6
Mayne pulled hard on the reins, steering the camel towards the sentry post overlooking the Nile. The wind-graded dust and gravel of the desert had given way to hamada, the hard igneous plateau that skirted the river where it had cut its way through the bedrock on its course north towards Egypt. He could see the Nile now, a hundred feet or so below the level of the plateau, sinuous rivulets of brown that curled around the outcrops of black rock that broke up the river as it ran down the cataract, the twists of white water showing where it was fast and dangerous. The men working below were not yet visible, but he could hear their cries echoing down the gorge as they hauled the boats past the rocks: the bellowed orders of the British sergeants and corporals; the undulating chant of the west African Kroomen singing in unison; and the distinctive nasal lilt of the Mohawk Indians, who spoke the archaic French of the voyageurs they had guided for generations through the Canadian wilderness.
He slid off the camel, took his saddlebag and rifle and left the beast snorting and chewing on some desert grass in a shallow gully about fifty yards from the sentry post. The sangar was a natural cleft in the clifftop, surrounded by the remains of an ancient masonry wall that the soldiers had fortified with rocks and mounded gravel to form a parapet around the edge. As he approached it, he could see the khaki pith helmets of half a dozen men and the long bayonets of rifles that had been left propped against the parapet. He had not yet been spotted, and he stopped for a moment to listen to the murmur of voices, among them the distinctive West Country burr of Corporal Jones, the sapper who was his servant, holding forth as usual to a rapt audience. ‘Camels,’ he heard Jones say. ‘Can’t stand ’em. My officer loves his, made me try to ride it. Horrible it was, spitting and belching and eating its own vomit. All those men volunteering to join the camel corps for the desert column, they don’t know what they’re in for.’
Another voice piped up. ‘Tell us more about the dervishes, Jonesy.’
Mayne heard the suck of a pipe, and saw a ring of tobacco smoke rise above the steam of the billycan that was boiling in the fire. Jones knew how to play his audience, how to build anticipation. He heard the pipe being knocked out, slowly, deliberately. ‘It’s the spears that puts the fear of God in a man,’ Jones said quietly. ‘As long as a lance they are, with metal points the length of your arm, sharper than those bayonets. After they’ve done with the killing, they go over the battlefield and dip their spears in the wounds, and then smear the blood all over themselves. That’s Johnny Fuzzy-Wuzzy for you.’ He paused, and Mayne heard the striking of a match, and then the suck of the pipe again. ‘Like the devil in battle they are, mark my words. Saw them myself, at El Teb in February. Like one of those medieval church paintings of the seven circles of hell, with little black demons serving Satan. That’s where we’re all going, I tell you, up this river to the gates of hell itself.’
‘I heard Colonel Burnaby speak of the battle when he arrived to join the desert column after recovering from his wounds.’ Mayne recognised the voice of the impressionable young infantry subaltern who had been left in charge of the sangar. ‘He was there as well, at El Teb.’
‘And he saw to them, hundreds of them,’ an Irish voice pitched in. ‘We’ve all heard the stories.’
‘Too right, mate,’ Jones asserted. ‘The colonel did for them good and proper, standing there on a rock above the battle wearing a Norfolk jacket and a stalking hat, looking for all the world like a country gent on a Sunday shoot. He had a fearsome weapon, a four-barrelled howdah pistol, like the ones they use in India to shoot tigers from the backs of elephants. It fires the same cartridge as the old Snider rifle, big enough to blow a hole clean through a man so you can see out the other side. Saw it with my own eyes, I did, the first dervish Burnaby killed, his innards flying and twirling out behind him like he was on fire, and still he kept coming. They’re devils, I tell you. Then the Colonel drops his pistol and fires pig-shot point blank with his double-barrelled twelve-bore. The dervishes knocked him up bad, but he kept on blasting. Twenty-three shells he fired, and he killed thirteen of them. And when his ammunition was finished, he laid about him something fearful with his sabre, and killed as many again. Saw it all with my own eyes.’
