to a retired British officer, General Hicks. It was one of the most abysmally inept armies ever to take the field, and Hicks’s authority was diluted and countermanded by the bumbling Raouf Pasha, who was already the author of two military disasters.”

Ryder paused and as he poured the last of the Hine into his glass he shook his head sadly, “It is almost two years to the day that General Hicks marched out of this city with seven thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry. He was supported by mounted artillery, Krupps guns and Nordenfelt machine-guns. His men were mostly Muslims and they had heard the legend of the Mahdi. They began to desert before he had covered five miles. He clapped fifty men of the Krupps battery in chains to encourage them to greater valour, but they still deserted and took their manacles with them.” Ryder threw back his head and laughed, and although the tale had been terrifying the sound was so infectious that Rebecca found herself laughing with him.

“What Hicks did not know and what he did not believe even when

Lieutenant Penrod Ballantyne, his intelligence officer, warned him, was that by now forty thousand men had flocked to the Mahdi’s green flag. One of the emirs who had brought his tribe to join the array was none other than Osman Atalan of the Beja.”

The men around the table stirred at the mention of that name. It was one to conjure with, for the Beja were the fiercest and most feared of all the fighting Arabs, and Osman Atalan was their most dreaded warlord.

“On the third of November 1883, Hicks’s motley force ran headlong into the army of the Mahdi, and they were cut to pieces by the charges of the Ansar. Hicks himself was mortally wounded as he stood at the head of the last formed square of his troops. When he fell the square broke and the Ansar swarmed over it. Penrod Ballantyne, who had warned Hicks of the danger, saw the General empty his revolver into the charging Arabs before his head was sliced off by a swinging broadsword. Ballantyne’s own superior officer, Major Adams, was lying shot through both legs, and the Arabs were massacring and mutilating the wounded. Ballantyne sprang to horse and managed to lift Major Adams up behind his saddle. Then he hacked his way out through the attackers, and broke clear. He caught up with the Egyptian rear guard which was by this time in full flight for Khartoum. He was the only surviving European officer so he took command. He rallied them and led a fighting retreat back into Khartoum. Ballantyne brought back two hundred men, including the wounded Major Adams. Two hundred men of the seven and a half thousand who had marched out with General Hicks. His conduct was the one single ray of light in an otherwise dark day. Thus the Mahdi and his khalifa became masters of all the Sudan, and they closed in with their victorious forty thousand on this city, bringing with them the captured guns that torment us to this day. And so the populace languishes and starves, or perishes from pestilence and cholera, while awaiting the fate that the Mahdi has in store for Khartoum.”

There were tears in Rebecca’s eyes as Ryder stopped speaking. “He sounds a fine and brave young man, this Penrod Ballantyne. Have you ever met him, Mr. Courtney?”

“Ballantyne?” Ryder looked surprised by this abrupt change in the focus of his tale. “Yes, I was here when he rode back from the battlefield.”

“Tell us more about him, please, sir.”

Ryder shrugged. “Most of the ladies I have spoken to assure me that they find him dashing and gallant. They are particularly enamoured of his moustache, which is formidable. Perhaps Captain Ballantyne might agree rather too readily with the general feminine opinion of himself.”

“I thought you spoke of him as a lieutenant?”

“In an attempt to garner some tiny grain of glory from that terrible day the commander of the British troops in Cairo made a great fuss of Ballantyne’s role in the battle. It just so happens that Ballantyne is a subaltern in the 10th Hussars, which is Lord Wolseley’s old regiment. Wolseley is always ready to give a fellow Hussar a leg up, so Ballantyne was uplifted to the rank of a full captain, and if that was not sufficient he was given the Victoria Cross to boot.”

“You do not approve of Captain Ballantyne, sir?” Rebecca asked.

For the first time David detected in his daughter’s attitude towards Ryder Courtney a definite coolness. He wondered at the rather excessive interest she was evincing towards Ballantyne, who presumably was a stranger to her, when suddenly, with a small shock, he recalled that young Ballantyne had visited the consulate some weeks before Hicks’s army had marched away to annihilation at El Obeid. The lad had come to deliver a despatch from Evelyn Baring, the British consul in Cairo, which had been too sensitive to be sent over the telegraph, even in cipher. Although nothing had been said at the time he had guessed that Ballantyne was an officer in the intelligence section of Baring’s staff, and that his seconding to Hicks’s motley army was merely a cover.

Damme, yes! It’s all coming back, David thought. Rebecca had come into his office while he was engaged with Ballantyne. The two young people had exchanged a few polite words when he introduced them, and Rebecca had left them alone. But later, when he was showing Ballantyne to the door, David had noticed her arranging flowers in the hall. On glancing out of his office window a short time later, he had seen his daughter walking with Ballantyne to the palace gates. Ballantyne had seemed attentive. Now it all fell into place. Perhaps it was not pure chance that Rebecca had been lingering in the hall when Ballantyne emerged from his office. He smiled inwardly at the way his daughter had pretended never to have met Ballantyne when she asked Ryder Courtney his opinion of the man.

So young, but already so much like her mother, David reflected. As devious as a palace full of pashas.

Ryder Courtney was still responding to Rebecca’s challenge: “I am sure that Ballantyne is an authentic hero, and I am indeed impressed by his facial hair. However, I have never detected in him any excess of humility. But then again I am ambivalent about all military men. When they have finished thrashing the heathen, storming cities and seizing kingdoms, they simply ride away, their sabres and medals clinking. It is left to administrators like your father to try to make some order out of the chaos they have created, and to businessmen like myself to restore prosperity to a shattered population. No, Miss Benbrook, I have no quarrel with Captain Ballantyne, but I am not entirely enamoured of that branch of the state apparatus to which he belongs.”

Rebecca’s eye was cold and her expression severe as Ryder Courtney stood up again to leave, but this time with greater determination. Rebecca did not attempt to delay his departure any longer.

It was after midnight before Ryder rode back to his go down He slept only a few hours before Bacheet woke him again. He ate his breakfast of cold, hard dhurra cakes and pickled salt beef while seated at his desk, working over his journal and cash book by the light of the oil lamps. He felt a sinking sense of dread as he realized how finely drawn were his business affairs.

Apart from six hundred pounds deposited in the Cairo branch of Barings Bank, almost all his wealth was concentrated in the besieged city. In his warehouse he had over eighteen tons of ivory, worth five shillings a pound, but only when it reached Cairo. In beleaguered Khartoum it was not worth a sack of dhurra. The same could be said of the ton and a half of gum arabic, the sap of the acacia tree, which had been dried into sticky black bricks. It was a valuable commodity used in the arts, cosmetics and printing industries. In Cairo his stock would sell for several thousand pounds. Then he had four large storerooms stacked to the ceiling with dried cattle hides bartered from the pastoral Dinka and Shilluk tribes to the south. Another large room was filled with trade goods: rolls of copper wire, Venetian glass beads, steel axe and hoe heads, hand mirrors, old Tower muskets and kegs of cheap black gunpowder, rolls of calico and Birmingham cotton goods, with all the other trinkets and gewgaws that delighted the rulers of the southern kingdoms and their subjects.

In the cages and stockades at the far end of his compound he kept the wild animals and birds that formed an important part of his trading stock. They had been captured in the savannahs and forests of Equatoria and brought downriver in his barges and steamer. In the stockades they were rested, tamed and made familiar with their human keepers. At the same time the keepers learnt what food and treatment would ensure their survival until they were transported north up the Nile to be auctioned to the dealers and their agents in Cairo and Damascus, and even to Naples and Rome where prices were considerably higher. In those markets some of the rarer African species might fetch as much as a hundred pounds each.

His most valuable possessions were concealed behind the steel door of the strongroom, which was hidden by a large Persian wall-hanging: more than a hundred bags of silver Maria Theresa dollars, that ubiquitous coin of the Middle East, minted with a portrait of the buxom queen of Hungary and Bohemia. This was the only coinage acceptable to the Abyssinians in their mountainous kingdom and his other more sophisticated trading partners, such as the Mutesa in Buganda, the Hadendowa and the Saar of the eastern deserts. At the moment there would be little trading with the emirs of these desert Arab tribes. Almost all had gone over en masse to join the Mahdi’s jihad.

He smiled sardonically in the lamplight. I wonder if the Mahdi might be open to an offer of Maria Theresa dollars, he thought. But I expect not. I hear he has already accumulated over a million pounds in plunder.

In the strongroom alongside the canvas bags of dollars were even greater treasures. Fifty sacks of dhurra corn, a couple of dozen boxes of Cuban cheroots, half a dozen cases of Hine Cognac and fifty pounds of Abyssinian coffee.

Chinese Gordon is shooting hoarders. I hope he offers me a last cheroot and a blindfold, he mused. Then he became deadly serious again. Before Gordon had commandeered the Intrepid this Ryder had made plans to move as much as possible of his stock and stores downriver to Cairo. Then he would run the blockade of the river.

He had also planned that, while he was occupied with this voyage, Bacheet would take the bulkier and less valuable stocks by camel caravan to Abyssinia and perhaps even to one of the trading ports on the coast of the Red Sea. Although the Mahdi had deployed his armies along the western bank of the Blue Nile, and the northern bank of the Blue Nile, and was blockading the river, there were still many gaps in his besieging cordon. Principal of these was the broad wedge of open desert between the two rivers, at whose apex stood the city. Only the narrow canal protected this part of the city perimeter, and although General Gordon’s men were deepening and widening it there was nothing beyond: no Dervish army, only sand, scrub and a few stands of acacia thorn for hundreds of miles.

Said Mahtoum, one of the few emirs who had not yet gone over to the Dervish, had agreed a price with Ryder to bring his camels close in to the city, just out of sight of it behind a low, rocky ridge. There, under Bacheet’s supervision, he would load the cargo and smuggle it over the Sudanese border to one of Ryder’s trading stations in the foothills of the Abyssinian mountains. All of those plans must now go by the board. He would be forced to leave all his possessions in the beleaguered city, taking only a boatload of refugees with him.

“Damn General bloody Chinese bloody Gordon!” he said, stood up abruptly and moved around the room. Apart from the cabin of the Intrepid this this was his only permanent home. His father and his grandfather had been wanderers. From them he had learnt the itinerant lifestyle of the hunter and the African trader. But this go down was home. It needed only a good woman to make it complete.

A sudden image of Rebecca Benbrook opened in his mind. He smiled ruefully. He had a feeling that, for no good reason he could fathom, he had burned his bridges in that quarter. He crossed to a pair of massive elephant tusks that were fastened by bronze rings to the stonework of the wall and stroked one of the stained yellow shafts absently. The feeling of the smooth ivory under his fingers was as comforting as a string of worry-beads. With a single bullet through the brain, Ryder had killed the mighty bull who had carried these tusks at Karamojo, a thousand miles south of Khartoum on the Victoria Nile.

Still fondling the ivory, he studied the faded photograph in its ebony frame on the near wall. It depicted a family standing in front of an ox-wagon in a bleak but unmistakably African landscape. A team of sixteen oxen was in spanned and the black driver stood beside them, ready to crack his long whip and begin the trek towards some nameless destination out there in the blue yonder. In the centre of the picture Ryder’s father sat in the saddle of his favourite mount, a grey gelding he had named Fox. He was a big, powerfully built man, with a full dark beard. He had died so long ago that Ryder could not remember if it was a reasonable likeness. He was holding the six-year-old Ryder on the pommel of his saddle with his long skinny legs dangling. Ryder’s mother stood at the horse’s head gazing serenely at the camera. He remembered every detail of her lovely features and, as always when he looked on them, he felt his heart squeezed by the memory. She was holding his sister’s hand. Alice was a few years older than Ryder. On the other side of her stood Ryder’s elder brother, with one arm protectively round their mother’s waist. That day had been Waite Courtney’s sixteenth birthday. He was ten years older than Ryder, and had been more a father to him than a brother after their own father had been killed by a wounded buffalo during the course of the journey on which the five in the photograph had been about to embark.

The last time Ryder Courtney had wept was when he received the telegraph from his sister Alice in London with the terrible news that

Waite had been killed by the Zulus on some God-forsaken battlefield in South Africa under a hill called Isandlwana, the Place of the Little Hand. He had left his widow Ada with two sons, Sean and Garrick; fortunately they were almost grown men and could take care of her.

Ryder sighed and drove those sad thoughts from his mind. He shouted for Bacheet. Although it was still dark, there was much they must do today if they were to be ready to sail before midnight.

The two men walked past the ivory warehouse to the gate of the animal stockade. Old Ali met them coughing and grumbling.

“O beloved of Allah,” Ryder greeted him. “May the wombs of all your beautiful young wives be fruitful. And may their ardour fire your heart and weaken your knees.”

Ali tried not to grin at this levity, for all three of his wives were ancient crones. When a chuckle almost escaped him he turned it into a cough, then spat a glob of yellow phlegm into the dust. AH was the keeper of the menagerie, and although he seemed to hate all mankind he had a magical way with wild creatures. He led Ryder on a tour of the monkey cages. They were all clean, and the water and feed in the dishes was fresh. Ryder reached into the cage of Colobus and his favourite jumped on to his shoulder, bared his teeth and exposed his fangs. Ryder found the remains of the dhurra cake from his breakfast in his pocket and fed it to him. He stroked the handsome black and white coat as they went on down the row of cages. There were five different species of ape, including dog-faced baboons, and two young chimpanzees, which were hugely in demand in Europe and Asia, and would find eager buyers in Cairo. They clambered up and hugged Ali round the neck; the youngest sucked his ear as though it were its mother’s teat. Ali grumbled at them in soft, loving tones.

