A policeman moved up to him and raised his rifle, and Jack immediately put his hands up, followed by Costas. He felt his harness being roughly unclipped and his backpack drop to the ground. Someone grabbed one wrist and then the other, handcuffing them behind his back. He could see that Costas was receiving the same treatment, and they were both pushed forward into the glare. ‘What the hell is going on?’ Jack said angrily to the nearest policeman. ‘Why are we being arrested?’
Ibrahim appeared in front of him, followed by two policemen. ‘Listen to me, Jack. They’re not going to arrest me. I’m going to drive back to Semna immediately. They’ve stripped the car and taken your mobile phones, everything. I’ve seen this before. All you’ll get back when they dump you across the Egyptian border will be your passports. But I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Why are we being arrested?’ Jack said. ‘What for?’
A policeman stood between Ibrahim and Jack, patting a truncheon, but Ibrahim spoke to him quickly in Sudanese and the man stepped aside grudgingly, a scowl on his face. Ibrahim turned to Jack. ‘I’m not supposed to be talking to you. You’re not supposed to have contact with anyone until you cross the border. Once you remove all of your gear they’ll blindfold you and take you in separate cars. Nobody will tell you anything. But you’ve been arrested for diving on an archaeological site without a permit, and for attempting to steal antiquities. That carries a statutory sentence of ten years. You’re getting off lightly.’
‘But we had a permit,’ Jack exclaimed.
‘We had permission, not a permit. There was nothing on paper. Everything was at the whim of al’Ahmed, and he’s clearly decided to revoke his support. It was always going to be a risk.’
‘We find it for him, and then he deports us,’ Jack said. ‘It was a setup.’
‘Be cool, Jack. And you too, Costas. Go with the flow and don’t provoke them. You can shout as much as you like after you’ve crossed the border. But one thing you can be sure of is that you won’t be allowed back in the Sudan while this man holds the strings of power in the antiquities department.’
20
Khartoum, 25 January 1885
Major Edward Mayne lay against the crumbling mud-brick wall of the fort, peering through his telescope over the Nile at the low buildings of the city some eight hundred yards away. He took a deep breath, then dropped his head down and swallowed hard to stop himself from retching. They had smelled the city from miles off, an occasional waft in the air, then a rancid backdrop that had tainted every breath, and finally the sickening, honey-sweet smell that assailed him now, a stench of decay combined with the fetid odour of the river, which was too sluggish to wash away the filth that oozed into it, leaving it mouldering and fly-ridden on the mudbanks that lined the shore. From a distance they had seen flocks of vultures wheeling over the city, and as they approached they watched the birds drop down and pull indescribable trophies from the river mud – lumps of gristle and strings of bones barely hanging together – and fly off with them to their desert feasting grounds to the west. Four weeks ago at the cataract he had mused on the fact that they were drinking water that had flowed past here, past Gordon, but now it made him sick to his stomach. He had known that Khartoum would be a city on its last legs, a place of starvation and disease and death, but nothing could have prepared him for this.
He lay still for a moment, listening out for Charrière’s return from the riverbank. The exposed riverbed was as wide as the Thames foreshore in London at low tide, but instead of hard gravel was a muddy effluvium that was already beginning to dry and crack; the river itself continued to flow through a narrow central channel, but on either side it was reduced to brown trickles and pools between mudflats. They had spotted one place where a boat crossing looked feasible, an irregular channel that ran past Tutti island some four hundred yards to the west and then towards the far shore, its waters visibly diminishing even in the short time they had been there. Charrière had gone half an hour ago to investigate a cluster of boats that had been drawn up nearby, their owners evidently awaiting the winter run-off from the mountains to the south that would once again cause the Nile to flood.
