Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by David Gibbins

  He picked up a sheet from a pile on the desk. ‘There are forty thousand people in this city. Forty thousand starving wretches, most of them slaves for whom the only day of liberation in their lives is this one. They may see me as their saviour, yes, but it is because I give them food. That is what I spend my time doing here. I calculate the figures, and I work out how much is left; I give them just enough to stay alive. I keep the hospital running so that the few Arab doctors may relieve the sufferings of those diseased people who are not bound to perish. I own that what I am doing is merely giving sustenance to a dying man. The Mahdi will arrive, and these people will be slaughtered. I can do nothing about that, but I cannot leave them while I am still able to give them food. I cannot leave. If that is unhinged, then so be it.’

  Gordon dropped the sheet, letting it flutter to the floor, and put his hands up to his face, covering his eyes. Then he ran them through his hair and let them drop to his sides. He looked pale, almost luminous, and suddenly fragile, and Mayne realised for the first time how emaciated he was. This was a man who chain-smoked to keep his appetite down, who had made it his task to distribute scant supplies of biscuit among forty thousand starving people, to make them last as long as possible. Mayne thought of the tedious hours they had spent in the School of Military Engineering learning about the economics of garrison management. This was hardly what the instructors would have had in mind, but Gordon was doing the job as he had been trained to do it.

  Mayne pointed to the carefully laid-out jibba on the floor. ‘There are some who believe you have been influenced to convert to the cause of the Mahdi.’

  Gordon passed his hand over his face, and then replied with an edge to his voice, as if trying to restrain himself. ‘It is true that I have a considerable correspondence with my friend Muhammad Ahmad. He is from a family of boatbuilders, you know, and he and I have a considerable shared interest in the technology of Nile watercraft.’ He gave a wry smile, and then went over to the desk and picked up another sheaf of papers, taking one and reading from it. ‘“In the name of God the merciful and compassionate, the Destroyer of him who is obstinate against his religion, blessings and peace be upon our Lord Mahomed and his successors, who have established the foundations and solid pillars of our faith.”’ He put the letter down. ‘It goes on in the same vein. My Sudanese clerk translates them for me. They invariably end with the Mahdi offering me sanctuary and an exalted place beside him if I see his particular version of the light. He cites the case of my friend and his prisoner von Slatin, pretending to believe that von Slatin’s conversion to Islam was not just an act of desperation to encourage his Sudanese troops before their final battle, and an act of expediency to save his life when he was captured. And he mentions our mutual interest in the prophet Isaiah, as if I would believe that Isaiah from on high would be instructing me to join a holy war and destroy all those who are obstinate against my religion.’

  He pointed to the jibba. ‘As for the clothing of the Ansar, I studiously collect everything that comes my way, and let it be known that I want more, as I did during my time in China. Apart from my collection, there will be few other mementoes from this war, and none from Khartoum; the relief force will not arrive before the Mahdi occupies the city, and there will be no souvenir-hunting by our troops. But if Wolseley and his cronies so fervently believe in my imminent apostasy, then I have a mind to start wearing the jibba. It would be more comfortable in the heat.’

  Mayne turned back to the rifle on the stand. ‘The Martini is a better rifle, sir, but I have seen dervish sharpshooters over the Nile use Remingtons to some effect.’

  ‘Are you a sharpshooter, Major Mayne? I had imagined so.’ Gordon looked at him, his blue eyes piercing. ‘What is your preferred rifle?’

  Mayne paused. Had Gordon guessed? ‘A Sharps, sir. Model 1862, in 45/90 calibre. A thirty-four-inch octagonal barrel, made especially heavy.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Gordon, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. ‘An American buffalo rifle. Aperture sights?’

  ‘They are the best, sir. I first used them at the Creedmore range near New York when I went there with a team from the Royal Military Academy.’

  ‘Stiff competition, I should think.’

  ‘I won, sir.’

  Gordon looked out into the darkness towards the island, where the cooking fires of the dervishes could just be seen. ‘I believe an American soldier holds the distance record with a Sharps, during the Indian wars?’

