Mayne shouldered his bags and shook hands with Tanner. ‘Soldier first, engineer second. You remember what they drummed into us at Chatham? And archaeologist third. But I wish you the best of luck. The cataract ahead will be hard work, but by the time I’m back, the column should be well past it. And that sharpshooter won’t be the last. Where there are sharpshooters, there’s an army somewhere beyond.’
Tanner nodded, his smile gone. He was ten years older than the subaltern in the sangar, due for promotion to captain that year, and had been in Afghanistan. ‘We’ve posted more picquets along the riverbank ahead of us, and a company of infantry has been put on alert to act as skirmishers should the need arise. Before he left for Korti, General Earle instructed us to proceed with extra caution. Direct orders from Lord Wolseley.’
Mayne shook Ormerod’s hand, and watched the two men trudge up the scree slope. That was the problem with this expedition: too much caution. High overhead, half a dozen vultures circled, smelling the blood of fresh corpses. On the opposite cliff, two soldiers had reached the body of the marksman and tipped it off into the river. It came floating by now, down the torrent between the two rocks and into the pool, where soldiers crowded along the edge, peering at it as it rolled over and over in the current, unmolested by crocodiles. The sharpshooter had undoubtedly been disguised as a desert Arab, just as Mayne had been on his travels with Shaytan, but he had revealed his true colours before opening fire: the body was wearing the patched jibba of the Ansar, the white robe with the embroidered patches that made it look like the dress of a poor Sufi; and above the gaping hole where his face had been, Mayne could see that the man had been shaven headed. He had seen the Ansar before, fleetingly with Shaytan far to the south when they had watched a Mahdist force surge by in the distance, a storm of dust with banners above and the occasional flash of white as men disengaged from the main force to get out of the dust, riding their camels along the near flank. But seeing a jibba this far north was unnerving, as if the man had broken through the invisible membrane that still divided their world from the darkness ahead.
He looked at the two rocks again, where Charrière had been standing when he had first seen him from the sangar. Down here, close to the river, they looked more impressive, like sentinels guarding a gateway to an unknown world. Through them he could see where the pellucid light over the pool, with everything sharply delineated, gave way to a haze and then an impenetrable miasma, the rocks of the cataract seeming to wobble and shimmer and then disappear from view entirely, as if he were looking into a mirage. He knew that his destiny lay somewhere out there, but for now he was glad to be turning north for a day or two, for a respite. He was desperately tired, and struggling up that slope in the chamber had given him a raging thirst.
He heard a shout, then turned and saw Charrière standing in the boat in the pool, waving at him.
It was time to go.
PART 3
10
Jack Howard followed Hiebermeyer and Costas along the ridge from the sangar, towards the site where they had seen the sculpted head of the pharaoh Senusret beside the square structure of the shrine that had been revealed in the excavation. It was mid afternoon, and despite being November, it was still hot enough to send rivulets of sweat down his face and make a dive in the Nile seem more appealing by the minute. He could see the figure of a woman on top of the shrine, picking her way slowly around, squatting down to inspect something more closely. Below her in the wadi, a Jeep with a child seat strapped into the front passenger side was parked up against the ridge. A young man was leaning against the bonnet, smoking and talking on a phone. He saw them, pushed off and waved languidly, a holstered side arm clearly visible by his side.
Jack waved back. ‘A bodyguard?’
‘Aysha’s cousin,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘He’s just finished his national service in Egypt, and was at a loose end. His military police unit was stationed at the frontier and liaised closely with the Sudanese border guards, so there was no problem getting him a temporary permit to carry a firearm in Sudan.’
‘You expecting trouble?’ Costas asked.
Hiebermeyer shrugged. ‘You can’t be too careful. There’s always been a bandit problem in the desert and there’s a growing fundamentalist presence in Sudan. The bandits think any excavation is after gold, and the fundamentalists get itchy over anything they think might disturb Islamic history. Aysha’s cousin may be a one-man show, but the Sudanese police helicopter squadron at Wadi Halfa is only half an hour away.’
They walked towards Aysha, who saw them and waved. Jack always relished spending time with her, not only for her sharp intelligence but also because she seemed to have walked straight out of the past; she had a face like one of the lifelike portrait plaques of the Hellenistic period found on mummies in the Faiyum, where Hiebermeyer had first met her. She was wearing a man’s keffiyeh headdress, a loose white long-sleeved shirt and a long skirt, but with robust desert boots and a workman’s belt with pockets and loops for tools. On her front was a swaddled bundle attached by cords around her waist and over her shoulders. Costas surged forward and peered at the face just visible beneath the protective sunshade at the front. ‘How’s my favourite small person?’ he asked.
‘Ahren’s fast asleep,’ Aysha said. ‘He’ll sleep for another hour, and then be bright and perky all night.’
‘This is his first taste of an archaeological excavation,’ Hiebermeyer beamed.
Jack smiled at Aysha. ‘I was with Maurice at Heathrow when he bought him some blocks to build a model of an ancient Egyptian temple.’
‘Correction. Maurice bought Maurice some blocks to build a model of an ancient Egyptian temple. It was the centrepiece of the excavation tent until our lovely son brought it tumbling down.’
‘Earning his archaeological credentials,’ Hiebermeyer said proudly. ‘Far more interested in ruins than standing structures. That’s my boy.’
Aysha walked carefully over to an awning on one side of the shrine, and sat down on a folding chair. The others joined her. Jack, who had been thinking hard since seeing the evidence from 1884 in the sangar, glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘Do you remember I promised to look out some material I had in the Howard family archive related to the Gordon relief campaign?’
Hiebermeyer looked at him keenly. ‘Your ancestor, the Royal Engineers officer?’
Jack nodded. ‘My great-great-grandfather, Colonel John Howard. He wasn’t part of the expedition, but he was in charge of a committee at the Royal Engineers headquarters at Chatham that looked after Gordon’s collection of antiquities. Howard passed through Egypt in March 1885 on his way back home from India, and picked up a crate of material in Cairo that had been sent down from the Sudan. I know it contained some archaeological finds that Gordon had dispatched from Khartoum the previous year, including ancient Egyptian artefacts from the desert. Those mostly went to the Museum of the Royal United Services Institute in London, and when that was disbanded in the 1960s they were dispersed around various museums in England.’
‘You told me there was some material related to Semna.’
Jack nodded. ‘Just two envelopes, in the collection of his private papers that I have in that old wooden sea chest in my office on Seaquest II. But it’s frustrating because both are empty. One has the sender’s address as “River Column, Semna”, dated the twenty-fourth of December 1884, and is from Lieutenant Peter Tanner, a sapper friend of Howard’s from his time in India. I know they shared an interest in archaeology, and I’ve always imagined that was what the letter was about. Sadly Tanner was killed in battle alongside General Earle six weeks later, when the river column had its first major engagement with the Mahdi’s army, at Kirbekan, some sixty miles south of here.’