Beyond the monkeys there were cages full of birds, from starlings of vivid metallic hues to eagles, huge owls, long-legged storks and horn-bills, with beaks like great yellow trumpets. “Are you still able to find food for them?” Ryder indicated the carnivorous birds tethered by one leg to their posts. Ali grunted noncommittally, but Bacheet answered for him.

“The rats are the only animals that still thrive in the city. The urchins bring them in for two copper coins each.” Ali looked at him venomously for having divulged information that was none of his business.

At the far end of the stockade the antelopes were penned together, except for the Cape buffalo who were too aggressive to share with other animals. They were still calves, barely weaned, for young animals were more resilient and travelled better than mature beasts. Ryder had left for last the two rare and lovely antelope he had captured on his last expedition. They had lustrous ginger coats with stark white stripes, huge swimming eyes and trumpet-shaped ears, and were also still calves; when fully mature they would be the size of a pony. Buds bulged out between their ears, which would soon sprout into heavy corkscrew horns. Although the cured hides of the bongo had been described before, no live specimen had ever been offered for sale in Europe, as far as Ryder knew. A breeding pair like this would command a prince’s ransom. He fed them dhurra cakes and they slobbered greedily into his palm.

As they walked on Ryder and Ali discussed how best to maintain a constant supply of fodder to keep their charges nourished and healthy. The bongos were browsing animals, and Ali had discovered that they accepted the foliage of the acacia tree. Al-Mahtoum’s men regularly brought in camel loads of freshly cut branches from the desert in exchange for handfuls of silver Maria Theresa dollars.

“Soon we will have to capture another floating reed island because if we do not the other animals will starve,” Ali warned lugubriously. He relished being the bearer of worrisome tidings. When rafts of swamp weed and papyrus broke free from the dense masses in the lagoons and channels of the Sud they were carried downstream on the Nile. Some of the rafts were so extensive and buoyant that often they brought large animals with them from the swamps. Despite the best efforts of the Dervish, Ryder and his crew were able to secure these living rafts with long cables and heave them on to the bank. There, gangs of labourers hacked the matted vegetation into manageable blocks and moored them in the moat of the channel. The grasses and reeds remained green until they could be used as fodder.

There was scarcely enough daylight for Ryder to finish his preparations to leave Khartoum, and the sun was setting by the time he and Bacheeet left the compound with a string of baggage camels for the old harbour. Jock McCrump had steam up in the boilers of the Intrepid this when they went aboard.

Ryder was painfully aware of the spying eyes of the city upon them as they loaded the last bundles of cordwood for the boilers into one of the barges. The sun had been down for two hours before they had finished but the heat of the day still held the city in a sweaty embrace as the moon began to show its upper limb above the eastern horizon and transform the ugly buildings of the city with its pale romantic rays.

Unremarked among the other sparse river traffic, a tiny felucca used the last of the evening breeze to leave the Omdurman bank and slip downriver. Under cover of darkness it passed not much more than its own length beyond the entrance to the old harbour. The captain stood on one of the thwarts and stared into the entrance. He saw that torches were burning, and with the rays of the moon he was able to make out all the unusual activity around the ferenghi steamer moored in the inner harbour. He heard the clamour and shouting of many voices. It was as he had been informed. The ferenghi ship was making ready to leave the city. He dropped back on to his seat at the tiller and whistled softly to his three-man crew to harden the big lateen sail so that he could bring her closer to the night breeze, then put the tiller hard up. The small boat shot away at an angle across the current and headed back for Omdurman on the western side of the river. As they came under the loom of the land the captain whistled again, but more piercingly, and was challenged almost immediately from the darkness: “In the name of the Prophet and the Divine Mahdi, speak!”

The captain stood up again and called to the watchers on the bank. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. I bear tidings for the Khalifa Abdullahi.”

The Intrepid this still lay at the Old City wharf. Jock McCrump and Ryder Courtney were checking the row of Martini-Henry rifles in the gun rack at the back of the open bridge, making certain they were loaded, and that spare packets of the big Boxer-Henry 45 calibre cartridges were to hand, should they run into the Dervish blockade when they left the harbour.

No sooner had they completed their final preparations than the first of the most important passengers came up the gangplank, Bacheet leading them to their quarters. The this had only four cabins. One belonged to Ryder Courtney, but over Bacheet’s protests he was going to relinquish it to the Benbrook family. There were only two bunks in the tiny cabin. They would be crowded, but at least it had its own bathroom. The girls would be afforded some privacy in the crowded steamer. Presumably one of the twins could sleep with her father, while the other would be with Rebecca. The foreign consuls had been allocated the remaining cabins, while the rest of the almost four hundred passengers must take their chances on the open decks, or crowded into the three empty barges. The fourth barge was laden with the cordwood so that they would not be forced to go ashore to cut supplies of this precious commodity.

Ryder looked towards the eastern horizon. The moon was only a few days from full, and would give him just enough light to descry the channel down towards the Shabluka Gorge. Unfortunately it would also light up the target for the Dervish gunners. Their aim was improving each day as they had more practice and experience with the laying of the Krupps guns that they had captured at El Obeid. They seemed to possess an endless supply of ammunition.

Ryder looked back at the wharf and felt a prickle of irritation. Major al-Faroque of General Gordon’s staff had lined up a company of his troops to guard the perimeter of the harbour. With fixed bayonets they were prepared to prevent a mob of refugees without General Gordon’s pass trying to storm the little steamer and force themselves aboard. The desperate populace would go to any lengths and take any chance to escape the city. What annoyed Ryder was that al-Faroque had allowed his men to light torches so that they could examine the faces and papers of those would-be passengers who were lining up at the entrance. The torchlight now illuminated the entire expanse of the wharf to the scrutiny of the Dervish sentries across the river.

“In God’s name, Major, get your men to douse those lights!” Ryder bellowed.

“I have General Gordon’s strict orders to allow no one to pass until I have checked their papers.”

“You are calling the Mahdi’s attention to our preparations to sail,” Ryder shouted back.

“I have my orders, Captain.”

While they argued, the crowd of passengers and hopefuls was swelling rapidly. Most were carrying infants or bundles of their possessions. However, they were becoming anxious and panicky at being forbidden entry. Many were shouting and waving passes over their heads. Those who had no pass stood stubborn and grim-faced, watching for their opportunity.

“Let those passengers through,” Ryder shouted.

“Not until I have examined their passes,” the Major retorted and turned his back, leaving Ryder fuming helplessly at his bridge rail. Al-Faroque was stubborn and the altercation was having no effect except to delay the embarkation interminably. Then Ryder noticed David’s tall figure pushing through the throng with his daughters pressing close behind him. With relief he saw that al-Faroque had recognized them and was waving them through the cordon of his troops. They hurried to the gangplank, burdened with their most valued possessions. Saffron was lugging her paintbox and Amber a canvas bag stuffed with her favourite books. Nazeera pushed the girls up the gangplank for David had used all his influence and the dignity of his office to obtain a pass for her.

“Good evening, David. You and your family will have my cabin,” Ryder greeted him, as he stepped aboard.

“No! No! My dear fellow, we cannot evict you from your home.”

“I will be fully occupied on the bridge during the voyage,” Ryder assured him. “Good evening, Miss Benbrook. There are only two narrow bunks. You will be a little crowded, I am afraid, but it’s the best available. Your maid must take her place in one of the barges.”

“Good evening, Mr. Courtney. Nazeera is one of us. She can share a bunk with Amber. Saffron can share with my father. I will sleep on the cabin floor. I am sure we will all be very comfortable,” Rebecca announced with finality. Before Ryder could protest an ominous chanting and shouting came from the large crowd held back by the guards at the head of the wharf, like floodwaters by a frail dam wall. It provided him with a welcome excuse to avoid another confrontation with Rebecca. There was an ominous glitter in her dark eyes, and a mutinous lift to her chin.

“Excuse me, David. I will have to leave you to install yourselves. I am needed elsewhere.” Ryder left them and ran down the gangplank. When he reached Major al-Faroque’s side he saw that the crowd beyond the line of soldiers was growing larger and more unruly with every minute that passed, and they were pressing right up to the points of the bayonets. Monsieur Le Blanc was the last of the diplomatic corps to arrive. Incongruously he was decked out in a flowing opera cloak and a Tyrolean hat with a bunch of feathers in the band. He was followed by a procession of his servants, each heavily laden with his luggage. Born aloft on the shoulders of his porters was a pair of brassbound cabin trunks, each the size of a pharaoh’s sarcophagus.

“You cannot bring all that rubbish on board, Monsieur,” Ryder told him, as the guards allowed him to pass.

Le Blanc reached him with sweat dripping off his chin, fanning himself with a pair of yellow gloves. “That “rubbish”, Monsieur, as you call it, is my entire wardrobe of clothing and is irreplaceable. I cannot leave without it.”

Ryder saw at once the futility of arguing with him. He stepped past Le Blanc and confronted the first party of trunk-bearers as they staggered through the cordon with their load.

“Put those down!” he ordered, in Arabic. They stopped and stared at him.

“Do not listen to him,” squealed Le Blanc, and rushed back to slap at their faces with his glove. “Bring it along, mes braves.” The porters started forward again, but Ryder measured the huge Arab who was clearly the head porter, then stepped up to him and slammed a punch into the point of his jaw. The porter dropped as though shot through the head. The trunk slipped from his fellows and crashed to the stone flags. The lid flew open and a small avalanche of clothing and toiletries poured out on to the wharf. The rest of the porters waited for no more but dropped their load and fled from the wrath of the mad ferenghi captain.

“Now see what you have done,” cried Le Blanc, and fell to his knees. He began gathering up armfuls of his scattered possessions and trying to stuff them back into the trunk. Behind him the crowd sensed an opportunity. They pressed forward more eagerly, and the guards were forced back a few paces.

Ryder grabbed Le Blanc’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “Come along, you Belgian imbecile.” He tried to drag him towards the gangplank.

“If I am an imbecile, then you are an English barbarian,” howled Le Blanc. He reached back and grabbed a trunk’s heavy brass handle. Ryder could not break his grip, although he hauled with all his strength.

From the back of the crowd a large rock was hurled at the head of the Major al-Faroque. It missed its target and struck Le Blanc’s cheek. He shrieked with pain, released the trunk handle and clutched his face with both hands. “I am wounded! I am gravely injured.”

More stones flew out of the crowd to fall among the soldiers and bounce off the pavement. One struck an Egyptian sergeant, who dropped his rifle and went down on one knee clutching his head. His men fell back, glancing over their shoulders for a line of retreat. The crowd yammered like a pack of hounds and pressed them harder. Someone picked up the sergeant’s fallen rifle and aimed it at Major al-Faroque. The man fired and a bullet grazed the major’s temple. Al-Faroque dropped, stunned. His men broke and ran back, trampling his prostrate form. They had been transformed in an instant from guards to refugees. Ryder picked up Le Blanc and ran with him kicking, screaming and struggling in his arms like a child in a tantrum.

Ryder dumped the Belgian on the deck, then raced on to his bridge. “Cast off!” he shouted to his crew, just as the first wave of rioters and half the Egyptian askaris scrambled on board. The decks were already so overcrowded that the crew were shoved from their positions and were unable to reach the mooring lines. More and more rioters raced down the wharf, and leapt on board the steamer or scrambled into the barges. Those already on board tried to beat them back and the decks were buried under a melee of struggling bodies.

Saffron popped her head out of the main cabin to watch the excitement. Ryder picked her up and thrust her bodily into her elder sister’s arms, then pushed them both into the cabin. “Stay out of the way,” he shouted, and slammed the door. Then he snatched the fire axe from its bracket at the head of the companionway. More rioters were coming out of the darkness, unending hordes.

Ryder felt the deck of the this heel over under the uneven distribution of weight. “Jock!” he shouted desperately. “The bastards are going to capsize us. We have to get her off the jetty.” He and Jock fought their way through the throng. They managed to cut the mooring lines free, but by this time the this was listing dangerously.

When Ryder reached his bridge again and opened the throttle, he could feel the enormous drag of the overloaded barges. He glanced back and saw that the nearest had less than two feet of freeboard. He spun the wheel towards the harbour entrance.

The this was driven by a Cowper engine, a powerful unit with three cylinders. This modern design incorporated an intermediate steam reservoir for compound expansion that allowed much higher boiler pressure than previous models. The this needed all this power to enable her to drag the string of heavily loaded barges up through the fast-flowing waters of the cataracts. Now, under the thrust of the Cowper, she built up speed and a white wave blossomed under the bows of each barge, faster still and the water curled over their bows. A chorus of despairing cries rose from the passengers in the barges as they began to flood and settle even lower in the water. Ryder cut back the power, and managed to con the this and her tows out through the harbour entrance into the open river where he would have more space in which to manoeuvre but the increased turbulence of the surface exacerbated the build-up of the bow waves.

Ryder was forced to throttle right back until he barely had steerage-way. The ship was picked up by the current and slewed across the channel with her tow lines becoming fouled. The barges ran down on the this. The first of the heavy vessels crashed into her stern, and she shuddered with the shock.

“Cut them loose!” Le Blanc screamed, his voice so shrill with terror that it cut through the din. “Cut them loose! Leave them behind! This is all their fault!”

The tangle of vessels, still bound together by their tow lines, drifted past the last buildings of the city, then into the broad reach of the combined Niles. Ryder realized he would have to anchor to give himself time to adjust the trim of the barges so that they would tow obediently. He considered turning back to put the stowaway passengers ashore. As they were now, they might flounder in the Shabluka Gorge. Even if they won through, his legitimate passengers would not be able to endure this overcrowding during the heat of the passage through the Desert of the Mother of Stones. Ryder gave the orders to break out the heaviest anchor before they were carried beyond the protection of General Gordon’s artillery. Suddenly there was a warning cry from Bacheet.

