6
Mayne pulled hard on the reins, steering the camel towards the sentry post overlooking the Nile. The wind-graded dust and gravel of the desert had given way to hamada, the hard igneous plateau that skirted the river where it had cut its way through the bedrock on its course north towards Egypt. He could see the Nile now, a hundred feet or so below the level of the plateau, sinuous rivulets of brown that curled around the outcrops of black rock that broke up the river as it ran down the cataract, the twists of white water showing where it was fast and dangerous. The men working below were not yet visible, but he could hear their cries echoing down the gorge as they hauled the boats past the rocks: the bellowed orders of the British sergeants and corporals; the undulating chant of the west African Kroomen singing in unison; and the distinctive nasal lilt of the Mohawk Indians, who spoke the archaic French of the voyageurs they had guided for generations through the Canadian wilderness.
He slid off the camel, took his saddlebag and rifle and left the beast snorting and chewing on some desert grass in a shallow gully about fifty yards from the sentry post. The sangar was a natural cleft in the clifftop, surrounded by the remains of an ancient masonry wall that the soldiers had fortified with rocks and mounded gravel to form a parapet around the edge. As he approached it, he could see the khaki pith helmets of half a dozen men and the long bayonets of rifles that had been left propped against the parapet. He had not yet been spotted, and he stopped for a moment to listen to the murmur of voices, among them the distinctive West Country burr of Corporal Jones, the sapper who was his servant, holding forth as usual to a rapt audience. ‘Camels,’ he heard Jones say. ‘Can’t stand ’em. My officer loves his, made me try to ride it. Horrible it was, spitting and belching and eating its own vomit. All those men volunteering to join the camel corps for the desert column, they don’t know what they’re in for.’
Another voice piped up. ‘Tell us more about the dervishes, Jonesy.’
Mayne heard the suck of a pipe, and saw a ring of tobacco smoke rise above the steam of the billycan that was boiling in the fire. Jones knew how to play his audience, how to build anticipation. He heard the pipe being knocked out, slowly, deliberately. ‘It’s the spears that puts the fear of God in a man,’ Jones said quietly. ‘As long as a lance they are, with metal points the length of your arm, sharper than those bayonets. After they’ve done with the killing, they go over the battlefield and dip their spears in the wounds, and then smear the blood all over themselves. That’s Johnny Fuzzy-Wuzzy for you.’ He paused, and Mayne heard the striking of a match, and then the suck of the pipe again. ‘Like the devil in battle they are, mark my words. Saw them myself, at El Teb in February. Like one of those medieval church paintings of the seven circles of hell, with little black demons serving Satan. That’s where we’re all going, I tell you, up this river to the gates of hell itself.’
‘I heard Colonel Burnaby speak of the battle when he arrived to join the desert column after recovering from his wounds.’ Mayne recognised the voice of the impressionable young infantry subaltern who had been left in charge of the sangar. ‘He was there as well, at El Teb.’
‘And he saw to them, hundreds of them,’ an Irish voice pitched in. ‘We’ve all heard the stories.’
‘Too right, mate,’ Jones asserted. ‘The colonel did for them good and proper, standing there on a rock above the battle wearing a Norfolk jacket and a stalking hat, looking for all the world like a country gent on a Sunday shoot. He had a fearsome weapon, a four-barrelled howdah pistol, like the ones they use in India to shoot tigers from the backs of elephants. It fires the same cartridge as the old Snider rifle, big enough to blow a hole clean through a man so you can see out the other side. Saw it with my own eyes, I did, the first dervish Burnaby killed, his innards flying and twirling out behind him like he was on fire, and still he kept coming. They’re devils, I tell you. Then the Colonel drops his pistol and fires pig-shot point blank with his double-barrelled twelve-bore. The dervishes knocked him up bad, but he kept on blasting. Twenty-three shells he fired, and he killed thirteen of them. And when his ammunition was finished, he laid about him something fearful with his sabre, and killed as many again. Saw it all with my own eyes.’
Mayne smiled to himself. Jones was a born raconteur who could reduce himself to the level of the coarsest of the soldiers, but as a street urchin in Bristol a benefactor had paid for him to go to the Bluecoat School, where he had picked up enough to converse more articulately with Mayne than some of the officers. He was in his late twenties, some ten years younger than Mayne, but had already bounced up and down the ranks several times, his natural abilities almost exactly counterbalanced by his transgressions, usually for speaking his mind in the presence of a less accommodating officer. He had been in India with the Madras Sappers and Miners, and had served in an arduous jungle campaign in the south before going to the war in Afghanistan in 1880, where he had picked up the surveying skills that had first brought him to Mayne’s attention. Before being despatched to the river column by an exasperated commanding officer, Jones had been in a Royal Engineers company attempting to build a railway into the desert from Suakin on the Red Sea coast; they had been present at the first major encounters of British forces with the Mahdi army at the bloody battles at El Teb and El Sid earlier that year. Whether he had actually seen Burnaby in action with his own eyes was a moot point that Mayne did not wish to explore, though there was enough corroboration to show that his account was essentially accurate.
‘Now there’s a soldier’s soldier for you, sir, Fred Burnaby, make no mistake,’ he heard Jones say. The pipe was sucked, and he caught a waft of tobacco smoke. ‘Some say old Burnaby has more brawn than brains, but mark my words, if he were in charge here, he’d hoick us out of the river and march us across the desert to where we could stand up to the fuzzy-wuzzies like real British soldiers, not like the sewer rats we are here. You can tell that to all your fancy friends in the press and your staff officers with their maps and plans, begging your pardon, sir.’
Mayne smiled again, in spite of himself. El Teb had been part of an abortive attempt to establish a Red Sea beachhead in order to approach Khartoum from the east, a plan that had bogged down in the fetid coastal swamps when the local Baggara tribesmen had rallied to the Mahdi’s cause and inflicted a series of disastrous defeats. But even that had not been enough of a wake-up call for some of the officers on the staff. One of the more tedious colonels, a man who had never been on the receiving end of a dervish charge, had heard stories of Burnaby’s Norfolk jacket and the shotgun, and had said it was not sporting. Not sporting. Few of them realised what they were up against. Even General Wolseley had assured the press that the appearance of a few dozen redcoats on a river steamer at Khartoum would cow the enemy into submission and relieve General Gordon and his Egyptian and Sudanese garrison. Yet it was Wolseley who had devised the plan they were currently executing, a scheme of astounding logistical complexity to inch a rescue force up the Nile against the flow, almost guaranteeing that they would not get there before the Mahdi’s forces overwhelmed Khartoum. Corporal Jones was right. If the will really existed to relieve Gordon, then the only course of action was a bold move across the desert, though whether a maverick like Burnaby was the right man to lead it was another moot point.