The Mahdist army might not yet be visible, but he knew they would be battle-ready. Kitchener had predicted that there would be a fight in the desert before they reached the Nile. That night there had been a crescent moon, and just before dawn the planet Venus had been visible on the horizon, omens the emirs always sought before unleashing war. But for Mayne, predicting battle was more than just a matter of augury and superstition. For more than a week now he had watched Stewart’s column trundle forward, excruciatingly slowly. They had marched by night, making more laboured progress than they would have done by day, exhausting both men and camels; both slept poorly in daylight, and the camels had less chance of foraging and finding water. When Stewart had reached the rocky crater of Jakdul and its wells at the midpoint of the desert route, he had lingered for days. To Mayne it was almost as if he were willing the enemy to meet him in the field, by giving ample time for spies to reach the Mahdi’s camp outside Khartoum and tell him of Stewart’s advance; the Ansar warriors would have been itching for a fight, forcing the Mahdi’s hand. This was truly a battle foretold. Mayne frowned, snapping shut the telescope. Getting to the Nile was going to take more time than he had bargained for, and with Gordon’s status in Khartoum more uncertain by the day, time was of the essence.
The camel hobbled beside him grunted and belched, emitting an odour so foul it made Mayne’s eyes smart again. It shifted on its forelegs and stared in the direction of the wells, chewing its cud. The bags of dura wheat slung over its back were nearly empty, and its hump was sagging. Both of their camels had traversed the Bayuda desert many times and knew exactly where they were, that the oasis ahead contained expanses of desert grass they could graze on as well as the puddles of muddy groundwater where they could slake their thirst. They had hobbled the camels the evening before to prevent them from wandering off on their own, and that night they had been restless. Mayne felt his own cracked lips, and was beginning to sympathise. Their breakfast of lime juice and biscuit had still not allayed the chill of the night, and he was looking forward to getting on the move again.
A figure materialised beside him, silent as ever. Over the past days Charrière’s skin had darkened with the sun and the dust, accentuating the deep grooves that scored his cheeks and forehead. The desert of the Sudan must seem a world away from the rivers and forests of Canada where he had been brought up, but he had relished the challenge to his tracking and survival skills. He tossed back the Arab robe he wore over his woollen trousers and checked shirt, took out a hunk of dried meat from a pouch on his belt and cut off a strip, passing it over. Mayne had acquired a taste for the jerky carried by the voyageurs on the Red River expedition fifteen years before; this time it was camel rather than moose meat, but he took it gratefully. Charrière cut himself a piece and the two men chewed and sucked for a few minutes without talking. Then Charrière raised the depleted water skin that had been hanging from his shoulder, letting a trickle pour into his mouth before passing it to Mayne, who did the same, taking only a mouthful, knowing that the wells ahead were under dervish control and the tepid water might be their last for some time. They had been warned about thirst blindness, and he had wondered about the wavering images he had been seeing on the horizon the day before, whether they were mirages of the desert or tricks of the mind, or both. Today he would need all the clarity he could muster. He took another swig, leaving a few mouthfuls as a reserve, then passed the skin back. Charrière plugged and reslung it, then pointed ahead, his voice slow and deliberate, with its distinctive French-Canadian accent. ‘That is no longer an army on the march.’
Mayne looked out again. ‘About a quarter of an hour ago they began to form a square. They’ve dismounted and corralled the camels inside. They’ve only just left the zariba where they spent the night, so it’s too early for them to be setting up camp again. You can see the glint of steel where they’ve fixed bayonets. They must be able to see something closer to the wells that we can’t.’
Charrière squinted at the low hills behind the wells, then slid off the rock and lay splayed in the dust beside the camels, his ear to the ground. ‘We may not be able to see it,’ he said, ‘but I can hear it. There is a pounding, a great pounding of human feet, many thousands of them. And something else I can hear in the air too, a beating sound, like a thousand drums.’
Mayne shut his eyes for a moment. The soldiers in the square were not just preparing for a skirmish, to repel a suicidal attack by a few jihadi horsemen like those that had beset them since they had entered the desert. What they could hear and see ahead of them now was barely imaginable, terrifying, a storm from the south, the edge of a sweeping darkness that would stir up an atavistic fear in the hearts of men whose crusader ancestors had faced it eight hundred years ago when they had come to reclaim the Holy Land. Mayne remembered how the tom-toms had so terrified the Egyptian soldiers with the river column on the Nile; he hoped the British would have more resolve than the Egyptian fellahin, men with an ancestral fear of warriors from the south. But what the men in the square must be able to see now would shake anyone, a mass advancing from the horizon against which victory might seem inconceivable.
Charrière picked up the telescope and peered through it. ‘I can see puffs of rifle fire near the square. Mahdist sharpshooters must have come up among the rocks. These folds and gullies in the desert will provide them with cover.’
‘When you see volley fire from the square, then you know the Mahdi army is attacking,’ Mayne replied. He turned over and sank back against the rock, forgetting for a moment the chill and the hunger and thirst, retracing the brief for his mission. He and Charrière had left General Wolseley’s base at Korti dressed as Arabs and riding the best camels that could be found for them, shadowing Stewart’s desert column. The column had been sent south across the Bayuda desert towards Metemma on the Nile, a direct route of 176 miles that cut off the wide loop of the river to the east. Once at Metemma, it was to meet up with General Earle’s river column and a small vanguard under Colonel Wilson would embark in the river steamers that had been sent there by Gordon from Khartoum, 98 miles to the south. The plan then was either breathtakingly audacious, or astonishingly naïve. The arrival of a few dozen British redcoats would cow the enemy, who would disappear back into the desert. Khartoum would be relieved, and Gordon saved. The expedition would be the greatest triumph of British arms since Queen Victoria had come to the throne.
Mayne knew that the chances weighed astronomically against any of this coming to fruition, not least the time factor: Gordon had issued a last plea for help weeks before, and already Stewart’s column had lingered for ten days longer than was necessary at the wells of Jakdul in the middle of the desert. The chances of the river column reaching Metemma before February were vanishingly small, with the falling level of the Nile at this time of year making the cataracts more treacherous by the hour. Yet Mayne’s own mission to get to Gordon just before the steamers arrived at Khartoum depended on Gordon knowing that the relief expedition had reached Metemma, and that rescue for himself and his people was possible; only then, Mayne knew, would he stand any chance of convincing him to leave. It had meant dogging the tails of the desert column, waiting until now, with the Nile less than twenty-five miles ahead, when the arrival of Stewart’s force at Metemma within two days seemed a fair certainty; he and Charrière could then bypass the column and make their way to Khartoum to reach it just ahead of the steamers and the relief force.