Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by David Gibbins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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