“Boats coming fast! Dervish boats from the other bank!” Ryder ran to him and saw a flotilla of dozens of small river craft appearing swiftly and silently out of the darkness from the direction of Omdurman, feluccas, nuggars and small dhows. He ran back to the bridge. The ten-thousand-candle-power lamp was mounted on the bridge coaming. He turned its brilliant white beam on the approaching craft. He saw that they were crammed with armed Ansar. The Dervish must have been fully aware of their escape plans and had been lying in ambush for the Intrepid this. As they closed with the steamer and her tangled string of barges the Ansar shrieked their terrible praise of God, and brandished their broadswords. The long blades glimmered in the light, and the passengers in the barges wailed with terror.

“Man the rail!” Ryder shouted to his crew. “Stand by to repel boarders!”

His crew understood this drill well. They had practised it regularly for the Upper Nile was a dangerous place and the tribes who lived upon its banks and in its marshes were savage and wild. They struggled to reach their places at the ship’s side to meet the enemy, but the passengers were packed shoulder to shoulder and they found it almost impossible to force their way through. The ruck of human bodies surged forward as they were shoved from behind, and some of those nearest the side were thrown overboard. They screamed and splashed on the surface until they were borne away on the current or sank beneath it. A young wife with her newborn infant strapped to her back went over and although she paddled desperately to keep her baby’s head above the surface, they were sucked back into the Intrepid this’s propeller.

It was fruitless to attempt to rescue any of those in the water. Nor was there time to anchor, for the Dervish boats closed in swiftly: as they reached the barges they hooked on to the sides and the Ansar warriors tried to clamber aboard, but they were unable to obtain a foothold on the packed decks. They hacked and stabbed at the screaming passengers with their swords, trying to clear a space. The barges rolled wildly. More bodies splashed overboard.

The next wave of Dervish boats came at the this from her starboard side. Ryder dared not open the throttle of his engines for fear of swamping the leading barge. If that happened the drag on the tow line would be so powerful the barge might drag this under with her. He could not run from them so he must fight them off.

By this time Jock McCrump and Bacheet had passed out the Martini-Henry rifles from the gun rack. Some of the Egyptian askaris had brought their Remington carbines on board with them and stood shoulder to shoulder with the crew at the rail. Ryder played the spotlight on the approaching boats. In its stark beam the faces of the Ansar were murderous with battle lust and religious ardour. They seemed as inhuman as a legion from the gates of hell.

“Aim!” shouted Ryder, and they levelled their rifles. “One round volley. Fire!”

The hail of heavy lead slugs ripped into the closely packed Arabs in the feluccas, and Ryder saw one Dervish flung backwards into the river, the sword spinning from his hands and half of his skull blown away in a bright cloud of brains and blood, sparkling crimson in the spotlight beam. Many more were struck down or hurled overboard by the impact of the 450-grain bullets at such close range.

“Load!” Ryder yelled. The breech-blocks snickered metallically, and the spent cases pinged away. The riflemen thrust fresh cartridges into the open breeches, and snapped the loading handles closed. “One round volley. Fire!”

Before the men in the small boats had recovered from the first volley, a second smashed into them, and they sheered away from it.

At that moment Ryder heard David’s voice carry above the wails and shrieks of the other passengers. “Behind you, Mr. Courtney!” David had climbed up on to the roof of the cabin. He was balanced there with one of his shotguns held at high port across his chest. Ryder saw Rebecca at his side. She held one of her father’s Webley revolvers in each hand, and handled them in a businesslike manner. Behind them stood the twins, each with a loaded shotgun ready to pass forward to their father. Their faces were moon pale but determined. The Benbrook family made a heroic little group above the struggling turmoil on the deck. Ryder felt a quick up-thrust of admiration for them.

David pointed over the opposite rail with the barrel of his shotgun, and Ryder saw that another wave of Dervish boats was closing in from that side. He knew he could not get his men back across the crowded deck before the attackers came aboard. If he did he would leave the starboard side undefended. Before he could make the decision and give the order, David took matters into his own hands. He raised the Purdey shotgun and let fly right and left into the crew of the nearest boat. The spreading cloud of goose shot was, at this range, more potent than the single Boxer-Henry bullet. The instant carnage in the felucca stunned the Dervish attackers. Four or five had gone down and were struggling on the deck in puddles of their own blood. Others had been knocked over the side and, flotsam, washed away on the stream.

Saffron slipped the second Purdey into her father’s hands while Amber reloaded the empty gun. Rebecca fired the Webley revolvers into the nearest felucca. The recoil from each shot threw the heavy weapons high above her head, but their effect was deadly. David fired again in such quick succession that the shots seemed to blend together in a single jarring concussion. As this havoc of lead pellets and revolver bullets sprayed over the boats, and they saw the tall white man on the cabin roof raise a third gun and aim at them, two of the felucca captains put their helms over, and turned away, unwilling to accept such punishment.

“Good man!” Ryder laughed. “And well done, you lovely ladies!”

The Dervish feluccas gave up on such dangerous, vicious prey and turned on the overladen and defenceless barges. Now that all the attackers were concentrating on them, their fate seemed sealed. Dervish Ansar hacked their way on board and the passengers were driven like sardines before a barracuda to the far rail of the ungainly craft. The bulwark was driven under by their combined weight and the river rushed in and flooded her. The barge foundered and rolled over. Her weed-carpeted bottom pointed for a moment towards the moon. Then she plunged under and was gone.

Immediately the sunken barge acted like a great drogue on the tow line, and the Intrepid this was cruelly curbed, like a horse pulled on to its haunches. The tow line had been made by twisting together three ordinary hawsers. It was immensely powerful, far too strong to part and release the barge. The this’s stern was dragged down irresistibly and the water flooded the afterdeck in a rush.

Ryder tossed his rifle to one of the this’s stokers and seized the heavy fire axe from him. He sprang down on to the flooding deck and shouldered his way to the stern. He was already knee deep in water, which cascaded in over the transom. Soon it would flood the engine room and quench the boiler fire. Ryder gathered himself and balanced over the tow line, which was now stretched tight as an iron bar through its fairlead in the stern plating. It was as thick as a fat man’s calf, and there was no give or elasticity in the water-laid strands.

Ryder swung the axe from full reach above his head with all his strength and, with a crack, a dozen strands parted at the stroke. He swung the axe high once more and put every ounce of muscle behind his next stroke. Another dozen strands gave way. He kept swinging the axe, grunting with the power behind each stroke. The remaining strands of the cable unravelled and snapped under the fierce drag of the submerged barge and the this’s driving propeller. Ryder jumped back just before the rope parted and slashed at him like some monstrous serpent. Had the parting cable end caught him squarely it might have broken both his legs, but it missed him by a few inches.

He felt the this lurch under him as she was freed of the drag, then spring back on to an even keel. She seemed to shake the water off her decks as a spaniel shakes when it comes ashore with a dead duck in its jaws. Then the propeller bit in hard and this surged forward. Saffron was shaken from her perch on the cabin roof. Her arms windmilled and Rebecca tried to catch her, but she slipped through her fingers and fell backwards with a shriek. If she had struck the steel deck she might have caved in the back of her skull, but Ryder threw aside the axe, dived under her and snatched her out of the air. For a moment he held her to his chest.

“A bird you certainly ain’t, Saffy.” He grinned at her, and ran with her towards his bridge. Although she tried to cling to him, he dumped her unceremoniously in Nazeera’s arms. Without a backward glance, he jumped behind the this’s wheel, and pushed the twin throttles wide open. With a rush of steam from her piston exhausts, she tore away, rejoicing to be free of her towing cable, building up swiftly to her top speed of twelve knots. Ryder brought her round to port in a narrow arc of 180 degrees until he was rushing straight back towards the tangled mass of barges and feluccas.

“What are you going to do?” David asked, as he appeared at Ryder’s side with his shotgun over a shoulder. “Pick up swimmers?”

“No,” Ryder replied grimly. “I am going to add to, not subtract from, the number of swimmers.” The bows of the this were reinforced with a double thickness of half-inch steel plate to withstand contact with the rocks of the cataracts. “I am going to ram,” he warned David. “Tell the girls that we will hit with an almighty thump and they must hang on tight.”

The Dervish boats were thick as vultures round an elephant carcass. Ryder saw that some of the Ansar were freeing the tow lines that held the barges together and passing the cables down to the dhows. Obviously they intended dragging them one at a time into the shallows of the west bank where they could complete the slaughter and plundering at their leisure. The rest were still hacking at the cowering bodies on the crowded decks or leaning over the sides to stab at those who were struggling in the water and screaming for mercy. In the beam of the this’s spotlight the waters of the Nile were stained the colour of mulberry juice by the blood of the dead and dying, and rivulets of blood trickled down the sides of the barges.

“The murderous swine,” Rebecca whispered. Then, to Nazeera, “Take the twins to the cabin. They should not witness this.” She knew it was a forlorn command. It would require more bodily strength than Nazeera possessed to remove them from the bridge. In the reflection of the spotlight’s beam their eyes were huge with dreadful fascination.

The capsized barge was floating bottom up, but sinking swiftly. Suddenly its stern rose, pointed at the moon, then slid below the surface and was gone. Ryder steered for a cluster of three big feluccas, which had tied on to the side of the nearest surviving barge. The Ansar were so busy with their bloody work on the deck that they did not seem to notice the this bearing down on them. At the last moment one of the dhow captains looked up and realized the danger. He shouted a warning, and some of his comrades were scrambling back into the feluccas as the this struck.

Ryder brought her in so skilfully that her steel bows tore through the wooden hulls in quick succession, the timbers shrieking and exploding with the sound of cannon fire as the boats capsized or were driven under the bloody waters. Although the this touched the side of the barge as she tore past, it was a glancing blow and the vessel spun away.

Ryder looked down into the terrified faces of the surviving refugees and heard their piteous entreaties for rescue. He had to harden his heart: the choice before him was to sacrifice all or rescue some. He left them and brought the this around, still under full throttle, then aimed at the next group of Dervish attack boats as they wallowed helplessly without steerage way alongside another drifting barge.

Now the Ansar were fully aware of the danger. The this bore down on them and the blazing Cyclops eye of the spotlight dazzled them. Some threw themselves overboard. Few could swim and their shields and broadswords drew them under swiftly. The this crashed at full throttle into the first felucca, shattered it, and ran on with scarcely a check. Beyond was one of the largest Dervish dhows, almost the length of the this herself. The steamer’s steel bows sliced deeply into her, but could not severe her hull. The impact threw her back on her heels and

some of those on her deck were hurled overboard with the crew of the dhow.

Ryder threw the this into reverse, and as he backed off from the mortally stricken dhow he played the spotlight beam around her. Most of the Dervish boats had recovered their boarding parties from the barges, abandoning their prey in the face of the this’s ferocious onslaught. They hoisted sail and steered back towards the west bank. The three surviving barges were no longer linked together, for the Ansar had succeeded in freeing the lines. Independently of each other they were spreading out and drifting in towards the west bank, thrust across the wide bend of the river by the current. In the powerful beam Ryder could just make out the Dervish hordes waiting to welcome them and complete the massacre. He swung the this around in the hope that he could reach at least one and pick up the tow line again in time to drag it off the hostile shore.

As he tore towards the barges he saw that the one that contained the cordwood, heavier than the others, was being carried more slowly on the current. The remaining two were still in its teeth, their decks piled with the dead and wounded, blood painting their sides, glistening red in the spotlight beam. They would soon be into the shallows where the this could not follow them.

Ryder knew every shoal and bend of the river as intimately as a lover knows the body of his beloved. He narrowed his eyes and calculated the angles and relative speeds. With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he realized he could not reach them in time to rescue them all. He kept the this tearing downstream under full steam, but he knew it was hopeless. He saw first one barge, then the other check sharply and come to a halt, stranded on the shoals. From the shore the waiting Dervish warriors plunged into the river and waded out waist-deep to finish the slaughter. Ryder was forced to throttle back and watch helplessly in horror and pity as the Ansar scrambled aboard and their bloody work began again. In vain he directed the rifle fire of his crew at the hordes of Dervish still wading out to the stranded vessels, but the range was long and the bullets had little effect.

Then he saw that the cordwood barge was still floating free. If he acted swiftly he might still be able to salvage it before it, too, went aground. He opened the throttle and raced down to intercept it. It was of crucial importance to recover this stock of fuel for his boilers. With it, they might reach the first cataract without being forced ashore to cut more timber. Ryder shouted to Jock McCrump to prepare a new tow line, then brought the this alongside the barge and held her in position while Jock and his boarding party jumped across to fix the fresh line.

“Quick as you like, Jock,” Ryder shouted. “We’re going to touch bottom at any moment.”

He looked anxiously at the enemy shore. They had now drifted within pistol shot, and even as he thought it he saw muzzle flashes as the Dervish riflemen opened fire on them from the bank. A bullet struck the bridge rail and ricocheted so close past David’s ear that he ducked instinctively, then straightened, looking embarrassed. He turned sternly to Rebecca: “Get the twins below immediately, and make sure they stay there until I tell you.”

Rebecca knew better than to argue with him when he used that tone. She gathered the twins and drove them off the deck with her fiercest tone and expression. Nazeera needed no urging and scuttled down to the cabin ahead of them.

Ryder played the spotlight along the bank, hoping to intimidate the Ansar marksmen or, at least, to illuminate them so that his own crew could return fire more accurately. Although Jock worked fast to rig the new tow line, it seemed like an eternity as they drifted swiftly towards the shallows and the waiting enemy. At last he bellowed across, “All secure, Captain.”

