He took a deep breath, smelling the tang of the desert and the acrid odour of camel dung, even imagining he had caught a sulphurous whiff of gunpowder. He felt as if another deep breath would suck in that veil and he would take the past within himself and step out into that day in December 1884. For a few moments he had not only seen the sharpshooter but become one with him, focused on the only things of importance at that moment: the balance of the rifle, the view through the sights, the measured pace of his breathing, the touch of his finger on the trigger. Jack wondered who the man had been, whether he would ever know his name.
He took a water bottle from his leg pocket, unscrewed the top and offered it to the other two. Costas took a mouthful, and then Jack drained the rest and replaced it in his pocket, screwing back the top as he did so. The drumming of the helicopter became a roar as it settled into its landing site, the whirling of its rotor blades just visible through the storm of dust created by the downdraught. It powered down, and Jack turned to the others. ‘I’ll give Ibrahim about an hour to offload the equipment with the crewmen. It’s his operation and I don’t want to interfere. But as soon as he calls through, I’m on to it. I’m itching to dive.’
‘Roger that,’ Costas said.
Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Does that give us enough time?’
Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I hope so. There are rogue elements in the regime here who could shut us down at any moment. There’s a lot simmering just beneath the surface in the Sudan: warlords, fundamentalism. We’re just trying to pack as much as we can into every day while we’re still able to work here.’
‘Where’s Aysha?’
‘At the Senusret shrine. Once we’ve talked to her, I’ll finish showing you what we’ve found. It’s fabulous stuff, one of the most exciting discoveries ever made in Egyptology. Follow me.’
PART 2
5
Near the third cataract of the Nile, Sudan, 23 December 1884
Major Edward Mayne of the Royal Engineers pushed the white cotton of his scarf up over his nose, leaving only a narrow gap beneath his headdress to see through, and pressed his heels into the flanks of his camel. He lurched forward as it swerved into a shallow gully, picking its way among the exposed bedrock that provided a surer footing than the loose shale and dust of the surrounding desert. Over the last two weeks he had learned to move in rhythm with the beast, becoming one with it as his guide had taught him, leaving him swaying like a sailor on land when he dismounted to take measurements and sketch the rocky course of the river through the cataracts, noting the places where boats might be hauled up against the current. The day before, a messenger had reached him with orders to return to the main camp of the river expedition and report to headquarters, and he and his guide had ridden hard that morning to reach the camp before the midday sun made travel intolerable. He knew that Corporal Jones would be waiting for him in the sangar dugout, where he had left him with the sentries overlooking the camp beside the Nile. As he got closer, he had made sure to avoid the deep gullies so that he was always exposed to view. Over the past weeks Mahdist sharpshooters had begun to inflict casualties on the river column, and he knew there would be jittery trigger fingers at the sight of anyone wearing Arab dress approaching on a camel.
He looked back to the east, where he had parted ways with his guide, Shaytan Ahmed al-Abaid, a chieftain of the Dongola people of upper Nubia, who had accompanied him on his foray into the desert. The previous evening they had huddled over the embers of their fire beside the wells of Umm Bayaid, concealed within a rocky gully from prying eyes, and had talked together until the last vestige of heat had left the rocks and they had lain to sleep on the hard ground, keeping close to their camels for warmth. Shaytan had been an interpreter for General Gordon in Khartoum, and had only left three weeks before, when Gordon had ordered him out of the city for his own safety. The Mahdi’s forces had blocked the main exit routes, and Shaytan had only made it through by disguising himself in the patched jibba robe of an Ansar warrior, the most fanatic followers of the Mahdi. He had travelled to General Wolseley’s headquarters at Wadi Halfa, some two hundred miles north on the Egyptian border, and offered his services to the expedition that was now inching its way south along the Nile in a forlorn attempt to relieve Gordon. In the careful ways of desert dialogue, in a wide-ranging discussion over cups of strong tea, Mayne had extracted from Shaytan all he could about Gordon’s state of mind. Shaytan’s account was dispassionate, the most up-to-date he had, and was not clouded by the prejudgements of British intelligence officers that had made it difficult for Mayne to get a good grasp of the man. That evening’s discussion had been the most valuable outcome of his foray into the desert; forward reconnaissance of the Nile had anyway seemed of dubious value in light of the probability that the river column would never reach Khartoum in time to save Gordon.
