Tanner took the package and tucked it into his tunic. ‘Right away. I’m heading up to the sangar now.’ He paused, gesturing back at the entrance to the chamber. ‘What do you think of it?’
Mayne nodded towards the river. ‘I think with what might be lurking in the pool, that’s one god you can’t afford to ignore.’
Tanner grinned, shaking his head. ‘If I survive this little jaunt, I might just try to wangle a number like the one Kitchener had in Palestine and come back here as an archaeological surveyor. If there’s more like this to be found, we might be on to the greatest treasure trove from antiquity.’
Mayne shouldered his bags and shook hands with Tanner. ‘Soldier first, engineer second. You remember what they drummed into us at Chatham? And archaeologist third. But I wish you the best of luck. The cataract ahead will be hard work, but by the time I’m back, the column should be well past it. And that sharpshooter won’t be the last. Where there are sharpshooters, there’s an army somewhere beyond.’
Tanner nodded, his smile gone. He was ten years older than the subaltern in the sangar, due for promotion to captain that year, and had been in Afghanistan. ‘We’ve posted more picquets along the riverbank ahead of us, and a company of infantry has been put on alert to act as skirmishers should the need arise. Before he left for Korti, General Earle instructed us to proceed with extra caution. Direct orders from Lord Wolseley.’
Mayne shook Ormerod’s hand, and watched the two men trudge up the scree slope. That was the problem with this expedition: too much caution. High overhead, half a dozen vultures circled, smelling the blood of fresh corpses. On the opposite cliff, two soldiers had reached the body of the marksman and tipped it off into the river. It came floating by now, down the torrent between the two rocks and into the pool, where soldiers crowded along the edge, peering at it as it rolled over and over in the current, unmolested by crocodiles. The sharpshooter had undoubtedly been disguised as a desert Arab, just as Mayne had been on his travels with Shaytan, but he had revealed his true colours before opening fire: the body was wearing the patched jibba of the Ansar, the white robe with the embroidered patches that made it look like the dress of a poor Sufi; and above the gaping hole where his face had been, Mayne could see that the man had been shaven headed. He had seen the Ansar before, fleetingly with Shaytan far to the south when they had watched a Mahdist force surge by in the distance, a storm of dust with banners above and the occasional flash of white as men disengaged from the main force to get out of the dust, riding their camels along the near flank. But seeing a jibba this far north was unnerving, as if the man had broken through the invisible membrane that still divided their world from the darkness ahead.
He looked at the two rocks again, where Charrière had been standing when he had first seen him from the sangar. Down here, close to the river, they looked more impressive, like sentinels guarding a gateway to an unknown world. Through them he could see where the pellucid light over the pool, with everything sharply delineated, gave way to a haze and then an impenetrable miasma, the rocks of the cataract seeming to wobble and shimmer and then disappear from view entirely, as if he were looking into a mirage. He knew that his destiny lay somewhere out there, but for now he was glad to be turning north for a day or two, for a respite. He was desperately tired, and struggling up that slope in the chamber had given him a raging thirst.
He heard a shout, then turned and saw Charrière standing in the boat in the pool, waving at him.
It was time to go.
PART 3
10
Near Semna, below the second cataract of the Nile, present day
Jack Howard followed Hiebermeyer and Costas along the ridge from the sangar, towards the site where they had seen the sculpted head of the pharaoh Senusret beside the square structure of the shrine that had been revealed in the excavation. It was mid afternoon, and despite being November, it was still hot enough to send rivulets of sweat down his face and make a dive in the Nile seem more appealing by the minute. He could see the figure of a woman on top of the shrine, picking her way slowly around, squatting down to inspect something more closely. Below her in the wadi, a Jeep with a child seat strapped into the front passenger side was parked up against the ridge. A young man was leaning against the bonnet, smoking and talking on a phone. He saw them, pushed off and waved languidly, a holstered side arm clearly visible by his side.
Jack waved back. ‘A bodyguard?’