  ‘One thousand four hundred and twenty-one yards over rough ground in the state of Montana, in the summer of 1874. His name was Private Ephrain Jones, sir. I competed against him at Creedmore.’

  ‘And you won.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Gordon gestured outside. ‘Then I could do with such a rifle here, and such a sharpshooter. The first thing I did when I returned to Khartoum last year knowing it would come under siege was to make accurate measurements of the distances from the city to the far shore of the river, to allow my riflemen to find their range. It was a most interesting geometrical exercise. I had my Sudanese row a measured line across the river, and then took right angles from it to create a trigonometric survey of all the main points of the shore. Do you understand my reasoning?’

  Mayne nodded. ‘Using triangulation you could thus calculate distances from any points of fire along the river shore.’

  ‘The Mahdi holds the island and all the shoreline to the west, but the fort and the adjoining riverbank to the east is dead ground, of no value to him because it’s too far away for his riflemen to shoot accurately, and his artillery is concentrated to the west and south where it can do greater damage to the entrances into the city. That fort provides good cover, though, and that’s where you’ve left your companion, isn’t it? I assume you have one. A spotter, perhaps. You’ve come here without your rifle and you would not leave that unattended.’

  Mayne saw no reason to deny it. ‘Sir.’

  ‘What is your estimation of the distance to that fort?’

  Mayne remembered Kitchener’s map. ‘Six hundred and fifty metres, give or take twenty.’

  ‘Six hundred and sixty-five metres. Bravo. You are good. Even at that range, with a cartridge that powerful a body shot could be a clean kill. Am I right?’

  ‘I’ve hunted deer with my Sharps at a thousand yards and dropped them stone dead.’

  ‘Have you ever hunted men, Major Mayne?’

  Mayne swallowed, suddenly discomfited. ‘I’m a soldier, sir. Like you.’

  Gordon stared at him, then smiled and slapped his shoulder. ‘Indeed we are. Soldier first, engineer second, dilettante fossicker down the byways of archaeology and geography and natural history third. That’s what they taught us. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I know why you’ve come. And you know that I won’t leave with you. There’s nothing more I can do for the people here, but if the world knows the truth of why Gordon of Khartoum stayed to the end, then perhaps it will not be a pointless sacrifice. The Mahdi is coming at dawn. I will be on the balcony when they break through the gates. I will be in this full dress uniform, with a red tunic. You will not mistake me. I believe the sun will shine tomorrow, for the first time in days; I can sense it. You must choose your time well. For a few moments at dawn a sliver of light from the eastern horizon lights up the balcony and the mosque behind, but then as the sun rises it reflects off the Nile and obscures this place. I have seen it myself, from the fort on the opposite shore. And watch your back. There will be others with their eyes on you. Mark my words.’

  Mayne did not know what to say. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Have I done my best for these people? For my country?’

  Mayne looked into his eyes, and suddenly felt a flood of compassion, and a flash of anger towards those who had orchestrated all this. ‘For Queen and country, sir.’

  Gordon put a hand on his shoulder, and then picked up a leather-bound volume from his desk. ‘Good. Now, before you go, I trust that yo
u will allow a condemned man one final request. It is of the utmost importance.’

  23

  Gordon led Mayne to his desk, pointed him to a chair and sat down himself behind the writing pad. He opened up the book he had been holding, and Mayne could see that it was a journal, filled almost to the last page with closely lined writing. Gordon gave him a penetrating look. ‘When I dispatched Colonel Stewart to safety in the steamer Abbas, little knowing the fate that awaited him downriver, I sent with him the largest part of my archaeological collection as well as the latest volumes of my journal. All of that was lost when the Abbas was sunk and Stewart murdered.’

  ‘Kitchener mentioned your collection,’ Mayne said. ‘He told me you had an ancient stone slab packed beneath the boiler.’

  Gordon nodded. ‘That was the day that Kitchener was here. Our discussion was almost exclusively concerned with archaeology. And the loss of that slab would have been an utter tragedy, had I not sketched the carvings on it.’