Mayne smiled to himself. Jones was a born raconteur who could reduce himself to the level of the coarsest of the soldiers, but as a street urchin in Bristol a benefactor had paid for him to go to the Bluecoat School, where he had picked up enough to converse more articulately with Mayne than some of the officers. He was in his late twenties, some ten years younger than Mayne, but had already bounced up and down the ranks several times, his natural abilities almost exactly counterbalanced by his transgressions, usually for speaking his mind in the presence of a less accommodating officer. He had been in India with the Madras Sappers and Miners, and had served in an arduous jungle campaign in the south before going to the war in Afghanistan in 1880, where he had picked up the surveying skills that had first brought him to Mayne’s attention. Before being despatched to the river column by an exasperated commanding officer, Jones had been in a Royal Engineers company attempting to build a railway into the desert from Suakin on the Red Sea coast; they had been present at the first major encounters of British forces with the Mahdi army at the bloody battles at El Teb and El Sid earlier that year. Whether he had actually seen Burnaby in action with his own eyes was a moot point that Mayne did not wish to explore, though there was enough corroboration to show that his account was essentially accurate.
‘Now there’s a soldier’s soldier for you, sir, Fred Burnaby, make no mistake,’ he heard Jones say. The pipe was sucked, and he caught a waft of tobacco smoke. ‘Some say old Burnaby has more brawn than brains, but mark my words, if he were in charge here, he’d hoick us out of the river and march us across the desert to where we could stand up to the fuzzy-wuzzies like real British soldiers, not like the sewer rats we are here. You can tell that to all your fancy friends in the press and your staff officers with their maps and plans, begging your pardon, sir.’
Mayne smiled again, in spite of himself. El Teb had been part of an abortive attempt to establish a Red Sea beachhead in order to approach Khartoum from the east, a plan that had bogged down in the fetid coastal swamps when the local Baggara tribesmen had rallied to the Mahdi’s cause and inflicted a series of disastrous defeats. But even that had not been enough of a wake-up call for some of the officers on the staff. One of the more tedious colonels, a man who had never been on the receiving end of a dervish charge, had heard stories of Burnaby’s Norfolk jacket and the shotgun, and had said it was not sporting. Not sporting. Few of them realised what they were up against. Even General Wolseley had assured the press that the appearance of a few dozen redcoats on a river steamer at Khartoum would cow the enemy into submission and relieve General Gordon and his Egyptian and Sudanese garrison. Yet it was Wolseley who had devised the plan they were currently executing, a scheme of astounding logistical complexity to inch a rescue force up the Nile against the flow, almost guaranteeing that they would not get there before the Mahdi’s forces overwhelmed Khartoum. Corporal Jones was right. If the will really existed to relieve Gordon, then the only course of action was a bold move across the desert, though whether a maverick like Burnaby was the right man to lead it was another moot point.
Mayne scraped the ground noisily with his boot and climbed the parapet. The knot of soldiers inside jerked their heads towards him, clutching at their rifles. He cleared his throat. ‘Speaking of more brawn than brains, I thought this was meant to be a lookout post.’ It hurt to talk, the first time he had done so in hours, his throat dry and coated with dust. The subaltern stood up quickly, disconcerted, straightening his tunic. ‘We never thought an enemy would come from that direction, sir. I have two sentries in the rocks with their eyes trained on the cliff above the opposite bank. That’s where we saw the dervishes watching us yesterday.’
Jones stood up, like Mayne a few inches over average height, put his hands on his hips and lo
oked Mayne up and down, then shook his head. ‘You look a sight, sir. Every bit of you. I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Don’t bother.’ Mayne let the saddlebag drop, pulled off his headdress and tried to push his fingers through his thick dark hair, and then through his beard. He looked at his hands and knew his face must be the same, layered with a dark orange crust of desert like the bedrock he had just been riding over. He hardly dared think of his odour; fortunately he seemed to have lost his sense of smell after a few hours on the back of the camel. He swallowed hard, trying to wet his throat. ‘The messenger reached us yesterday evening at the Kordofan wells; I’m due at Korti tomorrow afternoon for a conference with General Wolseley. That’s thirty miles downriver, and there are about six hours of daylight left. There’s no moon at the moment and even the voyageurs won’t paddle through the cataracts when it’s pitch dark. I don’t have time to wash and change.’