‘Aysha’s cousin,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘He’s just finished his national service in Egypt, and was at a loose end. His military police unit was stationed at the frontier and liaised closely with the Sudanese border guards, so there was no problem getting him a temporary permit to carry a firearm in Sudan.’
‘You expecting trouble?’ Costas asked.
Hiebermeyer shrugged. ‘You can’t be too careful. There’s always been a bandit problem in the desert and there’s a growing fundamentalist presence in Sudan. The bandits think any excavation is after gold, and the fundamentalists get itchy over anything they think might disturb Islamic history. Aysha’s cousin may be a one-man show, but the Sudanese police helicopter squadron at Wadi Halfa is only half an hour away.’
They walked towards Aysha, who saw them and waved. Jack always relished spending time with her, not only for her sharp intelligence but also because she seemed to have walked straight out of the past; she had a face like one of the lifelike portrait plaques of the Hellenistic period found on mummies in the Faiyum, where Hiebermeyer had first met her. She was wearing a man’s keffiyeh headdress, a loose white long-sleeved shirt and a long skirt, but with robust desert boots and a workman’s belt with pockets and loops for tools. On her front was a swaddled bundle attached by cords around her waist and over her shoulders. Costas surged forward and peered at the face just visible beneath the protective sunshade at the front. ‘How’s my favourite small person?’ he asked.
‘Ahren’s fast asleep,’ Aysha said. ‘He’ll sleep for another hour, and then be bright and perky all night.’
‘This is his first taste of an archaeological excavation,’ Hiebermeyer beamed.
Jack smiled at Aysha. ‘I was with Maurice at Heathrow when he bought him some blocks to build a model of an ancient Egyptian temple.’
‘Correction. Maurice bought Maurice some blocks to build a model of an ancient Egyptian temple. It was the centrepiece of the excavation tent until our lovely son brought it tumbling down.’
‘Earning his archaeological credentials,’ Hiebermeyer said proudly. ‘Far more interested in ruins than standing structures. That’s my boy.’
Aysha walked carefully over to an awning on one side of the shrine, and sat down on a folding chair. The others joined her. Jack, who had been thinking hard since seeing the evidence from 1884 in the sangar, glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘Do you remember I promised to look out some material I had in the Howard family archive related to the Gordon relief campaign?’
Hiebermeyer looked at him keenly. ‘Your ancestor, the Royal Engineers officer?’
Jack nodded. ‘My great-great-grandfather, Colonel John Howard. He wasn’t part of the expedition, but he was in charge of a committee at the Royal Engineers headquarters at Chatham that looked after Gordon’s collection of antiquities. Howard passed through Egypt in March 1885 on his way back home from India, and picked up a crate of material in Cairo that had been sent down from the Sudan. I know it contained some archaeological finds that Gordon had dispatched from Khartoum the previous year, including ancient Egyptian artefacts from the desert. Those mostly went to the Museum of the Royal United Services Institute in London, and when that was disbanded in the 1960s they were dispersed around various museums in England.’
‘You told me there was some material related to Semna.’
Jack nodded. ‘Just two envelopes, in the collection of his private papers that I have in that old wooden sea chest in my office on Seaquest II. But it’s frustrating because both are empty. One has the sender’s address as “R
iver Column, Semna”, dated the twenty-fourth of December 1884, and is from Lieutenant Peter Tanner, a sapper friend of Howard’s from his time in India. I know they shared an interest in archaeology, and I’ve always imagined that was what the letter was about. Sadly Tanner was killed in battle alongside General Earle six weeks later, when the river column had its first major engagement with the Mahdi’s army, at Kirbekan, some sixty miles south of here.’
‘And the other?’
