‘As well as the extraordinary crocodile mummies, there is another remarkable archaeological discovery here that I’d love to tell you about but it will have to be another time, when I can sit down undistracted and do it justice – suffice to say that Edward Mayne was here with us, and went with the major of the Canadian contingent and myself into the underground temple, through the barest of cracks at the top of the door – that really gives the game away to you, doesn’t it, but it’s not fair to keep you on tenterhooks, until I write next time; at any rate Mayne took a small stone slab with carving which he instructed me to give to his servant, Corporal Jones, who you will remember from the Rampa expedition when he was a sergeant, and I instructed Jones to send it on to you if Mayne should be killed. It may be merely of passing interest to you, I fancy, but as I believe you have been appointed curator of Gordon’s antiquities – for which my congratulations – it would make sense for you to be its recipient. Corporal Jones, incidentally, is for the Railway Company, to keep him out of mischief and away from any fights, though I fear we may all be in line for that in due course, with the Mahdi’s army growing daily. Mayne is for headquarters at Korti and some secret mission, I know not what. He has being doing reconnaissance out here. (You will remember that he instructed us in sharpshooting when we were juniors at Chatham; he has his rifle out here, I believe it is a Sharps, tho’ he keeps it concealed. It was he who used one of our rifles to pot the Mahdist sharpshooter who killed our two poor soldiers.)
My dear John, I am fed up with war already and would wish nothing better than to take up an appointment like that held by Kitchener in Palestine and carry out archaeological survey, or perhaps back in India. Egypt is now crying out for archaeologists as will the Sudan if we can finish this infernal war and get Gordon out alive. But if I were to be an archaeologist in Egypt, then your sister-in-law, darling Maria, would have to live in Cairo, and I would wish that on no English woman on account of the cholera, certainly no English woman wishing to bear children. I would not wish my wife to endure the sufferings of your own dear wife Georgina when your poor boy Edward died in Bangalore. Perhaps if there is no survey post I will find a position at the School of Military Engineering and we can communicate not by letter but daily and in person. I should like that above all things.
I am called by General Earle to the river. More anon.
Your most affectionate friend and fellow archaeologist,
P. Tanner, Lieutenant, Royal Engineers, at Semna, November 24th, 1885’
Rebecca looked up, and put the letter on Jack’s desk. ‘I was sad because you said he was killed only a few weeks later. It seems such a waste. I almost think of him as still being there, at that date, waiting for a life ahead which would never be fulfilled. You can say what you like about Gordon, but this was the cost.’
Jack took the letter and looked at it. Now he knew the name of the sniper: Mayne. He quickly walked over to the cased book collection that he had inherited from his grandfather, and pulled out several volumes of the Army List for the 1870s and 1880s. ‘Here it is,’ he murmured. ‘Edward Mayne, commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1868, captain 1878, major 1884. Served in the Red River expedition in Canada in 1871. Always a survey officer, or on secondment. This is interesting. He disappears completely from the list after 1885. Missing, whereabouts unknown.’
‘Killed in the desert campaign?’
‘If so, not on official operations, otherwise it would have been recorded. But it wasn’t unknown for men to ride out and disappear without trace in the desert.’
‘And did you notice? Tanner mentions the plaque.’
‘Yes,’ Jack said excitedly. ‘I’m sure it’s the square slab that was missing from the carving on the wall in the temple. It might, just might, contain some clues as to the meaning of the image in the carving. Even if I can’t go back to Sudan, we might at least be able to wrap that one up.’ His phone flashed, and he picked it up, reading the message. ‘Yes,’ he exclaimed. ‘Your great-aunt Margaret is back at home. Told me off for leaving an answerphone message instead of sending a text. That’s a modern eighty year old for you. That’s where we’re going. She’ll be delighted to see us this afternoon. We’d better be on our way.’
‘Not before you see what else I’ve found. We can read it in the car.’
‘Okay. Let’s be quick about it. Fire away.’