The camel snorted and tossed its head; Mayne knew he was close to the sangar now, just off to the west. Beyond that he saw the flash of the heliograph on a rocky outcrop above the far bank of the river, the signallers tilting the mirror in the sunlight to send out the long and short dashes of Morse code. The telegraph line from Khartoum had been cut as soon as the Mahdi’s forces had surrounded the city; some said that Gordon himself had done it in a fit of pique over the delay in sending a relief expedition to get his Egyptian and Sudanese staff and their families out of Khartoum before the Mahdi made escape impossible. The heliograph could only be used for the most basic information, for requests for supplies or reports of daily progress up the Nile; the Mahdi’s spies were perfectly able to read Morse code, and anything more sensitive would soon reach the ears of the sheikhs who commanded the force the British troops knew was waiting in the desert somewhere to the south. The only way to communicate securely was by courier, using local Sudanese tribesmen, who could ride swiftly and knew how to avoid the thieves and murderers of the desert oases. For weeks now it was the only way that messages from Gordon had reached them, messages that had infuriated Wolseley in their fickle vacillation between optimism and fatalism, and in the obscurity of Gordon’s intentions. Even the authenticity of the messages could be suspect, brought by messengers whose loyalty could never be certain. In the desert, the truth shifted like the sands, changing subtly in complexion with each gust of wind, then being swept away by storms that left a whole new landscape of reality to understand and navigate.
Mayne steered the camel towards the flashing light, knowing that the sangar now lay directly ahead above the near bank of the river. The message being sent out would be relayed down the heliograph posts to Korti, the advance camp on the Nile where the camel corps was assembling, and then on to Wadi Halfa. He smiled wryly to himself, remembering what Corporal Jones and the other soldiers had called Wadi Halfa: Bloody Halfway. It had become a standing joke for the men of the river column to ask each other how far they had gone at the end of each day, after another few hundred yards of backbreaking toil, hauling and rowing the boats to the next obstacle; the answer was always the same: bloody halfway. The joke had become strained as the level of the Nile had steadily fallen through December, and the channels he had spotted during his reconnaissance trips upstream had become trickles by the time the boats reached them. Sometimes it seemed as if they were caught in a Greek myth of the underworld, where no matter how hard they tried, their goal remained forever elusive. Yet Mayne knew that if this were the underworld, then they were only in the first circle of hell; somewhere ahead was an invisible barrier beyond which lay a deeper reach, a place where a force of darkness was marshalling that could obliterate them with the speed and ferocity of a sandstorm. And in the eye of that looming maelstrom was General Charles Gordon, their sole purpose for being here, a man whose future seemed increasingly doubtful as the chances of the relief expedition ever reaching him faded hour by hour.
He turned and watched Shaytan receding noiselessly in the distance, his camel wavering in the heat haze as it sauntered away. The sun glinted off the brass-covered flintlock p
istol with a handle like a rat’s tail that Shaytan had taken from the dismembered corpse of an Ottoman Turkish official they had found in the desert a few days previously, whether the work of the Mahdi’s men or brigands was unclear. With his golden gun and his belted dagger, Shaytan seemed from another era, yet Mayne had learned that the desert had a timeless quality in which the past seemed to live with the present. It had seemingly rebuffed every attempt by the British to introduce new technology: the railway his fellow engineers had pushed as far as they could beyond Korti, until the supply of track and their own energy had been sapped; the river steamers that Gordon had used in the upper reaches of the Nile near Khartoum, constantly breaking down and immobilised for want of wood for fuel; the Gatling and Gardner machine guns that should have assured their supremacy on the battlefield, but that jammed in the dust and the heat. They had learned through bitter experience that the only way to broach the desert was to adapt to it and learn the ways of desert survival as Mayne had done from Shaytan, yet even that put interlopers at a disadvantage against those who had been born to it. It was impossible to know where Shaytan would go next, or which side he would now join. What was certain was that his time with Mayne had come to an end, and they both knew that if they were to meet again, they might be trying to cut each other’s throats. It was the way of the desert, and signified nothing more than that they were both part of the eternal course of history in these lands.