Ryder reversed the this slowly until the gap between the two vessels was narrow enough for Jock and his team to leap back on board the steamer. As soon as his feet hit the this’s steel deck he yelled, “Haul away!”

With a rush of relief Ryder eased the throttles ahead and gently drew the barge after him until she was following like an obedient dog on a leash. He began to haul her off into the main stream of the river, when a rushing sound filled the air and something passed so close above him that his hat spun off his head. Then, immediately afterwards, there followed the unmistakable boom of a six-pounder cannon, the sound following the shell from the west bank.

“Ah! They’ve brought up one of their artillery pieces,” David remarked, in a conversational tone. “Only wonder is that it has taken them so long.”

Quickly Ryder doused the spotlight beam. “They could not fire before for fear of hitting their own ships,” he said. And his last words were drowned by the next shell howling overhead. “That was not so close.” He kept his right hand pressing down on the throttle handles to milk the last turn of speed out of his vessel. The weight and drag of the barge cut at least three knots off their speed.

“They are close enough to be using open sights,” David said. “They should be able to do better than that.”

“They will oh, I am sure they will.” Ryder looked up at the moon,

hoping to see the shadow of a cloud fall across it. But the sky was brilliant with stars and the moon lit the surface of the Nile as if it were a stage. For the gunners the this would stand out against the silver waters like a granite hillock.

The next shell fell so close alongside that a shower of river water fell over the bridge and soaked those on it so that their shirts clung to their backs. Then there were more cannon flashes along the shore behind them as the Dervish gunners dragged up gun after gun and unlimbered to bring the this under fire.

“Jock, we will have to give them the best of it and cut the barge loose,” Ryder called to the engineer.

“Aye, skipper. I had a notion ye would say just that.” Jock picked up the axe and started towards the stern.

Another Dervish gun-carriage galloped along the bank until it was slightly ahead of the straining this and her burden. Though neither Ryder nor David was aware of it, the master gunner commanding the mounted battery was the Ansar whom David had dubbed the Bedlam Bedouin.

From astride the lead horse of the team, he gave a sharp command and they wheeled the gun carriage into line with the gun’s muzzle pointing out across the river, and unlimbered. The number two and three loaders stamped the heavy steel base plate into the soft earth of the riverbank. They set the point of the trail into its slot in the plate. While they worked the master gunner was shrieking orders, wild with excitement: he had never in all his brief career been offered such a fine target as the ferenghi ship now presented. It was almost broadside on. Its silhouette stood out crisply against the shimmering waters. It was so close that he could hear the terrified voices of the passengers raised in prayer and supplication, and the peremptory commands of the captain speaking in the infidel language the gunner could not understand.

He used a hand-spike to traverse the gun round the last few degrees until the long barrel was aiming directly at the ship. Then he wound down the elevation handle until he was gazing over the open iron sights at his target.

“In the Name of Allah, bring the bomboms!” he screamed at his loaders. They staggered up with the first ammunition box and knocked off the clips that held the lid in place. Inside, four shells lay in their wooden cradles, sleek and glistening ominously. The gunner, self-taught in the art of gunnery, had not yet fathomed the arcane principle of fuse delays. In fumbling haste, he used the Allen key he wore round his neck to screw the fuses to the maximum setting in the belief that this imparted to each missile the greatest amount of destructive power. The

this was a mere three hundred yards off the bank. He set his fuses at two thousand yards.

“In God’s Name let us begin!” he ordered.

“In God’s Name.” His number two flung open the breech of the Krupps with a flourish.

“In God’s Name,” intoned the number three, and slid one of the long shells deep into the chamber until it was snug against the lands. The number two slammed the breech-block shut.

“God is great,” said the Bedlam Bedouin, as he squinted over his sights to make certain of his aim. He traversed the mount four degrees left until he was aiming at the base of the this’s funnel. Then he jumped back and seized the lanyard. “Allah is mighty,” he said.

“There is no other God but God,” chorused his team.

“And Muhammad and the Mahdi are his prophets.” The gunner jerked the lanyard, and the Krupps slammed back against its base plate. The discharge deafened the crew with its report and blinded them with the muzzle flash and the flying dust.

On an almost flat trajectory the shell howled over the river and struck the Intrepid this two feet above the waterline and just astern of midships. It passed obliquely through her hull as readily as a stiletto through human flesh, but by virtue of the maximum fuse setting it did not explode.

Had it been three inches higher or lower it would have done minimal damage, nothing that Jock McCrump with his gas welding equipment could not have repaired within a few hours. But that was not to be. In passing it slashed through the main steam line from the boiler. Steam heated to twice the temperature of boiling water and under pressure of almost three hundred pounds to the square inch erupted in a shrieking jet from the ruptured pipe. It swept over the nearest stoker as he bent to thrust a faggot of timber into the open firebox of the boiler. He was naked in the heat, except for a turban and loincloth. Instantly the steam peeled the skin and the flesh off his body in great slabs to expose the bones beneath. The agony was so terrible that the man could not utter a sound. Mouth gaping in a silent scream, he fell writhing to the deck and froze into a sculpture of the utmost agony.

Steam filled the engine room and boiled in dense white clouds from the ventilation ports to pour over the decks, shrouding the this in a dense white cloud. Rapidly the ship lost power and swung idly broadside to the current. The Bedlam Bedouin and his gun-crew howled with excitement and triumph as they reloaded. But their quarry was now obscured by her own steam cloud. Although shells from many Krupps batteries along the bank plunged into the water alongside, or ripped the air overhead as though a giant was tearing a canvas mainsail in two, no more struck the little this.

Jock McCrump had been on the bridge with Ryder when the shell struck. He grabbed a heavy pair of working gloves from the locker beside the forward steam winch, and pulled them on as he ran back to the engine-room hatchway. The steam that billowed through the opening stung his face and the bare skin of his arms, but the pressure in the boiler had dropped as the steam bled off through the ruptured pipe. He ripped the heavy canvas curtain that covered the hatch from its rail, and snapped at Ryder, “Wrap me, skipper!”

Ryder understood instantly what he was going to do. He shook out the thick curtain, then wound Jock in it, cloaking his head and every part of his body but for his arms.

“The grease pot!” Jock’s voice was muffled by the folds of canvas. Ryder seized it from its hook beside the winch, scooped out handfuls of the thick black grease and spread it over the exposed skin of Jock’s muscular arms.

“That will do,” Jock grunted, and opened a slit in his canvas head cover to draw one last deep breath. Then he covered his face and plunged blindly down the steel companion ladder. He held his breath and closed his eyes tightly. But the steam scalded the exposed skin, melting away the coating of black grease from his bare arms.

Jock knew every inch of his engine room so intimately that he did not need to see it. Guiding himself with a light touch of gloved fingers over the familiar machinery, he moved swiftly towards the main pressure line. The shrieking of high-pressure steam escaping from the rupture threatened to burst his eardrums. He felt his arms cooking like lobsters in the pot and fought the impulse to scream, lest he use the last air in his aching lungs. He stumbled over the stoker’s corpse, but recovered his balance and found the main steam line. It was wrapped with asbestos rope to prevent heat loss so he was able to run his gloved hands along it until he found the wheel of the stopcock that controlled the flow of steam into the line. Swiftly he spun the wheel and the rushing sound of escaping steam rose sharply, then was snuffed out as the valve closed.

It took ineffable pain to make a man like Jock McCrump sob, but he was crying like an infant as he staggered back to the foot of the companion ladder, then clambered painfully up to the deck. He stumbled out into the night air, which felt cold after the hellish atmosphere of the engine room, and Ryder caught him before he fell. He stared in horror at the huge blisters hanging from Jock’s forearms. Then he roused himself and scooped more grease from the pot to cover them, but Rebecca had appeared suddenly and pushed him aside.

“This is woman’s work, Mr. Courtney. You see to your boat and leave this to me.” She was carrying a hurricane lamp and, by its feeble light, examined Jock’s arms, pursing her lips grimly. She set the lamp on the deck, crouched beside Jock and began to work on his injuries. Her touch was deft and gentle.

“God love you, Jock McCrump, for what you’ve done to save my ship.” Ryder lingered beside Jock. “But the Dervish are still shooting at us.” As if to underline the fact another Krupps shell plunged into the river, so close alongside that the spray rained down on them like a tropical cloudburst. “How bad is the damage? Can we get power on at least one of the engines to get us out of range of the guns on the bank?”

“I couldnae see much at all down there, but at the best odds the main boiler will not have as much pressure in her as a virgin’s fart.” Jock glanced at Rebecca. “Begging your pardon, lassie.” He stifled a groan as Rebecca touched one of the pendulous blisters, which burst open.

“I’m sorry, Mr. McCrump.”

“It’s naught at all. Dinna fash yourself, woman.” Jock looked up at Ryder. “Maybe, just maybe, I can knock together some kind of jury-rig and get steam to the cylinders. It just depends on the damage she’s suffered down there. But at the best I doubt we’ll get more than a few pounds of pressure into the line.”

Ryder straightened up and looked around. He saw the dark shape of Tutti Island no more than a cable’s length downstream from where they wallowed, powerless, under the Dervish guns. What the Dervish cannon fire lacked in accuracy, it made up for in rapidity. From the sheer weight of shells being hurled at them, it could not be long before they received another direct hit.

He watched the changing bearing of the island for a moment longer. “The current is carrying us past the island. If we anchor in its lee it will screen us from the guns.” He left them and shoved his way through the passengers, shouting for Bacheet and his mate Abou Sinn. “Clear this rabble out of the way, and prepare to anchor at my command.”

They jumped to their stations, shoving and kicking aside the bewildered ask ari and stowaways to give themselves room to work. Bacheet freed the retaining tackle from the ring of the heavy fisherman’s anchor that hung at the bows. Abou Sinn stood over the chain where it emerged through the fairlead of the chain locker with the four-pound hammer ready.

Ryder peered back at the land, watching the muzzle flashes of the Dervish guns and judging his moment. For a few minutes he held his breath while it seemed that they would be driven ashore on the island, then an eddy in the current pushed them clear and they drifted so close to the eastern side of the island that they were sheltered from the Dervish batteries.

“Let go!” Ryder shouted to Abou Sinn, and with a blow of the sledgehammer he knocked the pin out of the anchor shackle. The anchor splashed into the river, the chain roaring out after it, and found the bottom. The chain stopped running and Bacheet secured it. The this came up hard and short, and spun round in the current to face upstream, with the timber barge behind her on her tow line. The Dervish cannon fire tapered off as the gunners found themselves deprived of their target. A few more shells screeched high overhead or burst ineffectually into the sandbanks of the screening island, then the gunners gave up and silence descended.

Ryder found Jock sitting on the bunk in the cabin, being attended to by all the Benbrook ladies. “How are you feeling?” he asked solicitously.

“Not so bad, skipper.” He indicated his arms: “These bonny little lasses have done a fine job on them.” Rebecca had bandaged both arms with strips that the twins had torn from one of the threadbare cotton bedsheets, then fashioned a double sling from the same material. Now she was brewing a mug of tea for him on the stove in the tiny galley next door. Jock grinned. “Home was never so good. That’s why I ran away.”

“Sorry to interrupt your retirement, but can I trouble you to take a peek at your engine?”

“Just when I was really enjoying me self Jock grumbled, but rose to his feet.

“I’ll bring your mug down to the engine room for you, Mr. McCrump,” Amber promised.

“And I’ll bring one for you, Ryder,” Saffron called.

Jock McCrump followed Ryder down to the engine room. Bacheet and Abou Sinn carried away the stoker’s corpse, and by the light of a pair of hurricane lamps they assessed the damage. Now that Jock was able to examine his beloved engine more closely, he grumbled bitterly to disguise his relief. “Bloody heathens! Can’t trust them further than you can throw one of them. No sense of common decency, doing this to my bonny Cowper.” However, only the main steam line shot was through; the engine itself was untouched.

“Well, there’s naught I can do for the steam line this side of my workshop in Khartoum. In the meantime, though, perhaps I can cobble something together to get a mite of steam through to the engine, but I reckon we’ll not be breaking any speed records with the old girl.” Then he held up his bandaged arms. “You’ll have to do the donkey work, skipper.”

Ryder nodded. “While we’re at it, I’m going to send Bacheet to move all our uninvited passengers across to the barge. That will correct my trim and give me a little more manoeuvrability and control. It will also give the crew more room to work the ship properly.”

While the passengers were trans hipped Ryder and his engineer began the repairs. Working quickly but carefully, they bled off the remaining steam from the boilers and drew the fires from the grate. Then they used the in-line valve cocks to isolate the damaged section of the main steam line. Once this was done, they could begin rigging a bypass line to carry steam through to the power plant. They had to measure the lengths they needed and cut the new pipe sections to length by hacksaw, then clamp them into the heavy vice on Jock’s workbench and cut threads into the ends of the pipes with the haijd dies. They packed the joints with asbestos thread and tightened the elbows and connectors with their combined weight on the long-handled pipe wrench. They ended up with a mare’s nest of convoluted improvised piping.

The work took the rest of the night, and by the time they were ready to test its integrity dawn was showing through the engine-room portholes. It took another hour to set the fires in the grates and work up a head of steam in the boiler. When the needle of the pressure gauge touched the green line Jock gingerly eased open the cock of the steam valve. Ryder stood beside him and watched anxiously, hands black with grease, knuckles bruised and bleeding from rough contact with steel pipes. They held their breath as the needle on the secondary pressure gauge rose, and watched the new pipe joints for the first sign of a leak.

“All holding,” Jock grunted, and reached across to the port-engine throttle. With a suck and a hiss of live steam the big triple pistons began to pump up and down in their cylinders, the rods moved like the legs of marching men, and the propeller shaft rotated smoothly in its bearings.