‘You mean you don’t want to, sir. You know the general’s going to send you out into the desert again, and you don’t want to lose that look. It takes a while to grow a convincing beard. A few days’ stubble is a dead giveaway, as none of the Arabs have it.’
Mayne said nothing, but unwound his headdress and scarf and stuffed them into the bag, then took off his hippo-hide belt and his robe. The robe had been another layer above his uniform and at first he had objected to it, but it had kept him cool while he was riding, the white cotton reflecting the desert sun. Beneath it he wore the standard attire of an officer in the desert campaign: a Sam Browne belt with a holster for his Webley-Pryse revolver, an ammunition pouch containing twenty rounds, a bag with his tinted sun-goggles, and a leather water bottle; and below that a grey serge jumper, yellow-ochre corduroy riding breeches, puttees wound up to his knees and brown ankle-length boots, all of it adapted from kit he had worn on the North-West Frontier of India. His pith helmet, dyed with Nile mud and acacia bark and with a cloth neck veil, was attached to the saddlebag. He would have liked to carry on wearing the headdress and scarf in this heat, but he needed to remain inconspicuous, keeping spying eyes from seeing anything singular about him. And there was another factor now too: the dervish sharpshooters who might be in the cliffs opposite. A headdress would show that he had been in the desert, probably gathering intelligence, and would suggest that he was an officer, so would make him a prime target. He did not want to invite a bullet before his mission had even begun.
Jones pointed to a khaki-coloured canvas roll-up the size of a cricket kitbag among their surveying gear on one side of the sangar. ‘I kept that beside me all the time, sir, as I promised you. Your special equipment.’
Jones knew what the bag contained, though not its true purpose. On the face of it, a sporting rifle was an unremarkable piece of gear for a British officer travelling abroad who might expect opportunities to hunt along the way; there were officers fired up by tales of African game who had brought with them entire arsenals, of every imaginable type and calibre. But Mayne’s gun was a make rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic, and he did not want to draw attention to himself. The wooden box inside the bag was sealed and weatherproofed so that it was not damaged in any way. He suspected that the time to test-fire and sight it in would be soon, perhaps immediately after his visit to Wolseley, so he would take it with him when he left the sangar for the river. He nodded his acknowledgement to Jones. ‘Is my boat ready?’
‘The bows were stoved in on a rock during the passage from Korti, and the sappers down below are patching her up. They’re going to signal me when they’re finished. Meanwhile Mr Tanner and Major Ormerod of the Canadian contingent have discovered something they thought you might want to see. They know about your interest in the ancient ruins, and they’ve come across some carvings in the cliff face below us.’
Mayne squinted at the ridge on the opposite side of the river. ‘I’ll stay up here, I think,’ he murmured. ‘If there are dervishes watching us, I’d rather try to do something about it than make myself a target at the base of that cliff. Judging by the difficulties I saw ahead in this cataract, the river column will probably still be camped here when I get back. Plenty of time then for exploring ruins.’
Jones looked at him shrewdly. ‘You’ve been away sometimes for weeks on end, and that’s just carrying out reconnaissance upriver. If General Wolseley wants you to go into the desert for him, then you’ll probably be away for a long time. We won’t be seeing you back here at this spot, sir, that’s my guess.’
Mayne pulled the Martini-Henry rifle out of the holster attached to his saddlebag, and picked up the cartridge box. ‘Then I’d better make the best use of my time while I’m here. My spotting scope and binoculars are in the saddlebag. Bring them to the parapet and we’ll see if we can’t spy out those dervishes of yours.’