It had been a week since they had left the battlefield of Abu Klea, a week during which they had kept to their plan, staying one day ahead of the three steamers that were chugging the ninety miles up from Metemma. They had moved fast through the desert, keeping close to the course of the river but far enough away to avoid being spotted, travelling in the cool of the night under a full moon and hiding in rocky gullies during the day. If all went to plan, the steamers would arrive some twelve hours from now, soon after dawn tomorrow morning, providing they survived the barrage of artillery and rifle fire that the Mahdi’s men would undoubtedly throw at them. Even so they would only be able to come up the channel opposite the palace where the river still flowed, and would have to use duckboards and ropes to get across the mudbanks to Mayne’s present position in the fort, the rendezvous point where they would pick up Gordon. The plan had worked so far, but it had been a close-run thing. Had he and Charrière arrived a day later, there would have been no chance of getting a boat across, and his only hope would have been to mingle with the Mahdi’s men on the far shore of the White Nile and attempt to get into the city from there, a virtually suicidal venture as his Arab disguise was bound to be rumbled close-up. His mission still hung in the balance; everything about it had been a close-run thing.
He heard the croak of frogs, and the buzzing of mosquitoes. Away to the left an emaciated cow with its eyes sewn shut was circling round and round a wooden post, pulling a wheel that raised and lowered a shaduf water-lifting device over the bank of the river. The harness creaked and groaned, and the beast wheezed. Someone had taken pot shots at it, probably the Mahdist sharpshooters on Tutti island; it had two black holes in its upper flanks and a gaping hole in its stomach where a bullet had exited along with a string of entrails, now hanging from it and swarming with shiny fat flies. Yet still the beast lumbered round, the shaduf dipping into an imaginary river that had dropped below its reach many days ago. The ravenous people on the opposite bank must have been tortured by the animal’s existence, but it had been saved from butchery by the danger of crossing the river within range of Tutti island, and the torpor Mayne had seen through his telescope: of men and women too far gone to move, let alone launch a boat. Charrière had promised to dispatch it with his knife once the sun was down and it was safe to do so without being seen.
Around the cow lay stacks of sun-dried bricks and piles of mud, solidified masses that dotted the shoreline like collapsed termite mounds. Mayne realised that the shaduf had been used to bring up water for brick-making, and that the deep pit behind him inside the ruined fort had been excavated for its mud. Its bottom was a festering slurry, alive with hatching insects, and he felt his sandals dig into it now, the mud oozing between his toes. The caked layers of sweat and grime on his skin had kept the mosquitoes at bay, a lesson he had learned from the Mohawks in Canada, but Charrière had protected himself further by daubing his face and forearms with liquid mud from the pit; afterwards he had seemed barely visible, as if he had emerged from the banks of the river like some Nile wraith. Mayne had forgone the treatment, caring little about the discomfort of insects and the risk of fever. He needed to look half presentable if he were to stand any chance of getting past the gate guardians at the palace and being allowed to see Gordon.
He raised his telescope and studied the palace now. It was the only building of any grandeur, a low two-storey affair with twelve large French-style windows on each floor facing out over the river, and an external staircase on the left-hand side that led from an upper-floor balcony to a forecourt enclosed by a perimeter wall and the gate to the street outside. He stared at the front of the structure, scrutinising the approach from the river while there was still enough light. A retaining wall and low balustrade lay along the top of the riverbank; below that was a stairway leading down to a small dock. The present level
of the river was some fifteen feet below that and fifty feet out, but duckboards had been laid over the mud from the stairs to the water’s edge. Anchored in the mud were a series of upright posts of indeterminate purpose, probably for mooring. He could see yet another reason why tonight was the only possible time to go. A gap had already appeared between the duckboards and the water, and another few hours would make it impassable, an expanse of ooze and quicksand that would terminate his mission within a stone’s throw of Gordon’s upper-storey windows.
