‘Something like that.’
Jones paused. ‘I’ll tell my story to the others, then.’
Mayne picked up his bags again and shouldered them. ‘I’d give it a while. Let them get over this little battle first.’
‘This time you’re leaving for good, sir?’
‘The boat’s waiting, and I’ve already lost time. There’s nothing more I can do here. I’ll pass the word to send up a burial detachment. And Jones?’
‘Sir?’
Mayne jerked his head towards the recumbent snorting form in the desert. ‘Don’t forget.’
Jones closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Sir.’
‘She’s hobbled by her back legs. You’ll need to take a bayonet to cut her loose.’
Jones eyed him suspiciously. ‘Rear legs means rear end, right? Up close?’
Mayne took out his headscarf and tossed it over. ‘Wear this. It’ll protect you.’
Jones caught it, sighed, and then held out his hand. ‘Godspeed, sir.’
Mayne shook it. ‘And to you.’ He shifted his load, and started up the edge of the parapet. It had been a half-hour delay that he could ill afford, but he felt better for it. His mind was sharp, focused, and everything he had been doing over the past weeks, the preparation in the desert, suddenly seemed worthwhile. He was suddenly itching to be downriver at Korti and ready for whatever Wolseley had planned for him.
9
Mayne picked his way over the parapet and began to descend the rough path the soldiers had made up the slope from the river, scrambling down the rocky abutments that became more sharply angled the closer they were to the cliff face on his right. The friable rock of the plateau gave way to the hard igneous substrate of the river gorge, providing a surer footing as he followed the small piles of rock the soldiers had made to mark the trail. At the base of the rocky outcrop was a sandy scree slope angled at forty-five degrees towards the river, curving round to the base of the cliff about a hundred yards from the water’s edge. As he began to slip and slide down the sand he saw two men making their way in his direction among the boulders between the river and the base of the scree, occasionally stopping to watch his progress. They were both officers, dressed in khaki and pith helmets, and as he neared them he recognised Lieutenant Tanner of the engineer detachment and Major Ormerod, the commander of the voyageurs. He came to a halt in a cloud of dust in front of them, unslinging his saddle bag and the khaki wrap and laying them on the sand. Ormerod, a burly Scotsman with a handlebar moustache, proffered his hand. ‘Christ, Edward, you look as if you’ve been through the wars.’
‘Just the desert.’ He shook hands with both of them, and then drew his fingers over the matted mass of his hair. He regretted now giving Corporal Jones his headscarf; he would get another at Korti. He jerked his head up towards the top of the slope. ‘They need a burial detail.’
‘It’s on its way,’ Tanner said. ‘We saw the soldier at the parapet get hit. A damned poor show.’
‘There are two dead,’ Mayne said, uncorking his water bottle and sipping from it, then squinting at the river, where Charrière was still up to his waist beside the boat. He gulped, wiped his mouth and pointed towards him. ‘He should watch out for the crocodile.’
‘It won’t attack him,’ Tanner said. ‘Not after he gave it a bloody nose with his whip.’
‘You saw it?’
‘I know it’s there. We all do.’
‘The moment it rears its ugly snout, it’s mine,’ Ormerod said gruffly. ‘I’ve got a double-barrelled express rifle mounted on a tripod overlooking that pool, and a servant watching day and night. I don’t want my voyageurs to return home and say one of their number was taken by a leviathan of the deep. That would be the last time we’d see them on an imperial adventure, and probably the last time we’d see them in church. The Mohawks would probably put their buckskins on and disappear back into the forests.’
Mayne capped his water bottle. ‘Corporal Jones is convinced that the leviathan of the Bible was not a Satanic monster but a Nile crocodile.’
‘That’s bad enough,’ Ormerod grumbled. ‘A twelve-foot killing machine.’
‘And you?’ Tanner asked.
Mayne looked at him. ‘Me?
‘What do you think?’
Mayne paused. ‘I think this expedition needs to disencumber itself of as much baggage as possible, and I think we are in danger of being weighed down by a leviathan of the mind.’
Ormerod grunted, then gestured towards the clifftop. ‘If that was you, it was a hell of a shot, Mayne. The Mohawks talk about your shooting from the Red River expedition, but that’s the first time I’ve seen it.’
‘Service rifle, that’s all,’ Mayne said. ‘It shows what our soldiers could do if we trained them properly in long-distance marksmanship.’ He reslung his water bottle and reached for his bags, but Ormerod put out a hand to stay him. ‘There’s something we want you to see first. At the base of the cliff.’
‘Jones told me. But I don’t have time.’
‘You’ve got half an hour. The boat leaked during the trial, and Charrière’s caulking it with some foul mixture the Dongolese concocted from camel dung and grass. There’s nothing you can do to help, so you might as well take a look.’
Mayne glanced at the green-brown smudges from his camel’s greeting on his tunic, mingling with the dark spots of blood from the soldier who had been shot beside him. He had probably had enough of camel dung for one day. ‘All right. But let’s make it quick.’
He followed them about twenty yards along the base of the cliff, stopping where a cluster of shovels and picks had been leant against the rock beside a portable gas lantern. Tanner, in the lead, pointed to an opening about two yards wide and a yard deep, evidently revealed by recent digging. It was the upper part of an ancient doorway, hewn out of the living rock. He picked up the lamp and sat on the sand, sliding himself feet first into the entrance. ‘It was completely buried when we arrived, but one of the officers’ dogs got up here and dug his way to the slab covering the entrance,’ he said, his voice edged with excitement. ‘I don’t think it had been opened up since the time of the pharaohs. Follow me.’
Mayne sat down on the sand beside Ormerod and they pushed themselves in after Tanner, ducking under the rock. It was suddenly cool, so much so that Mayne caught his breath, and the air was damp. They were on a slope of sand that had evidently poured into the chamber since it had been opened, cascading down to the floor and nearly filling it. Inside, the only light came from the narrow slit at the entrance, and as they slid further down they descended into gloom. ‘There’s about two feet of water at the bottom,’ Tanner said from ahead of them, his voice sounding distant and hollow. ‘It’s below the level of the Nile, and would have been in antiquity too. I think it was deliberately built that way. The water’s surprisingly clear, and I’m sure there’s a lower entranceway buried under the sand that must come out on the edge of that pool in the river, though I haven’t found it yet.’
Mayne caught a waft of gas as Tanner opened up the lamp, and heard the clicking of the flint as he tried to ignite it. The hiss turned to a roar and suddenly they were bathed in orange light, too dazzling to see anything. Tanner turned down the flame until it was white, and then Mayne could make out the walls, their own forms looming as shadows cast by the lamplight, giant and overarching. The chamber was about the size of the nave of an English country church. Where the walls had been cut from sedimentary rock it was eroded and covered in green slime, but the right side directly in front of Mayne was black basalt, polished smooth and free from growth.
He stared at what he suddenly saw, astonished. ‘Good God,’ he murmured. He took the lantern from Tanner and slid down the sand closer to the wall, sloshing in the cold water that filled the edges of the chamber. The wall was covered in relief carving, deeply etched into the stone. He put his hand on it, feeling the cool, clammy surface, drawing his fingers along the lines. He remembered from his geology instruction at the School of Military Engineering how difficult it had been to chisel igneous rock, and he marvelled at the ancient masons who had managed such a prodigious feat in this desolate place, so far away from their homeland in the lush flood plains of the Nile to the north.