Shaytan had called Mayne ‘Nassr’ayin’, meaning ‘Eagle Eye’. It was the same name he had been given in Iroquioan by the Mohawk Indians when he had spent a year living among them as a boy on the Ottawa river in Upper Canada, when his uncle had been in charge of a Royal Engineers detachment maintaining the canal from Lake Ontario to the new capital. The Iroquioan name, ‘Kahniekahake’, had stuck when he had returned to Canada as a newly commissioned subaltern and joined the Mohawk scouts in Wolseley’s expedition up the Red River in 1870 to quash the rebellion of Louis Riel. It was an extraordinary fact that some of those same men, including his boyhood friend Charrière, were here today, employed by Wolseley for their expertise with river craft to help haul the hundreds of whaleboats to be used to transport soldiers up the Nile towards Khartoum.
To the followers of Islam, the eagle was a perfect creation of Allah; to the Mohawks it was the spirit of a young warrior on a vision quest. Yet Mayne knew that Shaytan wore Islam as lightly as his ancestors had worn the beliefs of others who had passed through the desert in the distant past, and that for the Mohawk the spirit world required no special belief; it was simply the world they inhabited. Spending time with Shaytan had allowed Mayne to understand the desert people in a way that the staff officers in Korti and Wadi Halfa never would. The call to jihad that lay at the core of the rebellion was not the main motivation for the majority of the Mahdi’s army, a vast and motley gathering of tribesmen drawn from all quarters of the Sudan, some of them from the deepest reaches of the desert, where the influence of Islam was peripheral at best. For many, their instinct was to fight each other rather than join in a common cause. And yet this truth, that they were not all converts to militant Islam, was not a weakness; in the hands of the Mahdi, it was a strength. The Mahdi himself was one of them, born on the Nile, and he knew what drove his people. He knew how to use his holy vision to attract and rally his core of fanatical followers, the Ansar, and how to use their suicidal courage to draw others to follow his banner. And the tribesmen were not simply fighting to expel foreigners – Turkish and British and Egyptian and even Arabs – in order to defend their families and their traditions. The Mahdi knew how to stir them so that they were fighting because they relished it, because their pulses quickened at the sight of blood, because they could not resist following when the Ansar surged forward screaming and brandishing their spears at the enemy. Mayne had realised that the war had become self-fuelling, and that the only hope the British would ever have of containing it would be to return with an army large enough to mount a campaign of attrition and annihilation.
He looked back one last time at the wavering form in the distance. A gust of wind took one end of Shaytan’s headscarf and unfurled it like a banner, until it seemed to join the distant streaks of black cloud that appeared above the horizon; his camel appeared to stretch outwards and upwards like a mirage, and then was gone. It was like this in the desert, a place of mirages, of illusions, where desperate thirst could feel like dust in the throat, where there was no moral compass, where cruelty could be as casual and transient as the camaraderie he had felt over the last few weeks. Of all the places where he had been on campaign, he had never experienced the insidious draining that he had felt in the desert. The worst of it was when your body dried up until you were like a camel; they said that if you survived that without going insane, you learned to feed it with just what was necessary to keep from collapsing. Mayne knew he had been there often over the past few days, that Shaytan had made him experience it to show him how to survive; but it had left him with a desiccated feeling that would take days to resolve, and he knew that his body would try to convince him he was sated when he needed to drink more than he ever had done before in his life.
He turned back, pulled hard on the reins to keep the camel’s head in the direction of the river and kicked its flanks again. He found the animal strangely reassuring, as if its plodding gait were taking him out of that world of mirages and anchoring him back in reality. Seeing the patches of solid bedrock under the sand reminded him of the ancient ruins that Shaytan had shown him, Nubian and Roman and Egyptian, some of them from the time when the pharaohs had ventured this far south and tried to tame the wilderness they believed had been the homeland from which their civilisation had sprung. The ruins had been vestigial, elusive – the tamped-down floors of desert corrals, crumbled watchtowers, temporary forts – and there had been no stratigraphy to them; with seeming whimsy the wind would blow sand away to reveal ruins that were three thousand years old, or so recent that Shaytan could remember those who had lived in them. As soon as people passed on, the desert seemed to swallow their history and reduce it to the same desiccated imprint, the fate that seemed to lie in store for their own endeavours just as it had for the expeditions of the pharaohs who had preceded them on this trek into the shadowlands of their own history.
