‘Even I recognise those,’ Costas said. ‘It’s Akhenaten.’
Hiebermeyer was flushed with excitement. ‘You’ve got it. Here he is again. Gold mining would have been tightly controlled by the pharaoh’s overseers, so even the grinding querns were stamped with his official cartouche.’
‘Do you think that’s what brought Akhenaten here?’ Costas said. ‘Not some mystical revelation in the desert, but the lure of gold?’
Hiebermeyer knitted his brows. ‘That’s what I’d assumed, but then Aysha made me think otherwise. She believes that after Senusret abandoned this place and retreated north, these forts would have become forbidding places to the ancient Egyptians, ruins haunted by the ghosts of soldiers who had failed to broach the desert, places that may even have been cursed. For Akhenaten to have persuaded a force of soldiers to return here might have taken a special incentive, perhaps a discovery he himself had made when he came here alone as a rebellious teenager before becoming pharaoh, the expedition when he may have first experienced the revelation that drew him back a few years later. Perhaps the gold they found here secured the loyalty of his soldiers and helped them to overcome their fear. We know he was successful, because enough of a workforce came with him to build a temple complex at Sesebi, near the third cataract to the south of here. That’s the only temple of Akhenaten previously known in the Nubian desert.’
‘You say previously,’ Jack said, eyeing Hiebermeyer. ‘Have you got something more up your sleeve?’
‘Well, it might soon be up your sleeve. With the help of IMU equipment.’
Costas sprang up. ‘You mean diving? I’m ready.’
‘There’s some other stuff first.’ Hiebermeyer turned to Jack, beaming. ‘How’s your Victorian military archaeology these days?’
Jack peered back at him, and suddenly felt himself course with excitement. Since boyhood, he had been fascinated by the weapons and wars of the Victorian period, and during holidays from boarding school, when Hiebermeyer had stayed with him at the family home, he had dragged him to the range as he test-fired every antique military rifle and musket that had been accumulated by his ancestors over the years. He stood up, and grinned. ‘That sounds right up my street. Lead on.’
4
Hiebermeyer led Jack and Costas along the ridge beside the Nile to an awning over a trestle table covered with plastic finds trays. He picked out an object and handed it to Jack. It was a spent rifle cartridge, the brass blackened with age; the shape was distinctively bottle necked, with a wider lower body than most modern rifle cartridges, and the primer was dented where it had been struck by the rifle’s firing pin.
Costas peered at it. ‘I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. It looks as if it could take out an elephant.’
‘It’s a Martini-Henry cartridge, .577 necked down to .450 for the bullet,’ Jack said. ‘It was the last of the big British black powder cartridges, designed to put down a fanatical enemy running at you at full tilt. Even so, there are many accounts of tribesmen out here taking multiple hits and still charging screaming into the British lines with their spears levelled and swords raised.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Probably spurred on by the fact that there was no provision for treating the wounded in the Mahdi’s army, and death in battle for a jihadist guaranteed an exalted place in heaven.’
‘How closely can you date this?’ Costas asked Jack.
‘The Martini-Henry was the main British service rifle from the early 1870s until 1888. To be archaeological about it, there’s a terminus post quem in the fact that this particular cartridge is drawn brass, essentially a modern-style cartridge. The earlier cartridges of rolled brass foil were found to be deficient during the Zulu War in 1879, and were replaced soon after that. Given what we know about the chronology of British military deployment in the Sudan in the 1880s, I have no doubt that this cartridge dates from the time of the Gordon relief expedition of 1884 to 1885.’
‘I can be even more specific,’ Hiebermeyer said. He rummaged in a satchel on the table and pulled out a battered book, opening it at a marked page. ‘This is Colonel William Butler’s Campaign of the Cataracts: Being a Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884 to 1885. The relief force under General Wolseley was divided into a river column and a desert column, with most of the effort until quite late in the campaign, really too late to save Gordon, being put into the river column. The plan was to drag over eight hundred whaleboats up the Nile against the flow through the cataracts. Once they had reached open water, they were to be filled with British troops and used to break through the Mahdist lines besieging Khartoum.’
‘Come again?’ Costas said. ‘Dragging boats against the flow of the river, for hundreds of miles? What was wrong with going across the desert?’
‘Exactly the question that many asked at the time, not least Gordon himself,’ Jack said. ‘Wolseley had done something similar in Canada in 1870 when he took an expedition up the Red River against a rebellion led by Louis Riel, a mixed-blood Métis. The expedition was a remarkable success and ended without bloodshed after Riel capitulated. Wolseley conducted much of his subsequent campaigning career by precedent, and the Nile expedition was to be his tour de force. He even brought over the same Canadians he’d used on the Red River expedition, including more than fifty Mohawks from the Ottawa valley, as well as west African Kroomen from the Gold Coast, because he had campaigned there against the Ashanti in 1873 and had admired their boating skills.’
Costas shook his head. ‘It’s hard to know who was more unhinged, Gordon in Khartoum going stir-crazy, or Wolseley insanely dragging boats upriver to rescue him.’
Jack gave a wry smile. ‘By the time the river column reached this point, Wolseley had finally been persuaded to create a separate camel corps to advance across the Bayuda desert and cut out the bend of the Nile, and it was that force that finally did reach Khartoum in the steamers that Gordon had sent downriver to wait for them.’
‘But too late,’ Costas said.
Jack nodded. ‘By two days. But there have always been bigger questions about the expedition, about whether Wolseley ever realistically intended to relieve Gordon. He and his superiors in Cairo and London seem to have convinced themselves that Gordon had gone off on a loop of his own, that he had become insane. But I’ve never really bought that. Gordon was certainly an individualist, to put it mildly, but he was also an exceptional administrator and a committed Christian. He was horrified by the plight of those besieged in Khartoum, who had come to rely on him for the dispersal of food and medicine, and he refused to leave them. The idea that he was a self-appointed messiah may even have been encouraged by the government in London, who knew they could never rescue him and were apprehensive about losing face. There must have been those who would rather he died and became a martyr, especially with the fear that he might be captured by the Mahdi and paraded in front of the world, a complete humiliation for the British.’
Costas gestured at Hiebermeyer’s book. ‘So what happened at this place?’
Hiebermeyer checked his notes. ‘The river column reached Semna on the twenty-third of December 1884.’ He took out a folded photocopied sheet from the book. ‘Here’s the official War Office report: “At the head of this rapid is the great ‘Gate of Semna’, a narrow gorge between two rocky cliffs, partly blocked by two islands about equidistant from the shores and from each other. Through the three passages thus formed, the whole pent-up volume of the Nile rushes as through a sluice gate.”’ He pulled out another folded sheet and passed it to Costas. ‘And that’s a contemporary print from the Illustrated London News, based on a sketch sent to them by an anonymous officer. You can see the central channel, and the ropes used by the Royal Navy sailors to haul up the boats, with the voyageurs paddling and steering them. It shows what a monumental task this would have been. The river column was encamped here for several days, waiting for the boats to come up from the previous stretch of rapids and then for them to be taken one by one up through that narrow defile, now completely submerged by the effect of the Aswan dam.’