He looked at them now. They were shuttered and dark. For a moment he wondered whether the whole exercise had been in vain, whether Gordon was in there at all. Then he remembered Buller telling him that Gordon slept during the day and was up during the night; despite getting dark, it was still only about five o’clock, and he might not yet have risen. And there was something else, clinching evidence. Mayne looked at the duckboards again, seeing how the planks had been laid alongside each other in threes and lashed over transverse timbers placed on the mud about four feet apart. It was exactly how they had been trained to construct them at the School of Military Engineering, practising on the tidal banks of the river Medway. He shook his head, remembering Buller’s catty remark about Gordon: ever the engineer. The lowest extension of the planking nearest the water had been built in the same fashion, so Gordon must have been out there supervising the work a mere matter of hours before. He must still be alive.
He scanned along the shoreline as far as he could to the east. He could just make out the ditch and parapet that enclosed Khartoum on its landward side, earthworks that Gordon himself had had built yet could have no hope of defending with his few hundred remaining Sudanese troops, many of them by now surely on the brink of starvation and reduced by disease and untreated wounds. Within the walls lay a straggling line of mud-brick huts, leading up to the more substantial residences close to the palace where the Egyptian and Sudanese officials and their families must be holed up, barely surviving on Gordon’s dwindling food supply, paralysed by fear.
He cocked an ear, thinking he had heard footsteps, but it remained unsettlingly quiet. His Dongolese guide Shaytan had told him that the Mahdi ordered his entire army to prayer just before dusk, and that the Ansar enforced it with an iron fist; anyone caught transgressing had their hands lopped off. A quarter of a million men had been down on their hands and foreheads facing Mecca, their chanting too far off to be heard. But now somewhere in the distance he heard the single beat of a drum, nothing more, as if one of the drumbeats from Abu Klea had been captured somehow on the wind and spirited here, an ominous portent of things to come. He heard the thump of artillery, the shriek of a shell and the whoomph as it fell somewhere beyond the palace, raising a cloud of dust that joined the pastel-red pallor lying over the city. A rifle shot rang out from the island to the right, and he saw a dark figure scurry for cover below the balustrade of the palace. It was the first gunfire he had heard, and was strangely reassuring. When they had arrived from the desert, it had not only been the deathly quiet he found unnerving, but also the absence of smoke and burning; it was only when he looked with his telescope that he realised the reason: that everything flammable in the city – the wooden frames of the mud-brick houses, the shaduf water-lifting devices that should have lined the shore, the thatched roofs, the palm and fruit trees, the barrows and carts – was long gone, destroyed in the weeks of bombardment or chopped up and used for fuel. It was a city reduced to a skeleton, where even high-explosive shells failed to make much impact, with nothing left to splinter and shatter other than the fragile human beings who still clung to life in the streets.
The few people he had seen were like the wretches he had once watched sifting through rubbish on the Thames foreshore on a foggy London morning, only here they were naked and there was no tide to wash away the filth of the river. It was as if the city had collapsed in exhaustion during the day, and what little energy remained – for scouring the alleyways yet again for anything edible, for raising ever more fetid water from the river – came out in a brief burst at dusk, before it dissipated again and the night-time bombardment of the city resumed. The people had been living in the shadow of death for too long to care what tomorrow might bring; they knew as Mayne knew that this day could be their last, that the arrival of the steamers with the relief force would surely provoke the Mahdi to order a final assault in which everything squalid would be cleansed, in which the city would be cleared of its suffocating pallor and the divine light would be allowed to shine through, in which all those who did not see it and who still clung to Gordon would be raped and mutilated and butchered.
He turned again to the foreshore, and spotted a group of women and children dragging two corpses down to the river; they left them in the mud and scurried back up the bank. He looked at the dark pool below the bodies, and wondered whether the vultures were the only ones here with a taste for human flesh. Shaytan had told him that the slave-traders had captured crocodiles from the Nile and kept them in special underground tanks, feeding them with those who had crossed them. Perhaps these women were doing the same, leaving offerings to beasts that had been set free in the river but still lingered nearby, expecting a feast of death. He remembered the underground chamber beside the cataract and the image of the ancient Egyptian crocodile god Sobek. Perhaps these people, in this place too shrouded in horror for the divine light to break through, had reverted to worshipping the beasts the ancients believed radiated the divine presence. He wondered whether Gordon had seen that too, when he had first come here, and whether his zeal to lift the shroud and bring light to these people had brought darkness down upon himself, a darkness that Mayne could now see swallowing up the city, leaving only the lights of the palace flickering in the gloom.