‘You’re having something to eat and drink first, sir.’
Mayne grunted, then dropped into the sangar and leaned his rifle against the parapet. Jones was right. He was not yet ready for hard-tack biscuit and tinned bully beef, but he took the proffered leather mussak water bottle gratefully, wetting his lips and then swilling the water around his mouth as he had learned to do from the Dongolese, taking small sips before slaking his thirst. He left the bottle half full and passed it back, taking his first proper look at Jones, who was wearing regulation khaki but sporting a colourful bandanna under his helmet, its knotted end hanging down his back like a pigtail. Mayne recognised the cloth pattern of the Hudson’s Bay Company; it must have been given to him by one of the Canadian voyageurs recruited by Wolseley to navigate the boats up the cataracts. Unlikely friendships had formed among the motley crew assembled for this task.
Mayne waved away an open tin, but Jones succeeded in thrusting a rock-hard fragment of biscuit into his hand. ‘Was it as you expected, sir? The river, I mean?’
Mayne slumped back against the parapet. ‘The next stretch of open water begins about seven miles ahead. I’ve mapped out a possible route through the cataract in between, but the river was too muddy to see any underwater obstructions even from my vantage point high above the bank. It’ll be down to the Mohawks to navigate the way forward.’
‘They’ve got an uncanny ability, sir. We’ve been watching them in the rapids below us here. Your friend Charrière, he’s the best.’
‘Rivers are in their blood, and the canoe is like a second skin to them,’ Mayne replied. ‘They can sense the slightest change in the current, allowing them to detect rocks underwater as if the river had been stripped away.’ He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and took the water bottle again from Jones. ‘I’ve identified the best landing point for the flotilla when it reaches the foot of the next cataract at the end of the open water. It’s on the far bank, but the obvious route beyond that is a dead-end alley and they’d have to backtrack if they tried going up it, losing hours. They’ll need to cross the river and work their way up below the cliffs on this side. I’ll pass my sketches on to General Earle’s adjutant before I leave.’
‘Is the next cataract going to be as bad as this one, sir?’
Mayne took another swig. ‘Worse, probably. And there are four more stretches of cataract before the clear passage to Khartoum. That’s more than two hundred miles ahead, and by the time open water is reached, the river level will have dropped so much that even the clear sections between the cataracts will be full of shoals and exposed rock. Time is most definitely not on our side. At best it’s going to be a close-run thing.’
‘And a few good marksmen on the cliffs could slow us down even more,’ the subaltern said.
‘I thought the dervishes couldn’t shoot worth damn,’ the Irish soldier said, leaning up on his elbows from where he had been lying, staring intently at Mayne.
‘Don’t count on it,’ Mayne replied. ‘The true jihaddiyah, the Ansar, have forsworn modern weapons, and despise firearms as the tool of the infidel. But the Mahdi’s been very astute. He knows that the traditional tribal warrior of the Sudan equates cou
rage and manliness with the sword and the spear, and by extolling that tradition he’s been able to recruit more tribal men to his cause. But the Remington rifles they captured from the Egyptians have been put to good use too. The Mahdi has raised a cadre of sharpshooters to provide long-distance fire over the heads of the advancing Ansar. The few Egyptian soldiers who were allowed to survive capture have taught them how to clean and maintain the rifles, and how to shoot.’
‘Soldiers that we trained ourselves, turning what we taught ’em back against us,’ the soldier grumbled.
‘Can’t say as I blame them,’ Jones said. ‘The Egyptian soldiers we massacred back at Tel-el-Kebir when we first arrived in Egypt only wanted freedom from Turkish rule, and we put the survivors in chains and sent them down here to the seventh circle of hell to get slaughtered. Joining with the dervishes isn’t just about saving their own skins; it’s about carrying on their fight against the Ottomans. I’m not saying as we should sympathise with the Mahdi, heaven forefend, sir, but I’ve seen the Ottoman officials on the way down here and the way they lord it over the Egyptians, and I can see their point.’
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