It had been a week since they had left the battlefield of Abu Klea, a week during which they had kept to their plan, staying one day ahead of the three steamers that were chugging the ninety miles up from Metemma. They had moved fast through the desert, keeping close to the course of the river but far enough away to avoid being spotted, travelling in the cool of the night under a full moon and hiding in rocky gullies during the day. If all went to plan, the steamers would arrive some twelve hours from now, soon after dawn tomorrow morning, providing they survived the barrage of artillery and rifle fire that the Mahdi’s men would undoubtedly throw at them. Even so they would only be able to come up the channel opposite the palace where the river still flowed, and would have to use duckboards and ropes to get across the mudbanks to Mayne’s present position in the fort, the rendezvous point where they would pick up Gordon. The plan had worked so far, but it had been a close-run thing. Had he and Charrière arrived a day later, there would have been no chance of getting a boat across, and his only hope would have been to mingle with the Mahdi’s men on the far shore of the White Nile and attempt to get into the city from there, a virtually suicidal venture as his Arab disguise was bound to be rumbled close-up. His mission still hung in the balance; everything about it had been a close-run thing.
He heard the croak of frogs, and the buzzing of mosquitoes. Away to the left an emaciated cow with its eyes sewn shut was circling round and round a wooden post, pulling a wheel that raised and lowered a shaduf water-lifting device over the bank of the river. The harness creaked and groaned, and the beast wheezed. Someone had taken pot shots at it, probably the Mahdist sharpshooters on Tutti island; it had two black holes in its upper flanks and a gaping hole in its stomach where a bullet had exited along with a string of entrails, now hanging from it and swarming with shiny fat flies. Yet still the beast lumbered round, the shaduf dipping into an imaginary river that had dropped below its reach many days ago. The ravenous people on the opposite bank must have been tortured by the animal’s existence, but it had been saved from butchery by the danger of crossing the river within range of Tutti island, and the torpor Mayne had seen through his telescope: of men and women too far gone to move, let alone launch a boat. Charrière had promised to dispatch it with his knife once the sun was down and it was safe to do so without being seen.
Around the cow lay stacks of sun-dried bricks and piles of mud, solidified masses that dotted the shoreline like collapsed termite mounds. Mayne realised that the shaduf had been used to bring up water for brick-making, and that the deep pit behind him inside the ruined fort had been excavated for its mud. Its bottom was a festering slurry, alive with hatching insects, and he felt his sandals dig into it now, the mud oozing between his toes. The caked layers of sweat and grime on his skin had kept the mosquitoes at bay, a lesson he had learned from the Mohawks in Canada, but Charrière had protected himself further by daubing his face and forearms with liquid mud from the pit; afterwards he had seemed barely visible, as if he had emerged from the banks of the river like some Nile wraith. Mayne had forgone the treatment, caring little about the discomfort of insects and the risk of fever. He needed to look half presentable if he were to stand any chance of getting past the gate guardians at the palace and being allowed to see Gordon.
He raised his telescope and studied the palace now. It was the only building of any grandeur, a low two-storey affair with twelve large French-style windows on each floor facing out over the river, and an external staircase on the left-hand side that led from an upper-floor balcony to a forecourt enclosed by a perimeter wall and the gate to the street outside. He stared at the front of the structure, scrutinising the approach from the river while there was still enough light. A retaining wall and low balustrade lay along the top of the riverbank; below that was a stairway leading down to a small dock. The present level of the river was some fifteen feet below that and fifty feet out, but duckboards had been laid over the mud from the stairs to the water’s edge. Anchored in the mud were a series of upright posts of indeterminate purpose, probably for mooring. He could see yet another reason why tonight was the only possible time to go. A gap had already appeared between the duckboards and the water, and another few hours would make it impassable, an expanse of ooze and quicksand that would terminate his mission within a stone’s throw of Gordon’s upper-storey windows.
He looked at them now. They were shuttered and dark. For a moment he wondered whether the whole exercise had been in vain, whether Gordon was in there at all. Then he remembered Buller telling him that Gordon slept during the day and was up during the night; despite getting dark, it was still only about five o’clock, and he might not yet have risen. And there was something else, clinching evidence. Mayne looked at the duckboards again, seeing how the planks had been laid alongside each other in threes and lashed over transverse timbers placed on the mud about four feet apart. It was exactly how they had been trained to construct them at the School of Military Engineering, practising on the tidal banks of the river Medway. He shook his head, remembering Buller’s catty remark about Gordon: ever the engineer. The lowest extension of the planking nearest the water had been built in the same fashion, so Gordon must have been out there supervising the work a mere matter of hours before. He must still be alive.
He scanned along the shoreline as far as he could to the east. He could just make out the ditch and parapet that enclosed Khartoum on its landward side, earthworks that Gordon himself had had built yet could have no hope of defending with his few hundred remaining Sudanese troops, many of them by now surely on the brink of starvation and reduced by disease and untreated wounds. Within the walls lay a straggling line of mud-brick huts, leading up to the more substantial residences close to the palace where the Egyptian and Sudanese officials and their families must be holed up, barely surviving on Gordon’s dwindling food supply, paralysed by fear.
He cocked an ear, thinking he had heard footsteps, but it remained unsettlingly quiet. His Dongolese guide Shaytan had told him that the Mahdi ordered his entire army to prayer just before dusk, and that the Ansar enforced it with an iron fist; anyone caught transgressing had their hands lopped off. A quarter of a million men had been down on their hands and foreheads facing Mecca, their chanting too far off to be heard. But now somewhere in the distance he heard the single beat of a drum, nothing more, as if one of the drumbeats from Abu Klea had been captured somehow on the wind and spirited here, an ominous portent of things to come. He heard the thump of artillery, the shriek of a shell and the whoomph as it fell somewhere beyond the palace, raising a cloud of dust that joined the pastel-red pallor lying over the city. A rifle shot rang out from the island to the right, and he saw a dark figure scurry for cover below the balustrade of the palace. It was the first gunfire he had heard, and was strangely reassuring. When they had arrived from the desert, it had not only been the deathly quiet he found unnerving, but also the absence of smoke and burning; it was only when he looked with his telescope that he realised the reason: that everything flammable in the city – the wooden frames of the mud-brick houses, the shaduf water-lifting devices that should have lined the shore, the thatched roofs, the palm and fruit trees, the barrows and carts – was long gone, destroyed in the weeks of bombardment or chopped up and used for fuel. It was a city reduced to a skeleton, where even high-explosive shells failed to make much impact, with nothing left to splinter and shatter other than the fragile human beings who still clung to life in the streets.