“Power up and holding.” Jock grinned with the pride of accomplishment. “But I cannae take the chance and open her full. You’ll have to take what you get, skipper, and thank the Lord and Jock McCrump for that much.”

“You’re a living, breathing miracle, Jock. I hope your mother was proud of you.” Ryder chuckled. When he wiped the sweat off his forehead, the back of his fist left a black smear. “Now, stand by to give me everything you can just as soon as I can get the anchor weighed and cat ted He charged up the ladder to the bridge. Abou Sinn followed him and ran to the controls of the steam winch.

As the this pushed slowly forward against the river current, the anchor chain came clanking in through the hawser hole The flukes broke free from the riverbed and Ryder eased open the throttle. The this responded so sluggishly that she made little headway against the four-knot current. Ryder felt a cold slide of disappointment. He glanced over the stern at the barge. Drawing deeply under its cargo of cordwood and uninvited passengers, it was behaving with mulish recalcitrance. Dozens of pathetic faces stared across at him.

By God, I’ve half a mind to cut you free and leave you to the mercy of the Mahdi, he thought venomously, but with an effort set the temptation aside. He turned instead to David, who had joined him silently. “She’ll never be able to hold her own in the Shabluka Gorge. When the entire flow of the combined Niles is forced through the narrows the current reaches almost ten knots. With only half her power the this will be helpless in its grip. The risk of piling up on the rocky cliffs is too great to accept.”

“What other choice do you have?”

“Nothing for it but to battle our way back to Khartoum.”

David looked worried. “My girls! I hate to take them back to that death-trap. How long will Gordon be able to hold out in the city before the Dervishes break in?”

“Let’s hope it’s long enough for Jock to finish his repairs so that we can make another run for it. But now our only hope is to get back into the harbour.” Ryder turned the this across the current and headed her for the east bank. He tried to keep the bulk of Tutti Island between the ship and the Dervish batteries, but before they were half-way across the first shells were howling above the river. However, with the current giving him some assistance Ryder opened the range swiftly, and the skill of the Bedlam Bedouin and his comrades was not up to the task of hitting a target as small as the Intrepid this at a range of over a mile, except by the direct intervention of Allah. This day, however, their prayers went unanswered, and although there were a few encouraging near misses the this and her barge made good their crossing of the mainstream, then turned south for the city, hugging the furthest edge of the channel at extreme range for the Krupps.

The Dervish feluccas sallied out from the west bank and made another attempt to intercept the steamer, but by now the sun was high. General Gordon’s artillery on the riverfront of Khartoum was able to direct furious and remarkably accurate fire upon the enemy flotilla as it came within easy range. Ryder saw four small boats blown into splinters by direct hits with high explosive and correctly fused shells. The severed limbs and heads of the crews were hurled high in the yellow clouds of lyddite fumes. This discouraged all but a few of the bravest, most foolhardy captains, and most of the small boats turned back for the shore.

Three of the attack boats pressed on across the river, but the wind blew strongly from the south and the current was at five knots from the same direction. Two of the feluccas were swept downstream and were unable to make good a course to intercept the this. Only one of them stood in her way. But Ryder had been given plenty of time to prepare a reception for it. He ordered all the deck passengers to lie flat, so as to offer no target to the attackers. As the enemy vessel raced towards them, heeled over by the wind and pushed along by the current, Bacheet and Abou Sinn were crouched below the starboard bulwark.

“Let them get close,” Ryder called down from the bridge, as he judged the moment. Then he raised his voice to full pitch: “Now!J he bellowed.

Bacheet and Abou Sinn sprang up from hiding and aimed the brass nozzles of the steam hoses down into the undecked hull of the felucca. They opened the valves and solid white jets of live steam from the this’s boiler engulfed the warriors crowded into the open boat. Their bloodthirsty war cries and angry challenges turned to screams of anguish as the dense clouds of steam flayed the skin and flesh from their faces and bodies. The hull of the felucca crashed heavily against the steel of the this’s hull, and the impact snapped off the mast at deck level. The felucca scraped down the steel side of the steamer, then spun out of control in her wake. She now wallowed directly in the path of the heavily laden barge. The Ansar were so blinded by the steam that they did not see her coming. The barge smashed into the frail craft and trod her under the surface. None of her crew surfaced again.

“That takes care of that,” Ryder murmured, with satisfaction, then forced a smile at Rebecca. “Forgive me for depriving’ you of the comfort of the cabin floor, but tonight you will have to make do with your own bed in the palace.”

“That is a hardship I am determined to endure with the utmost stoicism, Mr. Courtney.” Her smile was almost as unconvincing as his, but he was amazed at how pretty she looked in the midst of so much mayhem and ugliness.

General Charles Gordon stood on the steps above the harbour entrance and watched the this limp in. When Ryder looked up at him from the bridge, his regard was cold and cutting as blue ice, with no trace of a smile nor any hint of sympathy. When the steamer was tied up at the stone jetty Gordon turned away and disappeared.

Major al-Faroque remained to welcome the bedraggled passengers as they staggered ashore from the barge. His head was swathed in a white bandage, but his expression was ferocious as he picked out those of his men who had deserted their posts and attempted to escape. As he recognized them he lashed each offender across the face with the kurbash whip he carried, and nodded to the squad of ask ari who were lined up behind him. They seized the marked men and locked manacles on their wrists.

Later that afternoon, when Ryder was summoned to the general’s office in the consular palace to make his report, Gordon was distant and dismissive. He listened without comment to all that Ryder had to say, condemning him with his silence. Then he nodded. “I am to blame as much as anybody. I placed too much responsibility on your shoulders. After all, you are not a soldier, merely a mercenary trader.” He spoke scornfully.

Ryder was about to make an angry retort when a volley of rifle fire rang out from the courtyard of the palace below. He turned quickly to the window and looked down.

“Al-Faroque is dealing with the deserters.” Gordon had not risen from his chair. Ryder saw that the ten men of the firing squad were leaning nonchalantly on their weapons. Against the wall of the courtyard facing them sprawled an untidy row of corpses. The dead men were all blindfolded with their wrists tied behind their backs, their shirts bloodsoaked. Major al-Faroque was walking down the line, his service revolver in his right hand. He paused over a body that was twitching spasmodically and fired a single shot into the blindfolded head. When he reached the end of the line he nodded to a second squad of men, who ran forward and piled the corpses into a waiting cart. Then another group of condemned men were led up from the cells into the courtyard and lined up along the wall. While a sergeant tied their blindfolds, the firing squad came to attention.

“I hope, General, that the consul’s daughters have been warned of these executions,” Ryder said grimly. “It is not something that young gentlewomen should witness.”

“I sent word to him that they should keep to their quarters. Your concern for the young ladies does you credit, Mr. Courtney. However, you might have been of greater service to them by affording them safe passage downriver to a place of security.”

“It is my intention to do so, General, as soon as I am able to effect repairs to my steamer,” Ryder assured him.

“It might already be too late for that, sir. Within the last few hours I have received the most reliable intelligence that the Emir Osman Atalan of the Beja tribe is in full march with his array to join the Mahdi’s besieging force out there.” General Gordon pointed out of the window across the White Nile at the Omdurman bank of the river.

Ryder was unable to conceal his alarm. With the notorious Osman Atalan opposing them, the nature of the siege would change. Any escape from Khartoum would become incalculably more difficult.

As if to endorse these grim thoughts, the next volley from the execution squad crashed out, and immediately afterwards Ryder heard the soft sounds of human bodies flopping lifelessly to the ground.

The Emir Osman Atalan, beloved of the Divine Mahdi, was riding at large. In response to the Mahdi’s summons to Khartoum, he had been for many weeks on the march up from the Red Sea Hills with his army. His warrior spirit chafed at the monotony and drudgery of the pace set by the great agglomeration of animals and people. The baggage train of camels and donkeys, the columns of slaves and servants, women and children was strung out over twenty leagues, and when they camped at night it was like a city of tents and animal lines. Each of Osman’s wives rode in a curtained litter on the back of her own camel, and slept at night in her own commodious tent, attended by her slaves. In the van and in the rear guard rode the legions of the forty thousand fighting men he commanded.

All the subservient tribes had massed to his scarlet and black banner: the Hamran, the Roofar of the hills and the Hadendowa of the Red Sea littoral. These were the same warriors who, within the last few years, had annihilated two Egyptian armies. They had slaughtered Baker Pasha’s superior numbers at Tokar and El Teb and left a wide road of bleached bones across the desert. When the wind came from the west the inhabitants of Suakin on the coast twenty miles away could still smell the unburied dead.

Many of the tribes under Osman Atalan had played a major role at the battle of El Obeid where General Hicks and his seven thousand had perished. They were the flower of the Dervish army, but in their multitudes they moved too slowly for a man such as Osman Atalan.

He felt the call of the open desert and the silence of wild lands. He left the teeming legions to continue the march towards the City of Infidels while he and a small band of his most trusted aggagiers ranged out on their horses to indulge in the most dangerous sport known to the bravest of the tribes.

As he reined in his steed on the crest of a long wooded ridge that overlooked the valley of the Atbara river, Osman Atalan cut a romantic, heroic figure. He wore no turban, and his thick black hair was parted down the middle and drawn into a long plait that hung to the level of the blue silk sash that girl the waist of his ornately patched jibba. He held the scabbard of his broadsword clamped under his right knee against the saddle. The hilt was exquisitely fashioned from rhinoceros horn with a patina like amber, and the blade was inlaid with gold and silver. Under the fine loose cloth of his jibba his body was lean and wiry, the muscles of his legs and arms like the woven sinews of a bowstring. When he swung down from the saddle he stood tall beside his horse’s head and stared out across the wide land below, searching for the first glimpse of the chase. His eyes were large and dark with the thick, curling lashes of a beautiful woman, but his features seemed carved in old ivory, hard flesh and harder bone. He was a creature of the desert and the wild places, and there was no soft flesh on him. The inexorable sun had gilded but not blackened his skin.

His aggagiers rode up behind him and dismounted. The title of honour was reserved for those warriors who hunted the most dangerous game on horseback, armed only with the broadsword. They were men carved from the same stone as their lord. They loosened the girths of their horses’ saddles, then tethered the animals in the shade. They watered them, pouring from the waterskins into leather buckets, then spread mats of plaited palm fronds before them and put down a small heap of dhurra meal for them to feed. They themselves did not drink or eat, for abstinence was part of their warrior tradition.

“If a man drinks copiously and often, he never learns to resist the sway of the sun and the sand,” the old men said.

While the horses rested the aggagiers took down their swords and shields from where they were tied to the saddles. They sat in a small, companionable group in the sunlight, and began to strop their blades on the cured giraffe hide of their shields. The hide of the giraffe was the toughest of all wild game, yet not so heavy as that of the buffalo or hippopotamus. The shields were round targes, unadorned with image or emblem, marked only by the blade of the enemy, or the claw and fang of the chase. Blade-honing was a pastime with which they filled their leisure, as much part of their life as breathing, more so than eating or drinking.

“We will sight the quarry before noon,” said Hassan Ben Nader, who was the emir’s lance-bearer, ‘praised be the Name of God.”

“In Allah’s Name,” the others chorused softly.

“I have never seen a spoor such as this lead bull leaves upon the earth,” Hassan went on, speaking softly so that he did not offend his master or the djinns of the wilderness.

“He is the bull of all bulls,” they agreed. “There will be sport for a man before the sun sets.”

They glanced sideways at Osman Atalan, showing respect by not staring at him directly. He was deep in contemplation, squatting with his elbows on his knees and his smooth-shaven chin in the cup of his hands.

There was silence except for the susurration of steel on leather. They paused in this endless activity only to test an edge with a thumb. Each blade was about three and a half feet in length, and double-edged. It was a replica of the broadswords of the crusaders that, centuries before, had so impressed the Saracens before the walls of Acre and Jerusalem. The most treasured blades had been forged from the steel of Solingen, and handed down from father to son. The marvelous temper of this metal imparted immense power to the blade, and it was capable of taking an edge like that of a surgeon’s scalpel the lightest stroke would split hide and hair, flesh and sinew to the deepest bone. A full stroke could divide an enemy at the waist, cutting him in two as effortlessly as though he were a ripe pomegranate. The scabbards were fashioned from two flat pieces of soft mimosa wood, heW together and covered by the skin of an elephant’s ear, dried hard and strong as iron. On the flat of the scabbard were two raised leather projections about twelve inches apart, which held the weapon securely under the horseman’s thigh. Even at full gallop it would not flap and bounce in the ungainly manner of the swords of European cavalry.

The aggagiers rested while the high sun moved through an arc of three fingers across the sky. Then Osman Atalan rose to his feet, in a single flowing, graceful movement. Without a word the others rose also, went to their mounts and tightened the girths. They rode on down the slope of the valley, through open savannah in which the stately flat-topped acacia trees stood along the banks of the Atbara river. They dismounted beside one of the deep green pools. The elephant had been there before them. They had filled their bellies with water, then bathed riotously, hosing powerful jets from their trunks over themselves and the surrounding sandbanks. They had scooped up cart loads of thick black mud and plastered it on their heads and backs as protection against the sun and the swarms of biting insects. Then the three mighty grey beasts had wandered away along the bank, but the sand and mud they had left on the edges of the pool were so fresh that they were still damp.

The aggagiers whispered excitedly together, pointing out the huge round tracks of the largest bull. Osman Atalan laid his war shield upon one of the pad marks. The circumference exceeded the giraffe-skin targe by the breadth of his finger.

“In God’s Name,” they murmured. “This is a mighty animal, and worthy of our steel.”