‘That one’s a real puzzle. It’s a scuffed brown manila envelope about twenty centimetres across that had once been tied around, as if it had contained something heavy, an object the size of a large floor tile. It’s addressed to Howard at the School of Military Engineering, and was from a sapper in the 8th Railway Company, Royal Engineers. It was posted in May 1885 from a British army field hospital at Wadi Halfa. The 8th Railway Company weren’t meant to be a combatant unit, but they did fight one of the last battles of the campaign, when they were besieged at the fort of Ambikol at the end of the railway line and held off wave after wave of dervish attacks. The sapper must have been badly wounded to have been at that particular hospital. His name was Jones, and I realised I recognised him from his regimental number on the envelope. He’d been a sergeant with Howard in India during the Rampa Rebellion in 1879, and a bit of research showed that he was a corporal with the river column in 1885 before being transferred to the Railway Company. Sometime after that he must have lost his corporal’s stripes and been reduced to sapper, not for the first time in his army career, it seems. It was common for engineer officers and NCOs to have close friendships, as they often worked together for months on end with no other soldiers present. When Jones had been with Howard in the Rampa jungle they made some major archaeological discoveries. That might explain why he chose to send Howard what looks as if it must have been some kind of artefact from the desert.’
‘Is there any chance of following the trail further?’
Jack nodded. ‘The sea chest only contains papers that happened to be among my father’s material when he died. But another couple of boxes of my great-great-grandfather’s papers were found when restoration work was carried out in the attic of the old hall on our estate last year. My grandfather was in serious debt following the Second World War and had to let the house, and it seems that he put a lot of family material into storage in the attic and then forgot to tell anyone about it. I’ve only managed to look through a few boxes so far, but I’ll go straight to it when I get back to the IMU campus after we finish our diving here. The attic is going to be converted to rooms for visiting scholars, and I need to supervise removal of all the material to the library before the end of next week. If Jones’ artefact came from Semna, which seems possible, then maybe it’s something that can shed light on the archaeology of this place. I’d love to go through the whole collection properly, but until now I hadn’t seen myself having the time. A retirement project maybe.’
Hiebermeyer peered at him over his glasses. ‘Retirement? Jack Howard?’
Aysha shifted the baby. ‘Why not put Rebecca on to it? John Howard’s her ancestor too.’
Jack gave her a rueful look. ‘I don’t think family history is her cup of tea. At the moment she’s toying with applying to study theoretical physics at Caltech.’
Aysha waved her free hand dismissively. ‘That’s just an act of rebellion against you. If you told her there was some kind of archaeological trail in those family papers, she’d be on to it like a shot. Remember, I’ve spent weeks sitting beside her in the finds lab cleaning bits of broken pot. I can assure you that she has the Howard genes. Anything to get out of drudgery, and she’ll do it.’
‘Okay. I’ll set it up. But I want to have a look again as well. Especially after having seen this place.’
‘The Royal Engineers played a major part in the development of archaeology out here,’ Aysha said, gently rocking the baby. ‘It’s fascinated me since you first suggested that I study it for my masters dissertation project in London.’
Jack looked at Costas. ‘It’s one of the unsung aspects of the development of archaeology in the Victorian period. One of the main jobs of the Royal Engineers was survey and mapmaking, and in the course of their explorations they laid the groundwork for archaeological research in many areas of the world that came under British influence, including Palestine and Egypt. A lot of them were also keenly interested in Biblical history and archaeology in its own right. That was the period when people were really beginning to put facts behind the timeline and geography of the Bible. The Royal Engineers attracted many men who today might well have become professional archaeologists.’
‘A case in point is Lord Kitchener,’ Aysha said. ‘I made a special study of him because I felt that his role in the archaeology of Egypt had been overlooked. We think of him chiefly as the man who avenged Gordon, who led the British in the reconquest of Sudan and the final victory against the Mahdist army at Omdurman 1898. But in so doing he opened up the whole of the Nubian desert to archaeological exploration, including the first investigations that took place here at Semna. I always felt that if he hadn’t been so obsessed with avenging his hero, he would have been able to carry out more exploration himself in the desert, as that was really his calling.