  He opened the back page of the journal, and passed it to Mayne. An inked drawing filled the page, neat, precise, the work of a trained draftsman. But the image was bizarre, different from any other ancient depiction Mayne had seen in the Sudan, almost like something occult. He looked at it with a sapper’s eye. ‘It’s a map, a plan,’ he murmured. ‘Rectilinear interlocking lines of communication, perhaps trenches or tunnels. They all seem to originate from one opening at the bottom, like a maze, a labyrinth.’

  ‘And the Egyptian symbols?’

  Mayne peered closely. The central part of the drawing was blank, in a rough square shape, presumably representing a missing part of the sculpture, but radiating from it over the rectilinear channels were long thin lines ending in shapes like closed hands. ‘That must be the Aten symbol, the rays of the sun,’ he said. ‘And the hieroglyphic cartouche to the right clinches it: that’s Akhenaten.’

  ‘And the other ones?’

  Mayne stared at the individual hieroglyphs that appeared in several places on the image. ‘The crocodile beside Akhenaten’s name means sovereign, pharaoh. The other one’s a symbol of a rolled-up papyrus, and is most curious,’ he said. ‘It means wisdom, or knowledge.’

  Gordon placed the book back on his desk with the page open. ‘I am going to tell you a little story. There was once a boy living beside the Nile north of Khartoum who was testing his first boat, a reed boat like the one you paddled over the river this evening. He had built it himself, cutting and collecting the reeds and bundling them together, and in the process had come to know all the creeks and byways of the Nile shore intimately. One day he came across something extraordinary: an ancient temple half inundated by the river, its upper surface revealed in a storm where it had lain buried in sand for thousands of years. He managed to squeeze inside, and discovered an ancient wall carving of remarkable form, not a depiction of battle or pharaohs but a cluster of rectilinear shapes that he did not recognise, that looked nothing like hieroglyphics or the Arabic script he had been taught by the Sufis. Do you remember when you arrived I showed you the lettering on that little shafti statue, and I said how in Islamic tradition the shape signifies more than the meaning? Well, the boy saw the shape and was terrified, thinking it was some ancient incantation, and quickly left. After the next Nile flood, the shoreline was banked over with sand and the temple once again buried. The boy continued to excel as a boatbuilder, but he had another gift, an ability to see visions that drew people to him, and he became a student of the Sufis. His family despaired of him, the last of generations of boatbuilders who had plied their trade on the Nile since time immemorial, but he was set on a different course. His name was Muhammad Ahmad’Abdallah.

  Mayne stared at him, astonished. ‘The Mahdi?’

  Gordon nodded. ‘Ten years ago, when I first came to the Sudan, his fame was already spreading, but he was no more than a Sufi mystic living on an island in the Nile. I travelled extensively along the river, and he came to know of me after I visited his family’s boatyard and drew sketches of their watercraft, showing them images of ancient boat models I had seen in Egypt and telling them of my interest in the antiquities of the Sudan. He had not forgotten his discovery as a boy and he invited me to his island. I recognised the hieroglyphs of Akhenaten from his description, and it was then that we discovered our shared passion for the Old Testament prophets, for Isaiah and also for Moses. We both believed that the pharaoh of the Book of Exodus at the time of Moses was Akhenaten himself, and that Akhenaten and Moses shared the same vision of one God, a vision that Muhammad Ahmad believed had come to them during an expedition to the southern desert. I became gripped by the idea, and spent much of my time on the search for proof, anything that might allow us to trace the expedition and find the place where we believed he had experienced his revelation. I persuaded my friend Heinrich Schliemann to take time off from Troy and join me in the desert, and I brought a few others into my confidence: Rudolf von Slatin; an American officer on my staff named Charles Chaille-Long; Colonel Sir Charles Wilson; and Herbert Kitchener. Wilson and Kitchener I knew I could count on because of their deep involvement with the archaeology of the Holy Land. And finally, you may be surprised to know, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.’

