He watched a sailor curl his body around the hawser and begin to pull himself across the gorge towards Charrière, inching his way over the torrent. On Charrière’s belt he could see the coiled kurbash, the hippo-hide whip that Shaytan had given him when he joined Mayne on a previous foray into the desert. It had belonged to Shaytan’s ancestors, passed down from distant antiquity; in return, Charrière had given him a polished stone macehead he carried in his leather bag, a weapon his grandfather had used during the American War of Independence. Where the whip had once had a metal tip, long since rusted away, Charrière had spliced in a razor-sharp flint he had brought from Canada.
Something had distracted Charrière’s attention from the sailor on the hawser. Mayne watched him unhitch the whip from his belt and uncoil it, and then saw the tip flicker across the pool below and snap against the surface, causing a ripple to spread out towards the boats around the edge. Mayne raised his telescope and trained it on the pool, uncertain whether he had seen a dark shape beneath the muddy surface where the whip had struck. Two shots rang out from below, the bullets hissing into the water to no obvious effect. No one had yet with certainty seen a crocodile in this pool, but the soldiers believed one was lurking there, making washing and drawing water a hazardous enterprise. Mayne was not entirely convinced, but it was another reason why he had decided to forgo any attempt to cleanse himself before setting out for Wolseley’s camp at Korti.
Jones came up beside him and peered down. ‘I’m sure I saw it,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘It’s the monster the Sudanese river men talk about.’
‘You can’t be sure,’ Mayne said. ‘It could have been a whirlpool, or one of those giant river carp.’
Jones shut his eyes, reciting. ‘“When he raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid. Round about his teeth is terror. In his neck abideth strength, and terror danceth before him. His neesings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Upon earth there is not his like, that is made without fear.” The leviathan, sir, from the Book of Job.’
Mayne lifted his eyebrows. ‘You remember that well. You’ve missed your vocation. You should have been a preacher.’
‘The leviathan’s not some ancient mythic creature, sir, it’s a crocodile. That word neesings, in King James’ time it meant snortings, well almost. I recited it to our Egyptian interpreter, and he said that’s what crocodiles do, they have a habit of inflating themselves and discharging heated vapour through their nostrils in a snorting kind of way, and in the sunlight it sparkles.’
‘It seems you’ve become a natural historian, too. You ought to take care. Natural history and preaching rarely mix, I find. Your congregation will want the fire-spitting dragon of the deep, Satan at hell’s mouth.’
‘It’s that picture Mr Tanner showed me, sir. I just can’t get it out of my head.’
Mayne turned back to the river, amused. One of the officers, Lieutenant Tanner, the engineer in charge of the boatbuilding detachment, had brought along a small library of Greek and Latin literature dealing with the Nile, and one evening the more literary among the officers had amused themselves looking up references to crocodiles in Pliny and Plutarch and Herodotus. Several of them, including Mayne, had left the expedition camp on the way south through Egypt to explore Akhenaten’s capital at Amarna, and had been shown a towering image of the crocodile god Sobek carved into a rock face. Since then it had been imperative among the more sporting officers to bag one, as yet to no avail. Mayne had invited Jones to join them that evening because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, virtually the only literature he had been exposed to as a boy, and he had quoted those lines from memory. As the port wine flowed and he grew bolder, he told them a story he had heard of how a giant Nile crocodile thrashing its tail to pick up speed had leapt on land and chased a woman up a tree, dragging her down and into the water, never to be seen again. Tanner had gone one better and pulled out a print cut from The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, hot off the press when he had left London; entitled ‘A Frightful Incident’, it showed a voluptuous naked woman swooning on her back on a rocky islet in the Nile, a crocodile the size of a dinosaur poised as if to ravish her. Jones had sat speechless, staring at the image with his mouth open, and then had rushed with it down to his mates around the fires a safe distance from the river, all of them in equal measure terrified of crocodiles and starved of female company in the six weeks since they had been allowed to visit the dens of Cairo on the voyage south.
There was a yell from the rocks, and Mayne looked back at the gorge. The sailor crossing the hawser had slipped and was hanging by his hands, his feet bouncing off the torrent below. The hawsers had been taken from Royal Navy ships at Alexandria and were impregnated with tar, a constant problem as the scorching sun melted it into a slippery mess. With another yell he dropped into the torrent and disappeared, swept into the pool below. Charrière kicked off his boots and dived in after him, arching powerfully off the rock and plunging in close to where the dark shape had appeared. It was not the first time he had rescued sailors of dubious swimming ability, but this time Mayne knew there was a special imperative: just out of sight downriver was a vicious whirlpool which would suck anyone caught in it to their death. He quickly scanned the edges of the river, hoping that the crocodile, if that was what it was, had been given enough of a bloody nose by the whip to keep out of the way.
Charrière and the sailor surfaced simultaneously, the man thrashing and yelling, and Charrière grabbed him by his chin and began to swim hard across the pool. He did not try to fight the current but let it take him, edging diagonally towards the far shore, reaching a rock just before he would have been swept beyond Mayne’s sight. A cluster of soldiers who had been running along the bank abreast of them reached in and pulled the two men out, lying the sailor down and leaving Charrière to strip off his shirt and walk back towards the boats.
It was an unremarkable incident, repeated every day or two in some form as they toiled up the Nile, but Mayne was thankful that his friend had not given his life in such a trivial way, only hours before he was due in front of Wolseley; the message Mayne had received in the desert had also told him to bring Charrière along. Yet these episodes seemed like a warning, a reminder that the river was not just an impediment but was also treacherous, lethal; it was as if the Nile itself were pushing them to turn with the flow and go north like the birds, to leave this land where river and desert ruled all. Mayne had heard the Mohawks talk about it among themselves in Iroquoian, not wanting the English to overhear, but he remembered enough of the language to understand. Many of them had already left the expedition, their contract with Wolseley having expired, and only a few of those who remained wished to stay longer. They had said that with each cataract they felt slower, heavier, as if the earth itself were pulling them in; and that to go further would be to reach places where men who fell into the water would no longer be rescued, where the invisible enemy along the cliffs would make the river into a gauntlet of death, where they would pass into another, darker world from which few could ever return.