Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘That can wait. Did you find anything down there from the 1880s?’
Jack nodded. ‘A whaleboat and some steamer machinery. There’s probably more. What do you mean, this can wait? What’s more important?’
‘Good. That’s what I’ll tell al’Ahmed about. The reason you’re not diving here again tomorrow is that he’s arranged for you to visit the wreck site of the Abbas, the steamer that foundered upriver in 1884 with Gordon’s antiquities on board. It could be the only opportunity we get. It seems too good to miss.’
Jack’s heart pounded with excitement, but he forced himself to think carefully. ‘What about the security situation?’
‘He says he’s sending in his own people to keep the local warlord at bay. I’m assuming he’s talking about Sudanese Interior Ministry police.’
‘You said you didn’t trust him,’ Costas said. ‘How can we?’
‘You can’t. But he talked about it while the other antiquities people were there, the ones we do trust. He said he was arranging a permit and fast-tracking the paperwork, and nobody there raised any protest; there was a lot of enthusiasm, in fact. They could all be in his pay, of course, but we have to take that chance. If this leads to a high-profile excavation and some spectacular finds, then it will justify his appointment and raise his status. It makes sense for him to want it to work.’
‘Or it could lead to us finding something he really wants, and then him booting us out,’ Jack said.
‘It’s your call.’
Jack tipped over and floated on his back, smelling the Nile, enjoying the sun on his face. He thought of the site of the Abbas, upstream beyond the great gates, into the forbidding land that had terrified the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs, and thousands of years later when a new force had risen to confront them in the desert. He thought of the men of the river column, of the unknown man with the rifle in the sangar who had so intrigued him, and how he and Costas now seemed to be dogging the footsteps of the relief expedition. Travelling to a site upstream, they would reach the place where the column had fought its first bloody battles with the Mahdi. And he thought of the lure of something else that had brought Akhenaten here, and perhaps Gordon too.
He thought of the sarcophagus and the plaque, and now the Sobek temple and the golden sceptre: they were extraordinary discoveries that had made pursuing this trail more than worthwhile. He could end the season on a high, and look forward to returning to both places next year, if nothing else got in the way. But right now, knowing that there might be more to be found, a potentially greater prize, put him on tenterhooks. He was on a roll, and he could not stop it.
He lifted his head, and stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘Okay. I’ll go with it. Let’s get Ibrahim to load up the gear. We can leave this evening. It could be the only chance we’ll ever have to find out what General Gordon might have hidden in that boat.’
13
Major Edward Mayne opened the flap of the tent and stepped inside, his eyes smarting in the fog of tobacco smoke that filled the air. It had been hot outside, uncomfortably so in the late afternoon sun, but here it was like walking into the overheated parlour of a London gentlemen’s club, or one of the native sweat lodges that Charrière had shown him in Canada when they were boys. He envied Charrière remaining outside, sitting with the sentries in the shade of a palm tree close to the Nile. The British had not yet learned the Arab way of keeping a tent cool in the desert sun, and the heavy canvas was more suited to a Crimean winter than the furnace of the Sudan. To Mayne it was symptomatic of the campaign as a whole: the British had half adapted, wearing desert-coloured khaki instead of scarlet uniforms, riding camels instead of horses, some of them even ditching their pith helmets for Arab headdress, yet the tactics were those of earlier campaigns. Mayne knew that there were those in this tent now who had the originality of thought to break free, to adapt to the desert; yet with time running short and Wolseley in tight control, there seemed little chance of altering a course of action that had been fatally flawed from the start.
Two officers were hunched over a portable desk in the far corner of the tent, one busy with a protractor and ruler and the other taking notes. Five other men sat around a trestle table in front of Mayne, dressed in the idiosyncratic mix of uniform and personal clothing typical of British officers on campaign. Wolseley himself sat directly opposite, a short, dapper figure immaculately composed, peering at a map along with three of the others. The only man who had seen Mayne enter was sitting to Wolseley’s right. There had been a decidedly exotic tang to the air, and Mayne remembered the taste for cherry tobacco that Burnaby had picked up on a recent sojourn in Morocco. He was there now, lounging sideways, cigarette held languidly and legs crossed, just like his famous portrait by James Jacques Tissot painted fifteen years before in London; only instead of the undress uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, he was wearing a kind of ersatz Scottish deerstalking outfit, with a giant howdah pistol holstered at his side. He nodded amiably at Mayne and took a deep drag on his cigarette, letting the ash fall in a shower on the floor and exhaling smoke rings upwards, watching them cascade against the tent roof and descend in a cloud over the other men.
Mayne saw another difference from the portrait: the supremely self-confident cavalry officer of Tissot’s portrait had become heavyset, with dimmed eyes; he was a man who knew he could go no further in his military career, and whose time for shoehorning himself into adventure would soon be curtailed by age and a new world with fewer places for freelancers like him. Mayne knew that the indifference Burnaby affected here cloaked an acute mind, yet he sensed too that the detailed planning that was preoccupying the others truly was an irrelevance for a man who had perhaps been drawn into the Sudan for something of the same reasons that had compelled Gordon himself to return, attracted by the darkness that lay to the south and by the promise of apotheosis in the battles to come.
‘Ah. Mayne.’ Wolseley had spotted him, and quickly stood up and extended a hand. Mayne leaned over and shook it, feeling the skin of his arm prickle with the heat under his tunic. ‘You know the others around this table. General Earle of the river column, General Stewart of the desert column. And of course Colonel Burnaby and General Buller.’
Earle and Stewart both glanced at him and quickly turned back to the map, which Mayne could see showed the loop of the Nile surrounding the Bayuda desert on the way south to Khartoum. Buller was sitting at Wolseley’s left, a giant of a man with a face like a North American bison. He heaved himself up and extended a hand. ‘Edward, my dear boy. Had no idea you were here until Wolseley told me. You should have sought me out in my tent. You know there’s always a bottle to be uncorked for you.’
‘Sir,’ said Mayne, shaking hands. ‘I should like that above all things. Perhaps when this is over.’ Buller was one of Wolseley’s inner circle, his so-called ‘Ashanti Ring’. Mayne had first met him in Canada, and despite his bovine exterior had found him an agreeable companion who spoke with refreshing candour. Like Burnaby, Buller had grown stout and heavy jowled, fuelled by a prodigious appetite for alcohol; Mayne had seen his personal camel train arrive at Korti laden down with crates of Veuve Clicquot champagne, an outrageous indulgence that only Buller could pull off. But the men loved him because he was a soldier’s soldier, a celebrated winner of the Victoria Cross in the Zulu War, a warrior who fought at the bloody forefront of battle and had a reputation for fearlessness surpassed only by Burnaby himself.