  ‘Gladstone?’ Mayne exclaimed, remembering what Kitchener had told him. ‘But you have surely been at loggerheads with him over your insistence on remaining in Khartoum.’

  ‘His involvement has been kept in the strictest secrecy, because he has not wanted his name to be associated with a quest that some might see as mystical. But he has in truth been my staunchest supporter. He tried his damnedest to dissuade me from returning here, and his irritation with me has a genuine basis to it. He tried to persuade me that what I had sought could wait until the Mahdist revolt had dissipated and we could return to the Sudan peaceably, but I told him the revolt was never likely to end within our lifetimes, and the quest would be lost. I felt that if I could make a discovery that drew together one who was regarded as a Christian soldier and another an Islamist visionary, then there was hope for some unity of vision that might emphasise the singularity of our beliefs, not their differences, and make war less of a certainty.’

  ‘So you came out here for that purpose? For the archaeology?’

  ‘My purpose in coming out here was in truth as I have told you: to arrange for the safe passage of my staff and their families from Khartoum, and to do all I could for the people of this city. But my archaeological quest was not disassociated from my aim to lift the veil of conflict from this place, and to stem the jihad.’

  ‘Did you find the temple?’

  ‘Muhammad Ahmad showed me the place, and I set my people to work. The temple was deeply buried, and it took months of effort. By the time the inner chamber was revealed, Muhammad Ahmad was no longer part of the picture; he had become the Mahdi, and the centre of the whirlwind that envelops us now. It was only after I had discovered the wall carvings and brought them to the light of day, when his spies among my workmen reported back to him, that he understood what he had seen as a boy for what it was. It was not early writing or some ancient spell. It was a map.’

  ‘Did you show it to him?’

  Gordon shook his head. ‘By then we were enemies. But he sent his followers after me, to try to take the carvings. I kept them here in the storerooms of the palace, hidden away, and eventually put them on the Abbas. To enthuse them, he let his followers believe that he was after gold, that I had found clues to some ancient El Dorado of the desert. Indeed, that is what the first pharaohs who came here thought too, seeking to extend the borders of Egypt beyond the desert but also hunting the oases and wells for evidence of an ancient civilisation, just as we do today. If they truly found their El Dorado we shall never know, for they were repelled by the warriors they called the guardians of the desert, savage fighters like the Ansar of the Mahdi today. In two places where Akhenaten went I have found depictions of battle against Egyptians in which these enemies are victorious, almost as if Akhenaten w
ere leaving the images as a warning for others from Egypt not to follow him.’

  Mayne thought for a moment. ‘The crocodile temple, where I saw the image of Akhenaten. It had just such a depiction of carnage in battle.’

  Gordon leaned forward, his voice intense. ‘It was the hunt for ancient gold, treasure they believed I had hidden away for secret dispatch to Egypt, that led the Mahdi’s men to ransack the Abbas, diving repeatedly on the wreck to search for it. But little did they know that there was a far greater treasure concealed there, a treasure that the Mahdi had sent his emirs to discover when they waylaid and murdered Stewart and his men.’

  Mayne looked at the crocodile symbol on the drawing, and suddenly remembered the channel that Lieutenant Tanner had discovered at the cataract, from the Nile to the crocodile temple. He studied the drawing again, seeing the interconnectedness of the lines, their origin at one source. ‘Do you remember at Chatham studying hydraulic engineering, looking at Venice and the island cities of northern India? This isn’t a labyrinth. It’s a complex of canals, some of them rising over the others. That entrance must lead from a water source, a river. I think the reason why this has never been found is that it’s underground.’

  Gordon nodded. ‘Agreed. And I think the water source had to be a river, to keep enough volume flowing into a complex like this, and to keep it from stagnating.’

  ‘In this part of the world that can only mean the Nile.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital city?’

  ‘Schliemann and Chaille-Long explored the site exhaustively and found no evidence. They even employed divers using compressed air cylinders to inspect the edges of the river underwater, but they found no indication of a channel.’