To the followers of Islam, the eagle was a perfect creation of Allah; to the Mohawks it was the spirit of a young warrior on a vision quest. Yet Mayne knew that Shaytan wore Islam as lightly as his ancestors had worn the beliefs of others who had passed through the desert in the distant past, and that for the Mohawk the spirit world required no special belief; it was simply the world they inhabited. Spending time with Shaytan had allowed Mayne to understand the desert people in a way that the staff officers in Korti and Wadi Halfa never would. The call to jihad that lay at the core of the rebellion was not the main motivation for the majority of the Mahdi’s army, a vast and motley gathering of tribesmen drawn from all quarters of the Sudan, some of them from the deepest reaches of the desert, where the influence of Islam was peripheral at best. For many, their instinct was to fight each other rather than join in a common cause. And yet this truth, that they were not all converts to militant Islam, was not a weakness; in the hands of the Mahdi, it was a strength. The Mahdi himself was one of them, born on the Nile, and he knew what drove his people. He knew how to use his holy vision to attract and rally his core of fanatical followers, the Ansar, and how to use their suicidal courage to draw others to follow his banner. And the tribesmen were not simply fighting to expel foreigners – Turkish and British and Egyptian and even Arabs – in order to defend their families and their traditions. The Mahdi knew how to stir them so that they were fighting because they relished it, because their pulses quickened at the sight of blood, because they could not resist following when the Ansar surged forward screaming and brandishing their spears at the enemy. Mayne had realised that the war had become self-fuelling, and that the only hope the British would ever have of containing it would be to return with an army large enough to mount a campaign of attrition and annihilation.
He looked back one last time at the wavering form in the distance. A gust of wind took one end of Shaytan’s headscarf and unfurled it like a banner, until it seemed to join the distant streaks of black cloud that appeared above the horizon; his camel appeared to stretch outwards and upwards like a mirage, and then was gone. It was like this in the desert, a place of mirages, of illusions, where desperate thirst could feel like dust in the throat, where there was no moral compass, where cruelty could be as casual and transient as the camaraderie he had felt over the last few weeks. Of all the places where he had been on campaign, he had never experienced the insidious draining that he had felt in the desert. The worst of it was when your body dried up until you were like a camel; they said that if you survived that without going insane, you learned to feed it with just what was necessary to keep from collapsing. Mayne knew he had been there often over the past few days, that Shaytan had made him experience it to show him how to survive; but it had left him with a desiccated feeling that would take days to resolve, and he knew that his body would try to convince him he was sated when he needed to drink more than he ever had done before in his life.
He turned back, pulled hard on the reins to keep the camel’s head in the direction of the river and kicked its flanks again. He found the animal strangely reassuring, as if its plodding gait were taking him out of that world of mirages and anchoring him back in reality. Seeing the patches of solid bedrock under the sand reminded him of the ancient ruins that Shaytan had shown him, Nubian and Roman and Egyptian, some of them from the time when the pharaohs had ventured this far south and tried to tame the wilderness they believed had been the homeland from which their civilisation had sprung. The ruins had been vestigial, elusive – the tamped-down floors of desert corrals, crumbled watchtowers, temporary forts – and there had been no stratigraphy to them; with seeming whimsy the wind would blow sand away to reveal ruins that were three thousand years old, or so recent that Shaytan could remember those who had lived in them. As soon as people passed on, the desert seemed to swallow their history and reduce it to the same desiccated imprint, the fate that seemed to lie in store for their own endeavours just as it had for the expeditions of the pharaohs who had preceded them on this trek into the shadowlands of their own history.