Yet in those few elusive ruins Mayne had found a human presence stronger than he had ever done among the towering monuments of Giza or Luxor or Abu Simbel that he had visited on his voyage south through Egypt. The day before, he had seen strange pyramidal forms rising from the sand, sheer-sided outcrops of basalt from some ancient volcanic eruption that had resisted the wind and stood stark above the desert like the backbone of the earth itself. In a flash of insight he had understood the origin of the man-made pyramids of ancient Egypt, an interest spurred by his time spent visiting the archaeological sites of the Nile after his first posting to Cairo. Those people who had gone north, the ancestors of the first pharaohs, had taken with them this vision of their ancestral landscape and had attempted to re-create it in their burial monuments. He realised why he had found the wonders of ancient Egypt curiously unmoving, for all their grandeur and technical marvel. They were no more than imitations of nature, like the walled gardens of European aristocrats, constructed by a people who could only bear to inhabit a world that they controlled. To those who rebelled, those like the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, that world must have seemed artificial, claustrophobic, unbearable; Mayne could see why Akhenaten had come here in search of truth, rejecting the religion of the pharaohs and finding deeper meaning in the one God, the Aten.
He remembered something, and reached under the fold of his desert robe into his tunic pocket, taking out a small package. Shaytan had given him a hejab, a pouch containing an amulet on a leather necklace with verses of the Koran wrapped around it. He released the reins of the camel and untied the leather thong that kept the bag shut, dropping the amulet into the palm of his hand. The wrapping was diaphanous, insubstantial, and when he took it
off, it seemed lighter than air. As he held it in his other palm, a wisp of wind suddenly took it from him. He snatched at it, but it was gone. For a moment he thought of dismounting and chasing it, but it was flying high above the desert, and it would be hopeless. He did not even know whether it truly had been verse from the Koran, or some more ancient wisdom of the Dongola transcribed into Arabic. But the amulet seemed more substantial, and he peered at it closely. He realised that it was an ancient carving in the shape of a scarab beetle, like ones he had seen for sale in the alleyway markets of Cairo, pillaged from ancient tombs. It was jet black, carved from hard volcanic stone, probably from some outcrop in the desert itself. Embedded in the wings were lines of gold wire and two tiny gemstones that he recognised as peridot, the beautiful green stone that the ancient Egyptians mined on St John’s Island in the Red Sea. The scarab must have been a prized possession in antiquity. Perhaps Shaytan had picked it up in one of those ruins, or it had been passed down to him through the generations of his ancestors since the pharaohs had turned their eyes away from this place. On its base Mayne could feel the ridges and indentations of carving, and turning it over he saw that it was hieroglyphics. When he had time, he would dig out the notebook he had filled with hieroglyphic symbols during two days of enforced leisure waiting for supplies when the expedition had encamped at Akhenaten’s ruined capital of Amarna, and see if he could find a match.
He saw a flash of reflected light up ahead, and quickly hung the scarab around his neck. The light had come from a bayonet poking above the wall of the sangar about two hundred yards away above the river gorge. He saw a wisp of smoke from a billycan fire, the universal sign of British soldiers brewing up. He pursed his lips. They were going to have to be more careful. Shaytan had spotted movement among the rocks above a few miles upstream, and Mayne knew that the British sentry posts would be prime targets for the Mahdi’s sharpshooters. He squinted at the western horizon beyond the smoke, just making out the distant ridge above the far bank of the river, but he could see nothing. He remembered the last time he and Shaytan had been this close to the Nile, when he had taken the Martini-Henry rifle out of its leather cover in front of the saddle and fired at a derelict shaduf, a water-lifting device, adjusting the sights for the range until he had shot the top of the pole away in three successive rounds, enough to know that the sights were correct should he have to do the same to a human target on the opposite ridge of the river as they worked their way up the cataracts. That was when Shaytan had called him Nassr’ayin, Eagle Eye; and it was for the same reason that he had acquired the name from the Mohawk years before. He had relished shooting the rifle in this elemental place, free from the superimpositions of civilisation. It was his constant, a tunnelling of his vision that excluded everything else, just as the river and the burning sun were the constants of the desert. And it was what he was here to do. He picked up the reins, ready to yank them. It was time he made his presence known.
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