“I have never seen a greater bull than this,” said Hassan Ben Nader. “He is the father of every elephant that has ever lived.” They filled the waterskins and let the horses drink again, then mounted up and followed the trail through the open acacia forest. The three bulls were moving head on to the faint breeze so that they would detect any danger ahead. The aggagiers moved up quietly and intently behind them.

The lead bull had dropped a pile of bright yellow dung in a clearing. It was stringy with chewed bark that he had stripped from the acacias, and lumpy with the stones of the Doum palm tree. A swarm of bright butterflies hovered over it. The scent was so strong that one horse snorted nervously. His rider calmed him with a reassuring touch on his neck.

They rode on, with Osman Atalan a length ahead. The trail was plain to see even from the distance of a hundred paces or more, for the bulls had ripped long slabs of bark from the boles of the acacias. The pale wounds were so raw and recent that they glistened with the running sap, which would dry into sticky black lumps of the precious gum arabic.

Emir Osman rose high in the stirrups and shaded his eyes to gaze forward. Almost half a mile ahead, the shaggy head of a tall Doum palm rose above the lesser trees of the savannah. Although the breeze was so faint as to be barely palpable the distant palm top was whipping from side to side as though it were being battered by a hurricane.

He looked back at his companions and nodded. They smiled, because they understood what they were witnessing. One of the bulls had placed his forehead against the bottle-shaped trunk of the palm and was shaking it with all his massive strength as though it were a sapling. This brought the ripe Doum nuts showering down on his head.

They reined in their steeds to a walk. The horses had scented the chase and were sweating and trembling with fear and excitement, for they knew what would happen next. Abruptly Osman laid his hand on his mount’s withers. She was a creamy honey-coloured mare. She lifted her lovely Arabian head and flared the wide nostrils that were the mark of her breed, but stopped obediently. Her name was Hulu Mayya, Sweet Water, the most precious substance in this thirsty land. She was six years old and in her prime, swift as an oryx and as gentle as a kitten, but with the heart of a lioness. In the clamour of battle and the fury of the chase she never faltered.

Like her rider she stared ahead for the first glimpse of their quarry. Suddenly there he was, one of the lesser bulls standing separated from his companions, dozing under the spreading branches of a mimosa tree. The dappled shadows blurred his outline.

Osman gestured with his right hand, and they went forward, the horses stepping warily as though they expected a cobra to rear up under their hoofs. Almost imperceptibly the shapes of the other two beasts emerged from among the trees. One, tormented by the stinging flies, shook his head violently so that his ears clapped thunderously against his shoulders. His tusks gleamed dully in the shade, darkened by sap and vegetable juices to the colour of a meerschaum pipe stained by tobacco smoke. The curved and tapered pillars of ivory were so vast that the aggagiers grunted with satisfaction, and touched the hilts of their broadswords. The third bull was almost hidden by a patch of kit tar thorn bush From this angle it was impossible to judge how his tusks compared with those of his companions.

Now that Osman Atalan had placed the position of each bull, he could plan his attack on them. First they must deal with the nearest, for if they passed across his wind their scent would be carried to him. The smell of man and horse would send him away at a rush, trumpeting the alarm to the others, and only hard riding would bring them up to the herd again. In a whisper that was barely a movement of his lips, but with expressive gestures of the hands Osman Atalan gave his commands to the aggagiers. From long experience each man knew what was expected of him.

The bull under the mimosa tree was angled half away from them, so when Osman led them forward again he circled out to the right, then came in more directly from behind. The eyesight of the elephant is poor, when compared with that of other creatures of the wild, such as the baboon and the vulture. But if it has difficulty distinguishing shape it picks up movement readily enough.

Osman dared not approach closer while he was mounted. He slipped from the saddle and girded up the hem of his jibba with the blue sash, leaving his legs covered only with baggy breeches. He tightened the straps of his sandals, then drew his broadsword. Instinctively he tried the edge and sucked the drop of blood that welled from the ball of his thumb. He tossed Sweet Water’s reins to Hassan, and started towards the massive grey shape in the shade of the mimosa tree. The bull seemed as majestic as a three-decked man-o’-war. It seemed impossible that such a mighty beast could fall to the puny blade.

Osman stepped lithely and lightly with the grace of a dancer, carrying the sword in his right hand. However, he had bound the first hand’s breadth of the blade above the cruciform crosspiece of the hilt with a strip of skin from the ear of a freshly killed elephant: now that this had dried and cured it formed a double grip for his left hand.

As he approached the bull he heard the soft rumbling of its belly -the animal was sharing its contentment and pleasure with the rest of the herd, who were also dozing in the somnolent midday heat nearby. The bull was swaying gently, and swishing lazily at the flies with his stubby tail; the wiry bunch of hair at the end was almost worn away with age. The gigantic stained tusks were so long and thick that the bull was resting the blunt tips on the hard-baked earth. His weathered, corrugated trunk hung slackly between the ivory shafts. He was fondling the sun-dried, bleached femur bone of a long-dead buffalo with the tip, rolling it against his front foot, then lifting it to his lips as if to taste it, rubbing it between the fleshy finger-like projections on each side of the nostril openings, much as an ancient Coptic priest might play with his beads as he sat dreaming in the sun.

Osman changed his grip, two-handed now for the fatal stroke, and moved down the bull’s flank close enough to touch him with the point of the sword. The riven grey hide hung down in bunches around the bull’s knees, and in loose flaps under his sagging belly, like the clothing of an old man, too baggy for his wizened body.

His aggagiers watched him with awe and admiration. A lesser warrior would have chosen to hamstring his quarry, approaching the unsuspecting beast from behind and, with swift double strokes, severing the main tendons and arteries in the back of the legs above the huge, splayed feet. That injury would allow the hunter to escape, but cripple and anchor the bull until the severed arteries had drained the life from him, a slow death that might take up to an hour. However, to attempt the head-on approach as their emir was doing, increased the danger a hundredfold. Osman was now well within the arc of the trunk, which was capable of delivering a blow that would shatter every bone in his body. Those huge ears picked up the smallest sound, even a carefully controlled breath, and at such close quarters the rheumy little eyes would detect the slightest movement.

Osman Atalan stood in the bull’s shadow, and looked up at one of those eyes. It seemed much too small for the huge grey head, and was almost completely screened by the thick fringe of colourless lashes as the bull blinked sleepily. The dangling trunk was also shielded by the thick yellow tusks. Osman had to entice the bull into extending it towards him. Any untoward movement, any incongruous sound would trigger a devastating response. He would be clubbed down by a blow from the trunk, or trampled under the pads of those great feet, or transfixed by an ivory tusk, then knelt upon and ground to bloody paste under the bulging bone of the bull’s forehead.

Osman twisted the blade gently between his fists and, with the polished metal, picked up one of the stray sunbeams that pierced the leafy canopy above his head. He played the reflected sunbeam on to the bull’s gently flapping ear, then directed it forward gradually until it shot a tiny diamond wedge of light into the bull’s half-closed eye. The elephant opened his eye fully and it glittered as it sought out the source of this mild annoyance. He detected no movement other than the trembling spot of sunlight, and reached out his trunk towards it, not alarmed but mildly curious.

There was no need for Osman to adjust his double grip on the hilt. The blade described a glittering sweep in the air, fast as the stoop of the hunting peregrine. There was no bone in the trunk to turn the blow so the silver blade sliced cleanly through it and half dropped to the ground.

The elephant reeled back from the shock and agony. Osman jumped back at the same instant and the bull spotted the movement and tried to lash out at it. But his trunk lay on the earth, and as the stump swung in an arc towards Osman, the blood hosed from the open arteries and sprayed in a crimson jet that soaked his jibba.

Then the bull lifted the stump of his amputated trunk and trumpeted in mortal anguish, his blood spraying back over his head and into his eyes. He charged into the forest, shattering the trees and thorn bushes that blocked his path. Startled from the brink of sleep by his trumpeting screams, the other bulls fled with him.

Hassan Ben Nader spurred forward with Sweet Water on the rein. Osman snatched a lock of her long silky mane and leapt into the saddle without losing his grip on the hilt of his broadsword.

“Let the first bull run,” he cried. The pumping of the massive heart would drive the blood more swiftly out of the open arteries. The bull would weaken and go down within a mile. They would return for him later. Without checking his horse, Osman passed the spot where the dying animal had turned sharply aside. He rose in the stirrups more clearly to descry the trails of the two unwounded bulls. He followed them until they reached the first hills of the river valley where they parted company. One bull turned southwards and stormed away through the forest, while the other clambered straight up the rocky slope. There was no time to study the spoor and decide which was the larger animal, so Osman made an arbitrary choice.

He signalled with his raised sword and the aggagiers separated smoothly into two bands. The first party rode on up the escarpment after one animal, and Osman led the rest after the other. The dust of its flight hung in the still hot air, so there was no need to slow down to read the spoor. Sweet Water flew on for another mile until, four hundred paces ahead, Osman made out the dark hump of the bull’s back crashing through the grey kit tar thorn scrub, like a whale breaching in a turbulent sea. Now that he had the chase in sight Osman slowed Sweet Water to an easy canter, to save her strength for the final desperate encounter. Even at this pace they gained steadily on the bull.

Soon the gravel and small pebbles thrown up by the bull’s great pads rattled against his shield and stung his cheeks. He slitted his eyes and rode in still closer, until the bull sensed his presence, and turned upon them with speed and nimbleness astonishing in such a massive beast. The horsemen scattered before his charge, but one of the aggagiers was not quick enough. The bull reached out with his trunk and, at full gallop, plucked him from the saddle. The broadsword with which he might have defended himself spun from his grip, throwing bright reflections of sunlight before it pegged into the hard earth and oscillated like a metronome. The bull turned aside and, with his trunk coiled round the aggagier’s neck, swung the man against the trunk of a Doum palm with such force that his head was torn from his body, then knelt over the corpse and gored it with his tusks, driving the points through and through again.

Osman turned Sweet Water back and, although she tossed her long mane with terror, she responded to the pressure of his knees and his touch upon the reins. He rode her in directly across the bull’s line of sight, and shouted a challenge to attract the animal’s full attention, “Ha! Ha!” he cried. “Come, thou spawn of Satan! Follow me, O beast of the infernal world!”

The bull leapt up with the corpse dangling from one of his tusks. He shook his head and the dead man was hurled aside. Then he charged after Osman, squealing with rage, shaking his great head so that the ears flapped and volleyed like the mainsail of a ship-of-the-line taken all aback.

Sweet Water ran like a startled hare, carrying Osman swiftly away before the charge, but Osman slowed her with a lover’s touch on the bit. Though he lay forward over her neck he was looking back under his arm. “Gently, my sweetest heart.” He moderated her speed. “We must tease the brute now.”

The bull realized he was gaining and thundered after them like a squadron of heavy cavalry. He thrust his head forward and reached out with his trunk. But the mare ran like a swallow skimming the surface of a lake to drink in flight. Osman kept her streaming tail an arm’s length ahead of the tip of the waving trunk. The bull forced himself to even greater speed, but as he was about to snatch down the horse and her rider Osman pushed her gently so that she ran tantalizingly ahead, just beyond the bull’s reach. Osman spoke softly into her ear and she turned it back to listen to his voice.

“Yes, my lovely. They are coming on.” Through the dust of the bull’s run he could make out the shapes of his aggagiers closing in. Osman was offering himself and his mount like the cape to the bull, giving his men the opportunity to ride in and deliver the lethal strokes. The elephant was so absorbed with the horseman in front of him that he was unaware of the men who rode up under his out-thrust tail. Osman watched Hassan Ben Nader leap lightly from the saddle to the ground right at the bull’s pounding heels. His outrider seized the loose reins and held the head for the instant that Hassan needed.

As he touched the earth he used the impetus of his horse’s gallop to hurl himself forward. As the bull placed his full weight on the nearest leg, the rope of the tendon bulged tightly under the thick grey hide. Hassan slashed his blade across the back of the fetlock, a hand’s span above the point where the straining tendon was attached to the joint. The gleaming steel edge cut down to the bone, and the main tendon parted with a rubbery snap that, even in the uproar of the chase, carried clearly to Osman’s ear. In the same instant Hassan Ben Nader snatched back the reins from his outrider and leapt into the saddle. His horse plunged into full gallop once more. It was a marvelous feat of horsemanship. With three lunges his horse had carried him clear of the bull’s tusks and trunk.

The bull lifted his wounded leg from the earth and swung it forward to take the next pace, but as his full weight came down on to the pad, the leg buckled and the fetlock joint gave way. An elephant is unable to run on three legs, as other four-legged creatures can, so he was instantly crippled and anchored to the spot. Squealing with agony and rage he groped for his tormentor. Osman spun Sweet Water about and,

with his heels, drove her back almost under the outstretched trunk,

shouting at the bull to keep his attention riveted, turning just out of reach. The bull tried to chase him, but stumbled heavily and almost went down as the crippled leg gave way under his weight.

In the meantime Hassan had circled back and, again undetected by the struggling animal, rode in now under his tail. He jumped down once more, and then, to demonstrate his courage, let his steed run on as he stood alone at the bull’s heel. He waited an instant for the bull’s full weight to come down on its uninjured leg, and when the tendon stood out proud beneath the skin he severed it with the skill of a surgeon. Both of the bull’s back legs gave way under him and he sank helplessly on to his haunches, screaming his anguish to the pitiless sky and the triumphant African sun.

Hassan Ben Nader turned his back on the struggling animal and walked away unhurriedly. Osman jumped down from Sweet Water and embraced him. “Ridden like a man, and killed like a prince.” He laughed. “This very day you and I shall take the oath and eat the salt of brotherhood together.”