‘General Gordon is another example. When he was first made governor general of the Sudan in the 1870s, he travelled around the country extensively, accompanied by some colourful European and American characters he’d appointed to his staff. He managed to visit many archaeological sites and amass a large collection of antiquities and ethnographic material. I ended up arguing in my dissertation that if it hadn’t been for Gordon’s insistence on staying to evacuate Khartoum in the face of the Mahdist uprising, then he wouldn’t have died and Kitchener might never have been spurred on his career of reconquest, leaving the archaeology of the Sudan virtually unknown. So in one way or another Gordon is the linchpin of the whole story, and without him we might not be here as archaeologists today.’
‘The Mahdi was the bin Laden of the 1880s, right?’ Costas asked.
‘There was more to him than that,’ Aysha said. ‘For a start, he wasn’t a spoiled rich boy with a whim for jihad that became obsessive. The Mahdi was the real deal, and lived the life he preached. He was a Sudanese boatbuilder with Arab ancestry who became a Sufi holy man. He had visions and was highly charismatic, leading people to think he was a kind of messiah. His followers included many Sudanese tribemen who were disaffected with Ottoman rule and wanted their own freedom; these were the enemy the British and the Egyptians fought, the warriors they called dervishes. The Mahdi died in the same year as Gordon, in 1885, probably poisoned, and his revolt ended with the defeat of his successors at Omdurman in 1898, but he was certainly seen as a role model by bin Laden and his cronies. Growing up as a Muslim in southern Egypt, I can assure you that the influence of the Mahdi’s family and his chosen line of successors remains strong. You do not use his name in vain in this part of Sudan without risking your neck.’
Jack turned to Costas. ‘Gordon was also a Royal Engineers officer. So you can see the link with Kitchener, and with my great-great-grandfather. After the Royal Military Academy they’d all done the same two-year course at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, and they were a tightly knit corps. And many of them not only had archaeological interests but were also strongly committed Christians, influenced by the evangelical movement. They were most interested in the archaeology of the Holy Land, which for them included Egypt.’
‘And that ties them to the Mahdi as well, especially Gordon,’ Aysha said. ‘Gordon was a real maverick, an iconoclast, not very good at taking orders, something he shared with Kitchener. But in Gordon’s case his iconoclasm extended to his religious views as well. The evangelical movement liked to claim him as one of their own, to see him as a devout crusader who had gone to Khartoum to confront the Islamist threat, but in truth that was far from Gordon’s own attitude. His view of religion was very inclusive, and his
focus was on the common tradition from which Islam and Judaeo-Christian beliefs sprang: the same God, many of the same prophets, a similar take on the idea of a messiah. He knew that the Mahdi had visions of Jesus as well as of Muhammad, and that he shared Gordon’s fascination with the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. And both men would have had an interest in Moses, and the origin of the idea of the one God.’
‘Which brings us neatly back to Akhenaten,’ Jack said. He pulled a small paperback book out of the side pocket of his combat trousers and tossed it to Hiebermeyer. ‘Have you ever had a go at reading that?’
Hiebermeyer looked at the cover and raised his eyes knowingly. ‘Moses and Monotheism, by Sigmund Freud. Yes, I have attempted this. A great deal of psychobabble, but the kernel of it contains some sound ideas.’
Jack grinned. ‘I had a look at it on the plane on the way here; I’m glad I’m not the only one who struggled with it.’ He turned to Costas. ‘Freud was putting his own particular spin on the well-established theory that the pharaoh of the Old Testament Book of Exodus was Akhenaten, and that it was he who was associated with Moses and the idea of the one God. This theory gained real bite during the late Victorian period when archaeologists began to understand more about the cult of the Aten, the sun god Akhenaten tried to foist on Egypt at the expense of all the old gods. Because this vision of one God happens to Moses in the Bible as well, Freud toyed with the notion that the two men were really one, that Moses was Akhenaten. Personally I’d discard all that in favour of what you actually read in the Bible, which seems a perfectly plausible picture of a pharaoh and a Hebrew slave sharing the same vision.’
The baby cried, and Aysha quickly undid the cords and passed him to Hiebermeyer, who put down the book and began feeding him with the bottle she gave him, sitting awkwardly but with a beaming smile on his face. ‘I agree with Jack. We’re talking about real people, not some kind of mystical union.’
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