She held the brown parcel in front of her. ‘This was at the bottom of the first box of Howard’s papers. It was sent to him at the School of Military Engineering in Chatham from a remote location in Ontario through the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs. It seems to have taken a long time getting out of Canada, as no postage was put on it. You can see that on one part of the envelope it’s marked “Veteran”, and the Canadian Department of Veteran Affairs seems to have decided to cover the costs. Beside “Veteran” it says “Nile, 1884–5”. But the postmark from Ottawa is the twenty-fifth of January 1925.’
‘That’s almost fifteen years after Colonel Howard died.’
‘It was unopened. It must have been forwarded by the School to his last known address, and someone stashed it with his stuff.’
‘Do we know who the sender was?’
‘His name was Henri Charrière. I remember you talking about Canadian Mohawk Indians on the Nile, and I looked him up in a book you recently ordered for the library on the subject. He’s in it, though there are few details. He served in the Red River expedition, like Mayne. The two men must have known each other, because Charrière was with the voyageur contingent on the Nile on that day in 1884 when Tanner wrote his letter. Unlike the other Indians, there’s no record of when he went back to Canada, and he didn’t return to live in their communities. There’s a note saying that a man with his name with a veteran’s pension was living in 1922 in a cabin beside Lake Traverse in Algonquin Park, a wilderness area in Ontario. He must have been at least eighty years old by then. How he ended up with what’s in this package, and why he sat on it for so long before deciding to send it to someone in authority, is a mystery.’
‘Show it to me while we walk out.’
‘You might want to stay sitting just for this bit. I opened it to see the cover, but I thought you might want to be the first one to open the actual book.’
Jack took the package from her, glancing at the grubby envelope covered with stamps and nearly illegible writing, and he admired Rebecca’s tenacity in deciphering it. He slipped the volume out, and weighed it in his hands. It was a ruled notebook, a diary or a journal. He realised that he was looking at the back cover upside down, and he flipped it over. There was a hand-written title on the cover. He read it, and then read it again, barely taking it in. He coughed, and read it out loud: ‘“The Journal of Major General Charles Gordon, CB, Garrison Commander at Khartoum, 14 December 1884 to 25 January 1885”.’
He sat back, stunned. It was the lost final volume of General Gordon’s diary. He could scarcely bring himself to open it. This would surely at last reveal the truth of those last days in Khartoum. He pressed the journal against his chest, and then put it carefully back into the envelope, handing it back to Rebecca. ‘Yours for safe keeping. That may be the most extraordinary treasure of this whole quest. You can begin reading it to me in the car.’
Four and a half hours later, Jack pulled off the main road and drove down the narrow lane into the village where his great-great-grandfather had lived. It seemed a world away from the desert of Sudan and the war against the Mahdi, but these villages were the idealised image of England that many of the soldiers dreamed of while they were on campaign, and today they were often the places where the last residues of undiscovered papers and artefacts from those years were to be found. He had not been here for a long time, but he remembered the route through the picturesque village square and up the side lane to the row of half-timbered cottages, the rolling summits of the Brecon Beacons looming a few miles behind. H
e stopped outside the front gate, switched off the engine and enjoyed the silence after the drive, letting Rebecca sleep for a few minutes longer.
It had been an extraordinary few hours of revelation as she had picked her way through the diary. Gordon’s last entry on the morning of the day he died was a neatly written statement that Jack could remember now from memory: Major Mayne of the Royal Engineers has arrived, with a companion. He is to have this journal for safe keeping, so that it may be published and known to the world. Now I know I am to die. I have stayed with the people of Khartoum to the last.