He put his hand on his forehead, feeling the sticky dampness his fingers had picked up from the mud-brick wall. Everything seemed to be covered in a viscous overlay, as if the city were decaying and its putrescence seeping out around the edges, over the Nile and into the desert beyond. He remembered what this place had been before: a city whose population were either slave-dealers or the slaves themselves, people who had either discarded morality or whose morality had been destroyed when they were put in chains. A city like that had been in a state of decay long before the siege had begun, its rotting core concealed perhaps by the bustle of trade and the thin carapace of civilised normality provided by the governor and his administration. With those gone it was as if the horror had been allowed to surface, the decay to ooze out. The darkness he saw now in the corners and alleyways was not merely shadows, but something more substantial, a malaise that would soon swallow the skeletal houses and leave nothing there at all, a decaying mound eviscerated of life, like the ancient city-mounds he had seen in the desert to the north.
Seeing the emaciated forms of the people had made him conscious of his own body, of the sparseness of muscle on his forearms, the gaunt cheeks beneath his beard. It was as if all that had hardened him, toughened him up for the desert journey, had in reality been preparation for Khartoum, reducing him to a state where he could be absorbed by the city and stand alongside others as a supplicant to the man who had arrived in their midst like a prophet. But the spareness of his frame scarcely registered against those he had seen on the other shore. This had been a city without food for weeks, apart from the dwindling supply of grain that Gordon must have kept for his own people. The only conceivable sustenance could have come from the corpses that mounted every day, dead through starvation or disease or gunfire; even so, their withered bodies could scarcely have provided palatable nourishment. He caught himself up, suddenly horrified by the ease with which he had assumed the worst. But contemplating Khartoum was like looking at one of the medieval paintings of hell that so fascinated Corporal Jones, where imagining the concealed horrors was worse than the visible images. He wondered how many other cities had gone this way, their inhabitants reduced to living without meaning, solely for survival, until they were mere shadows; and ho
w many of the stark white ruins he had visited, places like Akhenaten’s capital Amarna, had ended their days not in quiet abandonment but in squalor and amorality and putrescence, reeking of decay.
He heard a footfall outside the wall, and Charrière slid alongside him and squatted down. ‘I’ve found a small reed boat, about the size of a canoe. I’ve used my knife to make you a paddle from a piece of plank. It’s crude, but it will do. The channel will take you to within a hundred yards of the island, so you will need to go without making a sound, just as we used to when we crept up on deer on the shore of our lake in the forest.’
It was the first time Charrière had spoken of their past. Mayne had a sudden vision of the two of them as boys half a lifetime ago in Canada, of the birch-bark canoe that Charrière’s father had made him, of the trust they had had in him that he had betrayed by leaving. He started to say something, to tell Charrière how much he wished they were back there now, how sorry he was for letting him down all those years ago, but then he looked into Charrière’s eyes, cold, hard, dark, and said nothing. He raised himself up, keeping below the level of the walls. ‘A reed boat is good. There will be no noise if I go over a rock.’
Charrière looked back out over the desert, scanning the gloom and frowning.
‘What are you thinking?’ Mayne asked.
‘There are no camels, but I sense it. There are others there.’
Mayne stared at him. ‘Our pursuers? There’s been no sign of them since Abu Klea.’
‘I have not been able to backtrack at night and look for them. We have been on the move continuously.’
Mayne looked around. ‘There might be others hiding here in these ruins, people who have made it across from the city.’ He remembered Shaytan telling him that on the way out from Khartoum on the steamer, he had spotted figures along the banks of the Nile, scarcely human forms with distended bellies and bulbous eyes crawling over the mud and catching fish with their bare hands, eating them raw.
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