“You do me too much honour,” Hassan whispered, and fell to his knees in homage, ‘for I am your slave and your child, and you are my master and my father.”

They rested the horses in the shade and watered them from the skins while they watched the last struggles of their quarry. The blood spurted from the gaping arteries in the back of the bull’s legs, in rhythm with the pulse of his heart. The earth beneath his pads dissolved into a bath of mud and blood, until his crippled legs slipped and slid as he shifted his weight. It did not take long. The bright crimson flow shrivelled, and the lassitude of approaching death settled over him. At last the air rushed out of his lungs in a long, hollow groan and he toppled on to his side, striking the earth with a sound that echoed off the hills.

“Five days from now I will send you back here with fifty men, Hassan Ben Nader, to bring in these tusks.” Osman stroked one of the huge ivory shafts that thrust up into the air higher than his head. It would take that long for the cartilage that held them in the bony sockets of the skull to soften with decay so that the great shafts could be drawn out undamaged by careless axe strokes. They mounted and rode easily back along their own spoor to find the first beast that Osman had attacked. By this time he, too, would have bled to death from the terrible wound. It would be easy to track him down to the spot where he had fallen, for he must have left a river of blood for them to follow. They had not gone half a league before Osman held up a hand to halt them and cocked his head, listening. The sound that had alerted him came again from across the rocky ridge over which the other band of aggagiers had pursued the third bull. The intervening hills must have damped down the echoes so that they had not heard them before. The sound was unmistakable to these experienced hunters: it was the sound of an angry elephant, one that was neither crippled nor weakened by its wounds.

“Al-Noor has failed to kill cleanly,” said Osman. “We must go to his aid.”

He led them up the slope at a gallop, and as they crossed the ridge the sounds of conflict were loud and close. Osman rode towards them, and found a dead horse lying where it had been struck down, its spine shattered by a blow from the bull’s trunk. The aggagier had died upon its back. They rode past them without drawing rein, and found two more dead men. At a glance Osman read the signs: one had been unhorsed in the face of the charging animal. The hooked, red-tipped thorns of the kit tar had plucked him from the saddle as he had tried to escape the bull’s charge. The other dead man was his blood-brother, and he had turned back to save him. As they had lived so they died, their blood mingled and their broken bodies entwined. Their horses had run free.

The elephant trumpeted again. The sound was closer now, and sharper. It rang out from a forest of kit tar not far ahead. They slammed their heels into the flanks of their mounts and galloped towards the kit tar As they approached, a rider broke at full gallop from out of the thorn barrier into the open. It was al-Noor on his grey, which was in the extremes of terror and exhaustion. Al-Noor wafc almost naked: his jibba had been ripped from his body by the thorns and his skin was lacerated as though it had been clawed by a wild beast. The grey was staggering, throwing out its hoofs sloppily at each stride, and was too far gone to see and avoid the ant bear burrow in its path. It stumbled and almost went down, throwing al-Noor over its head, then ran on, leaving its rider stunned, in the track of the great bull elephant that burst out of the thorn forest behind him. This was the patriarch bull, whose tracks had first astounded them. There was blood on one back leg but too high and too far forward to have struck the tendon. Al-Noor had inflicted a flesh wound that did not slow or impede the animal. As he came on, he held his head high to keep his long tusks clear of the thorn scrub and stony earth. They extended from his lip twice as far as a tall man could reach with both arms spread wide. They were as thick as a woman’s thigh with almost no taper from lip to tip.

“Ten can tars a side!” Hassan shouted, amazed. This was a legendary animal, with almost two hundred pounds of ivory curving out on each side of his great grey head. Still dazed al-Noor rose shakily to his feet and stood, swaying drunkenly, with blood and dust coating his face. His back was turned to the charging bull, and he had lost his sword. The bull saw him, squealed again, and rolled his trunk back against his chest. Al-Noor turned. When he saw death descending upon him he raised his right hand, index finger extended as a sign that he died in Islam, and cried, “God is great!” It was his moment of acceptance. He stood without fear to meet it.

“For me and for Allah!” Osman called to his mare, and Sweet Water responded with her last reserves of strength and speed. She dashed in under the vaulted arch of tusks, Osman flat on her neck. The bull’s trunk was rolled. There was no target for his blade. He could only hope to draw the charge off the man. The bull’s gaze was so focused on al-Noor that he was unaware of the horse and rider coming in from the flank until they flashed past, so close that Osman’s shoulder glanced off one of the tusks. Then they were gone, like the darting flight of a sunbird. The bull wheeled aside, forsaking the standing man and following the more compelling focus of his rage. He charged after the horse.

“O beloved of Allah,” al-Noor shouted his gratitude after the emir who had saved him, ‘may God forgive all your sins.”

Osman smiled grimly as the words floated to him above the murderous trumpeting, the clash of hoofs and bursting thorn scrub. “God grant me a few more sins before I die,” he shouted back, and led the bull away.

Hassan and the other aggagiers rode in his wake, shouting and whistling to attract the bull’s attention, but he held on after Sweet Water. The mare had run hard but she was not yet spent. Osman looked back under his arm and saw that the bull was coming on apace, so swiftly that neither Hassan nor any other could get into position to attack his vulnerable back legs. He looked ahead and saw that he was being driven into a trap. Sweet Water was running into a narrow open lead between dense stands of the kit tar thorn, but her path was blocked by a solid wall of thorn. Osman felt her check under him. Then she turned her head, gazed back at her beloved rider, as if seeking guidance, and rolled her eyes until the red linings showed. White froth splattered from the corners of her mouth.

Then horse and rider ran into the kit tar which closed round them in a green wave. The thorns hooked into hide and cloth like eagle’s talons, and almost at once Sweet Water’s graceful run was transformed into the struggles of a creature caught in quicksand. The bull thundered down upon them, its mighty progress unchecked by the kit tar

“Come, then, and let us make an end.” Osman called the challenge, dropped the reins and kicked his feet out of the stirrups. He stood up, tall, upon the saddle, facing back over Sweet Water’s rump, his eyes on the level of the bull’s. Man and beast confronted each other over a rapidly dwindling gap.

“Take us if you are able,” Osman called to the bull, knowing how the sound of his voice would infuriate the animal. The bull flattened his ears against the sides of his skull, and rolled the tips in rage and aggression. Then he did what Osman had been waiting for: he unrolled his trunk and reached out to seize the man and lift him high off the back of his horse.

Balancing to Sweet Water’s violent lunges and struggles, Osman held the long blade poised, and as the serrated grey trunk was about to close round his body, he struck. The steel whickered in flight, and dissolved into a silver blur of light. The stroke was full, and seemed to meet no resistance: the steel sliced through hide, flesh and sinews, as though they were mist. It severed the trunk close to the lip as smoothly as the guillotine blade takes off a condemned man’s head.

For an instant there was no blood, just the sheen of freshly exposed flesh and the gleam of nerve ends and white tendons. Then the blood burst forth, engulfing the great grey head in a crimson cloud as the arteries erupted. The bull screamed again, but now in agony and dismay. Then he lurched to one side as he lost his balance and sense of direction.

Osman dropped back into the saddle and guided Sweet Water with his knees, steering her out of the arc of the bull’s blood-dimmed eyesight. The animal blundered in a wide uncertain circle as Hassan rode in behind him to make the cut in the back of his left leg. Then he jumped back into the saddle, leaving the bull anchored by his crippled leg. Osman slipped down from Sweet Water’s back and, with another stroke of his blade, cut through the other hamstring.

The heart blood pumped from the terrible wounds in his back legs and trunk, but the bull remained upright for as long as a mullah might take to recite a single sura of the Koran. Osman Atalan and his aggagiers dismounted and stood at their horses’ heads to watch his death throes and pray for him, praising his might and courage. When at last he fell with a crash to the stony earth, Osman cried, “Allah is almighty. Infinite is the glory of God.”

The word flashed through the alleys and souks, and was shouted from the rooftops and minarets. As it spread, a sombre, funereal mood descended on the city of Khartoum. Whispering dolefully as they came together, the inhabitants hurried to find a vantage-point from which they could gaze across the river and behold their fate.

Ryder Courtney was in the workshop in his compound behind the hospital and the red mud walls of Fort Burri when a servant brought him a note from David Benbrook, scribbled on a torn sheet of consular paper. Since first light that morning Ryder had been working with Jock McCrump on the repairs to the Intrepid this. When they had disconnected the punctured steam piping they discovered more damage than they had first suspected. Some of the metal fragments had been carried into the cylinders and had scored the liners. It was surprising that they had been able to make the return trip to the harbour.

“Damn good job I didnae let you go tearing away at full throttle,” Jock muttered morosely. “We would have had a right ballocks if I had.”

They had been obliged to sway the heavy engine out of the this’s hull on to the stone jetty. Then they transported it to the compound by ox-wagon, taking a circuitous route to avoid the narrow alleyways. They had been working on it for the last ten days, and the repairs were almost completed. Ryder wiped his hands on a ball of cotton waste, then glanced through the note. He handed it to Jock. “Do you want to come and watch the Lord Mayor’s show?”

Jock grunted. With long tongs he lifted a glowing sheet of metal from the forge and carried it to the anvil. “Like as not we’ll be having a gutful of that worthy Oriental gentleman Osman bloody Atalan without running out to stare at him now.” He hefted the heavy blacksmith’s hammer and began to pound the metal to shape. He ignored Ryder as he plunged it into a trough of water. It cooled in a hissing cloud of steam and Jock measured it critically. He was shaping a patch for one of the shell holes in this’s hull. He was not satisfied with the result, and whistled tunelessly as he returned it to the forge. Ryder grinned and went out to the stables for his horse.

He crossed the canal on the earthen causeway, and rode through the scurrying crowds to the gates of the consular palace. He hoped to avoid running into General Gordon, and was pleased to see his unmistakable khaki-uniformed silhouette on the upper parapet of Mukran Fort with half a dozen members of his Egyptian staff gathered around him. Each man had either a telescope or a pair of field-glasses focused on the north bank of the Blue Nile, so Ryder was able to ride past the fort and reach the consulate without drawing their attention. He handed his horse over to one of the syces at the gate of the stableyard and strode through the barren gardens to the legation entrance of the palace. The sentries recognized him at once and saluted him as he entered the main foyer.

An Egyptian secretary came hurrying to meet him. Like everyone else he wore a nervous, worried expression. “The consul is on top of the watchtower, Mr. Courtney,” the man told him. “He asked you to be good enough to join him there.”

When Ryder stepped out on to the balcony the Benbrook family did not notice him immediately. They were grouped around the big telescope on its tripod. Amber was taking her turn, standing on a cane-backed chair to reach the eyepiece. Then Saffron looked round and let out a squeak of delight. “Ryder!” She ran to seize his arm. “You must come and see. It’s so exciting.”

Ryder glanced at Rebecca, and felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach. She showed no ill effects from their recent curtailed voyage downstream. On the contrary, she looked cool, even under the layers of green georgette petticoats that ballooned out over her crinoline. There was a bright yellow ribbon around the crown of her straw hat, and her hair was arranged in ringlets over her shoulders. It caught the sunlight.

“Don’t let that child pester you, Mr. Courtney.” She gave him a demure smile. “She has been in an overbearing mood since breakfast.”

“Overbearing means regal and queenly,” said Saffron, smugly.

“It does not.” Amber looked back at her from the telescope. “It means bumptious and insufferable.”

“Peace be unto both of you.” Ryder chuckled. “Sisterly love is a beautiful thing.”

“Glad you could come,” David called to him. “Sorry to tear you away from your work, but this is worth a look. You have had enough of the telescope, Amber. Let Mr. Courtney have a turn.”

Ryder stepped up to the parapet, but before he stooped to the eyepiece he stared out across the river. It was an extraordinary spectacle: as far as he could see the land seemed to be on fire. It took a moment to realize that this was not smoke that gave the sky a dun, fuming aspect, but the dust cloud thrown up by a vast moving mass of living things, human and animal, that stretched away to the eastern horizon.

Even at such a distance there was a low reverberation in the air, like the muted hum of the beehive, or the murmur of the sea on a windless day. It was the sound of braying donkeys, lowing herds, fat-tailed sheep and thousands of hoofs, marching feet, the creaking of camel burdens and the squeal of axles. It was the clatter of giraffe-hide war shields, of spears and blades rattling in their scabbards, the rumble of the gun-carriages and the ammunition train.

Then, more clearly, he heard the trumpeting of the ombeyas, the Sudanese battle trumpets carved from a single ivory tusk. The warlike call of these instruments carried an immense distance in the desert airs. Underlying it was the throbbing bass beat of hundreds of huge copper drums. Each emir rode at the head of his tribe with his drummers, trumpeters and banner-bearers preceding him. He was closely surrounded by his mulazemin, his bodyguards, his brothers and blood-brothers, and his aggagiers. Though they rode united now by the holy jihad of the Divine Mahdi most of these tribes carried their centuries-old blood feuds, and none trusted another.

The banners were of rainbow hues, embroidered with texts from the Koran, and exaltations to Allah. Some were so large that it took three or four men to hold them aloft, rippling and snapping in the hot desert breeze. The banners and the harlequin-patched jib has of the warriors made a gorgeous show against the drab landscape.

“How many do you estimate there are?” David asked, as though he was speaking about the race-day crowd on Epsom Down.

“The devil alone knows.” Ryder shook his head doubtfully. “From here, we can’t see the end of them.”

“Fifty thousand, would you hazard?”

“More,” said Ryder. “Maybe many more.”

“Can you make out the entourage of Osman Atalan?”