Everything about it was astonishing. Now Jack knew where Major Mayne had gone. He and Rebecca were certain that the companion had been Charrière, as that would explain how he came to have the diary. Why it had taken him so long to return it, beyond the lifetimes of most of the players in those events, remained perplexing. Mayne himself must have died for Charrière to have ended up with the diary, perhaps during that final apocalyptic day when the Mahdist forces overran the city. What Mayne was doing visiting Gordon in his final hours was a mystery. There was no other mention in the historical records of a British officer reaching Gordon so late in the day. It must have been a covert mission, top secret. The phrase that repeated over and over in Jack’s mind was Gordon’s final sign-off: now I know I am to die. Had he simply become resigned to the inevitable, to the inescapable outcome of the Mahdi’s attack? Or had he known something else? Jack had remembered Lieutenant Tanner’s letter mentioning Mayne’s rifle, and he had begun to think the unthinkable. Had a British officer been sent in secret in a last-ditch attempt to persuade Gordon to leave, to ensure that he was not captured by the Mahdi and paraded in front of the world? Had that officer been chosen because he was also one of the army’s most skilled marksmen, with instructions to deploy that skill should Gordon refuse to leave? He had remembered the iconic image of the death of Gordon, standing fully exposed on the balcony of the palace; using satellite imagery, Rebecca had determined that he would have been within range of a sharpshooter with a high-powered Sharps rifle on the opposite side of the river, shooting to ensure that he was killed yet leaving no evidence that his death was anything other than that of a soldier fighting to the last against an overwhelming enemy.
And then on the last page of the diary they had seen a diagram of an archaeological discovery that Gordon had made somewhere along the Nile, a stone plaque that he had sent away in the Abbas, and Jack had realised that it must have been the one that he and Costas had so nearly recovered, and which must now be in the hands of al’Ahmed and his family. It was a precise illustration of parallel and intersecting lines that Jack recognised from the carving that they had found inside the sarcophagus of Menkaure. Gordon had labelled it with the same term that Captain Wichelo of the Beatrice had used to describe the plaque in the coffin: the City of Light.
The pieces were suddenly falling together. Listening to Rebecca read the journal, Jack had realised that the archaeology from thousands of years ago and the history from little more than a century ago were inextricably intertwined; if it had not been for the archaeology, he would not have embarked on the quest to find out more about Gordon in his family papers, and Rebecca would never have made the discovery. The journal had allowed him to see Gordon as if he himself had opened the door to that room in the palace at Khartoum in 1885, just as Major Mayne must have done; and he had seen neither a mystic nor a messiah, but a man to whom the desert had given a clarity of vision that made compassion for his fellow human beings the guiding force in his life, for those in Khartoum who had come to rely on him for daily survival. He wondered whether Akhenaten too had been misunderstood by history, whether it was not the location of his revelation in the desert that was the discovery they should be seeking but rather the place he had turned to next, where the clarity of vision he too had experienced might have led him to create something tangible, something of benefit to humankind, not in the desert to the south but in the heartland of the civilisation along the Nile from which he had sprung.
And now there was one final piece of the puzzle to find, a piece that might provide the detail needed to bring those images of Akhenaten’s city from abstraction to reality, to a place that might at last be within the possibility of archaeological discovery that had eluded Gordon and others on this trail for so long.
Rebecca woke and rubbed her eyes, looking blearily at the cottage. ‘We’re here. Look, there’s Great-Aunt Margaret.’ She opened the door and got out, and the neatly dressed old lady who had come down the path welcomed her with open arms. Jack followed, giving her a hug too.
‘It’s lovely to see Rebecca doing so well,’ she said. ‘She’s more amazing than all your adventures put together, you know.’
‘Well, she’s part of them now.’
Aunt Margaret led them through the beautifully tended garden towards the front door; Jack had to stoop to enter the cottage. At the bottom of the stairs she turned around and faced them. ‘Now, before we have tea and Rebecca tells me all her news, I know you’ll want to see what I found after you told me what to look for, Jack.’
‘You didn’t have to, Great-Aunt Margaret,’ Rebecca said. ‘We don’t want you hurting yourself.’
‘Oh, there’s a bit of the adventurer in me too, you know, Rebecca. I don’t know how much your dad has told you about me, but I’m not called Howard for nothing. When you told me you thought it might have been plastered or painted over, I took my basket of garden tools up there and set to. I haven’t had so much fun since I broke into the fifth High Llama of Llora’s tomb in the Karakorum Desert and got away with his sacred prayer roll, almost.’