Yet in those few elusive ruins Mayne had found a human presence stronger than he had ever done among the towering monuments of Giza or Luxor or Abu Simbel that he had visited on his voyage south through Egypt. The day before, he had seen strange pyramidal forms rising from the sand, sheer-sided outcrops of basalt from some ancient volcanic eruption that had resisted the wind and stood stark above the desert like the backbone of the earth itself. In a flash of insight he had understood the origin of the man-made pyramids of ancient Egypt, an interest spurred by his time spent visiting the archaeological sites of the Nile after his first posting to Cairo. Those people who had gone north, the ancestors of the first pharaohs, had taken with them this vision of their ancestral landscape and had attempted to re-create it in their burial monuments. He realised why he had found the wonders of ancient Egypt curiously unmoving, for all their grandeur and technical marvel. They were no more than imitations of nature, like the walled gardens of European aristocrats, constructed by a people who could only bear to inhabit a world that they controlled. To those who rebelled, those like the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, that world must have seemed artificial, claustrophobic, unbearable; Mayne could see why Akhenaten had come here in search of truth, rejecting the religion of the pharaohs and finding deeper meaning in the one God, the Aten.
He remembered something, and reached under the fold of his desert robe into his tunic pocket, taking out a small package. Shaytan had given him a hejab, a pouch containing an amulet on a leather necklace with verses of the Koran wrapped around it. He released the reins of the camel and untied the leather thong that kept the bag shut, dropping the amulet into the palm of his hand. The wrapping was diaphanous, insubstantial, and when he took it off, it seemed lighter than air. As he held it in his other palm, a wisp of wind suddenly took it from him. He snatched at it, but it was gone. For a moment he thought of dismounting and chasing it, but it was flying high above the desert, and it would be hopeless. He did not even know whether it truly had been verse from the Koran, or some more ancient wisdom of the Dongola transcribed into Arabic. But the amulet seemed more substantial, and he peered at it closely. He realised that it was an ancient carving in the shape of a scarab beetle, like ones he had seen for sale in the alleyway markets of Cairo, pillaged from ancient tombs. It was jet black, carved from hard volcanic stone, probably from some outcrop in the desert itself. Embedded in the wings were lines of gold wire and two tiny gemstones that he recognised as peridot, the beautiful green stone that the ancient Egyptians mined on St John’s Island in the Red Sea. The scarab must have been a prized possession in antiquity. Perhaps Shaytan had picked it up in one of those ruins, or it had been passed down to him through the generations of his ancestors since the pharaohs had turned their eyes away from this place. On its base Mayne could feel the ridges and indentations of carving, and turning it over he saw that it was hieroglyphics. When he had time, he would dig out the notebook he had filled with hieroglyphic symbols during two days of enforced leisure waiting for supplies when the expedition had encamped at Akhenaten’s ruined capital of Amarna, and see if he could find a match.
He saw a flash of reflected light up ahead, and quickly hung the scarab around his neck. The light had come from a bayonet poking above the wall of the sangar about two hundred yards away above the river gorge. He saw a wisp of smoke from a billycan fire, the universal sign of British soldiers brewing up. He pursed his lips. They were going to have to be more careful. Shaytan had spotted movement among the rocks above a few miles upstream, and Mayne knew that the British sentry posts would be prime targets for the Mahdi’s sharpshooters. He squinted at the western horizon beyond the smoke, just making out the distant ridge above the far bank of the river, but he could see nothing. He remembered the last time he and Shaytan had been this close to the Nile, when he had taken the Martini-Henry rifle out of its leather cover in front of the saddle and fired at a derelict shaduf, a water-lifting device, adjusting the sights for the range until he had shot the top of the pole away in three successive rounds, enough to know that the sights were correct should he have to do the same to a human target on the opposite ridge of the river as they worked their way up the cataracts. That was when Shaytan had called him Nassr’ayin, Eagle Eye; and it was for the same reason that he had acquired the name from the Mohawk years before. He had relished shooting the rifle in this elemental place, free from the superimpositions of civilisation. It was his constant, a tunnelling of his vision that excluded everything else, just as the river and the burning sun were the constants of the desert. And it was what he was here to do. He picked up the reins, ready to yank them. It was time he made his presence known.