“He will be in the van, naturally.” Ryder placed his eye to the telescope and trained it forward. He picked out the scarlet and black banners. “There is the devil himself. Right at the forefront!”

“I thought you said you had never before laid eyes upon him,” David said.

“No introduction necessary. That’s him, I tell you.”

In all that hubbub and bustle the slim figure on the cream-coloured horse was unmistakable for its dignity and presence.

At that moment there was a sudden commotion among the vast congregation on the far bank. Through the telescope Ryder saw Osman rise in the stirrups and brandish his broadsword. The front ranks of his mulazemin broke into a furious charge, and he led them straight at a small group of horsemen that rode to meet them from the direction of Omdurman. As the masses of cavalry and camels dashed forward they discharged volleys of joyous gunfire into the air. The blue smoke mingled with the dust cloud and the spearheads and sword blades twinkled like stars in the murk.

“Who is that they are riding to meet?” David asked sharply.

Through the lens Ryder concentrated on the small group of horsemen, and exclaimed as he recognized the green turbans of the two leading horsemen. “Damme, if it’s not the Divine Mahdi himself and his khalifa, the mighty Abdullahi.” Ryder tried to make his tone sardonic and pejorative, but no one was deceived.

“With that merry band of cut-throats sitting across it, the road to the north is firmly closed.” Although David said it breezily, there was a shadow in his eyes as he looked to his three daughters. “There is no longer any escape from this wretched place.” Any retort that Ryder could make would have been famous, and they watched in silence the meeting of the men who held the fate of the city and all its inhabitants in their bloody hands.

With bared sword and his long plait thumping against his back, Osman Atalan charged straight at the mounted figure of the Mahdi. The prophet of Allah saw him coming in a whirlwind of dust, to the deafening bray of the war horns and the pounding of drums. He reined in his white stallion. Khalifa Abdullahi stopped his horse a few paces behind his master, and they waited for the emir to come on.

Osman brought Sweet Water to a plunging, skidding halt and shook his broadsword in the Mahdi’s face. “For God and his Prophet!” he screamed. The blade that had slain men and elephants in their hundreds was now only a finger’s breadth from the Mahdi’s eyes.

The Mahdi sat unmoved with that serene smile on his lips and the falja showing between them.

Osman spun Sweet Water round and galloped away. His bodyguard and banner-bearers followed him at the same wild gallop, firing their Martini-Henry rifles into the air. At a distance of three hundred paces Osman rallied his men and they regrouped at his back. He lifted his sword high, and again they charged in a serried phalanx, straight at the two lone figures. At the last instant Osman pulled up the mare so violently that she came down on her haunches.

“La il aha ill allah There is but one God!” he yelled. “Muhammad Rasul Allah! Muhammad is the prophet of God!”

Five times the horsemen retreated and five times they charged back. At the fifth charge Muhammad Ahmed, the Divine Mahdi, raised his right hand and said softly, “Allah kariml God is generous.”

Immediately Osman threw himself from Sweet Water’s back and kissed the Mahdi’s sandal led foot in the stirrup. This was an act of the utmost humility, a rendering up of one man’s soul to another. The Mahdi smiled down at him tenderly. He emanated a peculiar perfume, a mixture of sandalwood and attar of roses, known as the Breath of the Mahdi. “I am pleased that you have come to join my array and the jihad against the Turk and the infidel. Rise up, Osman Atalan. You are assured of my favour. You may enter with me into the city of Allah, Omdurman.”

On the flat roof of his house, the Mahdi sat cross-legged on a low angareb, a couch covered with a silk prayer rug and strewn with cushions. There was a screen of reed matting over the terrace to shield them from the sun, but the sides were open to the cooling breeze off the river and to provide a view across the wide expanse of the Victoria Nile to the city of Khartoum. The ugly square blockhouse of Mukran Fort dominated the de fences of the besieged city. Emir Osman Atalan sat facing him, and a slave maid knelt before him with a dish of water on which floated a few oleander petals. Osman dipped water from it and made the ritual ablutions, then dismissed the woman with a wave. Another lovely Galla slave girl placed between them a silver tray that bore three jewelled long-stemmed silver cups: chalices looted from the Roman Catholic cathedral in El Obeid.

“Refresh yourself, Osman Atalan. You have travelled far,” the Mahdi invited him.

Osman made an elegant gesture of refusal. ‘I thank you for your hospitality, but I have eaten and drunk with the dawn and I will not eat again until the setting of the sun.”

The Mahdi nodded. He knew of the emir’s frugality. He was well aware of the peculiar religious enlightenment and the sense of dedicated purpose brought on by fasting and denial of the appetite. The memories of his sojourn on Abbas Island were as fresh as if it had taken place the previous day, and not three years before. He lifted a silver cup to his lips, displaying for an instant the gap between his front teeth, sign of his divinity. Of course, he never drank alcohol but he was partial to a drink made from date syrup and ground ginger.

Once he had been lean and hard as this fierce desert warrior, but he was no longer a solitary hermit. He was the spiritual leader of a nation, chosen by God. Once he had been a barefoot ascetic who had denied himself all sensual pleasures. Not long ago it had been boasted through all the Sudan that Muhammad Ahmed had never known a woman’s body. He was virgin no longer and his harem contained the first fruits of all his mighty victories. His was first choice of the captured women. Every sheikh and emir brought him gifts of the most lovely young girls in their territory, and it was a political imperative that he accept their largesse. The numbers of his wives and concubines already exceeded a thousand, and increased each day. His women fascinated him. He spent half his days among them.

They were dazzled by his appearance, his height and grace, his fine features, the winged birthmark and the angelic smile that disguised all his emotions. They loved his perfume and the gap between his teeth. They were intoxicated by his wealth and power: his treasury, the Beit el Mai, held gold, jewels and millions in specie, the spoils of his conquests and the sack of the principal cities of the Nile. The women sang, “The Mahdi is the sun of our sky, and the water of our Nile.”

Now he set aside the silver cup and held out his hand. One of the waiting girls knelt to offer him a scented silk cloth with which to dab the sticky syrup from his lips.

Behind the Mahdi, on another cushioned angareb, sat the Khalifa Abdullahi. He was a handsome man with chiselled features and a nose like the beak of an eagle, but his skin was dappled, like a leopard’s, with the scars of smallpox. His nature was also that of the leopard, predatory and cruel. Emir Osman Atalan feared no man or beast, except these two men who sat before him now. These he feared with all his heart.

The Mahdi lifted one gracefully shaped hand and pointed across the river. Even with the naked eye they were able to make out the solitary figure on the parapets of the Mukran Fort.

“There is Gordon Pasha, the son incarnate of Satan,” said the Mahdi.

“I will bring his head to you before the beginning of Ramadan,” said his khalifa.

“Unless the infidel reaches him before you do,” suggested the Mahdi, and his voice was soft and pleasant to hear. He turned to Osman. “Our scouts report to us that the infidel army is at last on the move. They are sailing southwards in a flotilla of steamers along the river to rescue our enemy from my vengeance.”

“At the beginning they will move at the pace of the chameleon.” The khalifa endorsed his master’s report. “However, once they pass through the cataracts and reach the bend of the river at Abu Hamed, they will have the north wind behind their boats and the current will abate. The speed of their advance will increase six-fold. They will reach Khartoum before Low Nile, and we cannot assault the city before the river falls and exposes Gordon Pasha’s de fences

“You must send half of your army northwards under your most trustworthy sheikhs and stop the infidels on the river before they reach Abu Klea. Then you must annihilate them, just as you destroyed the armies of Baker Pasha and Hicks Pasha.” The Mahdi stared into Osman’s face, and Osman’s spirits stirred. “Will you deliver to me my enemy, Osman Atalan?”

“Holy One, I will give him into your hands,” Osman replied. “In God’s Name and with the blessing of Allah, I will deliver to you that city and all those within.” The three warriors of God gazed across the Nile like hunting cheetahs surveying herds of grazing gazelle upon the plains.

Captain Penrod Ballantyne had been waiting in the antechamber of Her Britannic Majesty’s consulate in Cairo for forty-eight minutes. He checked the time on the clock above the door to the inner office of the consul general. On the left-hand side of the massive carved door hung a life-sized portrait of Queen Victoria as she had been on her wedding day, pure and pretty with the bloom of youth still on her and the crown of Empire on her head, On the opposite side of the door there was a matching portrait of her consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, handsome and marvellously bewhiskered.

Penrod Ballantyne shot a glance at himself in the gilt-framed ceiling-high mirror that adorned the side wall of the antechamber and, with satisfaction, noted his own likeness to the young Prince Consort, now long dead while Penrod was young and vital. The captain’s epaulettes on his shoulders and the frogging of his uniform jacket were bright new gold. His riding boots were polished to a glassy sheen, and the fine glove leather creased around his ankles like the bellows of an accordion. His cavalry sabre hung down along the scarlet side stripe of his riding breeches. He wore his dolman slung over one shoulder and clasped at his throat with a gold chain, and carried his Hussar’s bearskin busby under his right arm. On his left breast he wore the purple watered silk with the bronze cross inscribed “For Valour’, which had been cast from the Russian guns captured at Sebastopol. There was no higher military decoration in the Empire.

Sir Evelyn Baring’s secretary came in. “The consul general will see you now.”

Penrod had been standing to preserve the pristine appearance of his uniform creases at the elbows, down the back of his tunic and at the knees of his breeches were unsightly. He replaced the tall busby on his head, glancing in the mirror to make certain it was centred low on his eyebrows with the chain across the chin, then marched through the carved doors into the inner office.

Sir Evelyn Baring was seated at his desk, reading from a sheaf of despatches in front of him. Penrod came to attention and saluted. Baring beckoned him in without glancing at him. The secretary closed the door.

Sir Evelyn Baring was officially the agent of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government in Egypt, and her consul general in Cairo with plenipotentiary powers. In truth he was the viceroy, who ruled the ruler of Egypt. Since the Khedive had been saved from the mobs of rebellion by the British Army and the fleet of the Royal Navy in Alexandria harbour, Egypt had become, in all but name, a British protectorate.

The Khedive Tawfig Pasha was a weak youth and no match for a man like Baring and the mighty Empire he represented. He had been forced to abdicate all his powers, and in return the British had given him and his people the peace and prosperity they had not known since the age of Pharaoh Ptolemy. Sir Evelyn Baring possessed one of the most brilliant minds in the colonial service. The Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and his cabinet were aware of and highly appreciative of his qualities. However, towards his underlings, his manner was patronizing and condescending. Behind his back they called him “Sir Over Bearing’.

Now he ignored Penrod as he went on with his reading, making notes in the margins with a gold pen. At last he stood up from his desk, and left Penrod standing while he went to the windows that overlooked the river to Giza and the stark silhouettes of the three mighty pyramids on the far bank.

That damned idiot, Baring mused to himself. He has got us into this pretty pickle of rotten fish. From the outset he had opposed the appointment of Chinese Gordon. He had wanted to send Sam Baker, but Gladstone and Lord Hartington, the Secretary of War, had overruled him. It is in Gordon’s nature to provoke conflict. The Sudan was to be abandoned. His job was to bring our people out of that doomed land, not to confront the Mad Mahdi and his Dervishes. I warned Gladstone of precisely this, Gordon is trying to dictate terms and force the Prime Minister and the cabinet to send an army to reoccupy the Sudan. If it were not for the unfortunate citizens that he has incarcerated with him, and for the honour of the Empire, we should let Chinese Gordon stew in his own juice.

As Baring turned away from the window and the contemplation of those immemorial monuments across the Nile, his eye fell on a copy of

The Times of London that lay on the table beside his favourite armchair. He frowned more deeply. And then we have also to take into account the uninformed and sentimental opinions of the sweating masses, so readily manipulated by those petty potentates of the press.

He could almost recite the leading article from memory: “We know that General Gordon is surrounded by hostile tribes and cut off from communication with Cairo and London. Under these circumstances the House has the right to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they are going to do anything to relieve him. Are they going to remain indifferent to the fate of the one man on whom they have counted to extricate them from their dilemmas, to leave him to shift for himself, and make not a single effort on his behalf?” was what Lord Randolph Churchill had said to the Commons, as reported on 16 March 1885. Damned demagogue! Baring thought now, and looked up at the Hussar captain. “Ballantyne, I want you to go back to Khartoum.” He spoke directly to Penrod for the first time since he had entered the room.

“Of course, sir. I can leave within the hour,” Penrod responded. He knew that the one word the master of Egypt liked to hear above all others was ‘yes’.

Baring allowed himself a wintry smile, an extraordinary mark of his approval. His intelligence system was wide-reaching and pervasive. Its roots burrowed into every level of Egyptian society, from the highest levels of the government and the military to the forbidden councils of the mullahs in their mosques and the bishops in their cathedrals and Coptic monasteries. He had his agents in the palaces of the Khedive and the harems of the pashas, in the souks, bazaars and brothels of the greatest cities and the meanest villages.

Penrod was nothing but a tiny tadpole in the festering swamp of intrigue in whose waters Sir Evelyn Baring set his lines and into which he cast his net. However, recently he had become quite fond of the lad. Behind the good looks and dandified appearance, Baring had detected a bright, quick mind and an attention to duty that reminded him of himself at the same age. Penrod Ballantyne’s family connections were solid. His elder brother was a baronet and had large estates on the Scottish Borders. He himself had a significant income from a family trust, and the purple ribbon on his chest bore ample witness to his courage. Moreover, the young dog had shown a natural aptitude for intelligence work. Indeed, he was gradually and subtly making himself valuable not indispensable, for nobody was that, but valuable. The only possible weakness that Baring had so far detected in him he carried in his trousers.

“I will give you no written message, for the usual reasons,” he said.