Rebecca coughed politely. ‘You did what?’
Jack coughed a bit more loudly. ‘Aunt Margaret has, um, a certain history. She worked for MI6. She’s classified up to the hilt.’
‘Oh,’ Rebecca said. ‘You mean like Miss Moneypenny?’
‘No, I mean like “M”,’ Jack said. ‘She’s actually Dame Margaret Howard, though she never calls herself that.’
‘Such a silly title,’ Aunt Margaret said. ‘Use it outside Britain and they think it means you run a brothel.’ She hesitated at the foot of the stairs, and looked at Jack. ‘Before we go up, lest I forget, your friend Costas has been on the phone.’
‘Really? What about?’
‘Do you remember when he and I first met, more than ten years ago? It was at the inauguration of IMU.’
Jack paused. ‘I remember the two of you talking at great length about poetry, about the Arthurian legends. You’d just retired, and you were going to return to your undergraduate passion from Oxford days and write a book about the Holy Grail, about how the legend influenced generations of explorers on their own quests.’
Aunt Margaret reached over to a small table beside the front door and picked up a brown paper parcel tied with string. ‘When Costas called me this morning, he said that the desert had made him think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and then of the Holy Grail quest that was the inspiration behind the poem. He said that the place beside the Nile where you found the crocodile temple reminded him of the Fisher King, the wounded warrior who guarded the Grail, yet whose kingdom was turned to waste as he did so. And then when you were forced to leave the Sudan he thought of the fragmentation of the Grail quest, about how it had become an aimless journey with no beginning and no end, like the march to nowhere of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. And then he remembered how there was one who through it all was destined to achieve the Grail and heal the wasteland.’
‘We studied the legend in school,’ Rebecca said. ‘You mean Sir Galahad.’
Aunt Margaret handed her the package. ‘Will you see that Costas gets this? It’s a Victorian edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, rather tatty I’m afraid. It was owned by Colonel Howard; he loved this kind of stuff and apparently used to spend his evenings by the fire here reading Sir Walte
r Scott’s Waverley novels and Tennyson and anything in Old English and Norse literature on quests and adventure.’
‘Maybe it was an escape from the fear of those years in the lead-up to the First World War,’ Rebecca said, holding the book tight.
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But I think many like him at that time saw their lives in those terms, and for them the lesson of the Grail story was that the quest was as important as the destination, a treasure that might remain always out of reach. Colonel Howard had one last quest to fulfil, one that had begun in his early years with a discovery in the jungle of southern India, and perhaps reading this fired him up to resume the journey that gave his life excitement and meaning.’
Jack cocked an eye at her. ‘This story is really for me, isn’t it?’
Aunt Margaret smiled. ‘I don’t need to be telling you it, do I?’ She jerked her head up the stairs. ‘I told Costas he really didn’t need to worry. You’ve made it here. You’re back on the quest again.’
Jack glanced at Rebecca. ‘With a little help from my daughter.’
Aunt Margaret gave him a steely look. ‘Oh no. You made it here because you wanted to. Jack Howard is not designed to wander about in the wasteland. You’re here because it’s in your genes. It’s in mine too, so I know it.’
Jack grinned. ‘All right. Point taken.’
‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Chop chop. Tea’s getting cold. We can’t be talking all day.’
She led them up the creaking stairs past the first floor and into the attic. Jack stooped low through the entrance, and followed her past boxes and crates to the massive cruck timbers that gave the cottage its name. ‘This is where Great-Grandfather used to work,’ she said. ‘When I arrived here after retiring, his desk was still there, but I’ve moved it down to my own study. It’s a little dusty up here.’ She pointed up to the apex of the crux, where fragments of plaster and chips of paint were spread all around. ‘There you go. It looks a bit like the image on the Khedive’s Star, don’t you think? Those pyramids. I’ve got the Star awarded to Great-Grandfather for service in Egypt.’
Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) Page 34
