‘And the Egyptian symbols?’
Mayne peered closely. The central part of the drawing was blank, in a rough square shape, presumably representing a missing part of the sculpture, but radiating from it over the rectilinear channels were long thin lines ending in shapes like closed hands. ‘That must be the Aten symbol, the rays of the sun,’ he said. ‘And the hieroglyphic cartouche to the right clinches it: that’s Akhenaten.’
‘And the other ones?’
Mayne stared at the individual hieroglyphs that appeared in several places on the image. ‘The crocodile beside Akhenaten’s name means sovereign, pharaoh. The other one’s a symbol of a rolled-up papyrus, and is most curious,’ he said. ‘It means wisdom, or knowledge.’
Gordon placed the book back on his desk with the page open. ‘I am going to tell you a little story. There was once a boy living beside the Nile north of Khartoum who was testing his first boat, a reed boat like the one you paddled over the river this evening. He had built it himself, cutting and collecting the reeds and bundling them together, and in the process had come to know all the creeks and byways of the Nile shore intimately. One day he came across something extraordinary: an ancient temple half inundated by the river, its upper surface revealed in a storm where it had lain buried in sand for thousands of years. He managed to squeeze inside, and discovered an ancient wall carving of remarkable form, not a depiction of battle or pharaohs but a cluster of rectilinear shapes that he did not recognise, that looked nothing like hieroglyphics or the Arabic script he had been taught by the Sufis. Do you remember when you arrived I showed you the lettering on that little shafti statue, and I said how in Islamic tradition the shape signifies more than the meaning? Well, the boy saw the shape and was terrified, thinking it was some ancient incantation, and quickly left. After the next Nile flood, the shoreline was banked over with sand and the temple once again buried. The boy continued to excel as a boatbuilder, but he had another gift, an ability to see visions that drew people to him, and he became a student of the Sufis. His family despaired of him, the last of generations of boatbuilders who had plied their trade on the Nile since time immemorial, but he was set on a different course. His name was Muhammad Ahmad’Abdallah.
Mayne stared at him, astonished. ‘The Mahdi?’
Gordon nodded. ‘Ten years ago, when I first came to the Sudan, his fame was already spreading, but he was no more than a Sufi mystic living on an island in the Nile. I travelled extensively along the river, and he came to know of me after I visited his family’s boatyard and drew sketches of their watercraft, showing them images of ancient boat models I had seen in Egypt and telling them of my interest in the antiquities of the Sudan. He had not forgotten his discovery as a boy and he invited me to his island. I recognised the hieroglyphs of Akhenaten from his description, and it was then that we discovered our shared passion for the Old Testament prophets, for Isaiah and also for Moses. We both believed that the pharaoh of the Book of Exodus at the time of Moses was Akhenaten himself, and that Akhenaten and Moses shared the same vision of one God, a vision that Muhammad Ahmad believed had come to them during an expedition to the southern desert. I became gripped by the idea, and spent much of my time on the search for proof, anything that might allow us to trace the expedition and find the place where we believed he had experienced his revelation. I persuaded my friend Heinrich Schliemann to take time off from Troy and join me in the desert, and I brought a few others into my confidence: Rudolf von Slatin; an American officer on my staff named Charles Chaille-Long; Colonel Sir Charles Wilson; and Herbert Kitchener. Wilson and Kitchener I knew I could count on because of their deep involvement with the archaeology of the Holy Land. And finally, you may be surprised to know, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.’
‘Gladstone?’ Mayne exclaimed, remembering what Kitchener had told him. ‘But you have surely been at loggerheads with him over your insistence on remaining in Khartoum.’
‘His involvement has been kept in the strictest secrecy, because he has not wanted his name to be associated with a quest that some might see as mystical. But he has in truth been my staunchest supporter. He tried his damnedest to dissuade me from returning here, and his irritation with me has a genuine basis to it. He tried to persuade me that what I had sought could wait until the Mahdist revolt had dissipated and we could return to the Sudan peaceably, but I told him the revolt was never likely to end within our lifetimes, and the quest would be lost. I felt that if I could make a discovery that drew together one who was regarded as a Christian soldier and another an Islamist visionary, then there was hope for some unity of vision that might emphasise the singularity of our beliefs, not their differences, and make war less of a certainty.’
‘So you came out here for that purpose? For the archaeology?’
‘My purpose in coming out here was in truth as I have told you: to arrange for the safe passage of my staff and their families from Khartoum, and to do all I could for the people of this city. But my archaeological quest was not disassociated from my aim to lift the veil of conflict from this place, and to stem the jihad.’
‘Did you find the temple?’
‘Muhammad Ahmad showed me the place, and I set my people to work. The temple was deeply buried, and it took months of effort. By the time the inner chamber was revealed, Muhammad Ahmad was no longer part of the picture; he had become the Mahdi, and the centre of the whirlwind that envelops us now. It was only after I had discovered the wall carvings and brought them to the light of day, when his spies among my workmen reported back to him, that he understood what he had seen as a boy for what it was. It was not early writing or some ancient spell. It was a map.’
‘Did you show it to him?’
Gordon shook his head. ‘By then we were enemies. But he sent his followers after me, to try to take the carvings. I kept them here in the storerooms of the palace, hidden away, and eventually put them on the Abbas. To enthuse them, he let his followers believe that he was after gold, that I had found clues to some ancient El Dorado of the desert. Indeed, that is what the first pharaohs who came here thought too, seeking to extend the borders of Egypt beyond the desert but also hunting the oases and wells for evidence of an ancient civilisation, just as we do today. If they truly found their El Dorado we shall never know, for they were repelled by the warriors they called the guardians of the desert, savage fighters like the Ansar of the Mahdi today. In two places where Akhenaten went I have found depictions of battle against Egyptians in which these enemies are victorious, almost as if Akhenaten were leaving the images as a warning for others from Egypt not to follow him.’
Mayne thought for a moment. ‘The crocodile temple, where I saw the image of Akhenaten. It had just such a depiction of carnage in battle.’
Gordon leaned forward, his voice intense. ‘It was the hunt for ancient gold, treasure they believed I had hidden away for secret dispatch to Egypt, that led the Mahdi’s men to ransack the Abbas, diving repeatedly on the wreck to search for it. But little did they know that there was a far greater treasure concealed there, a treasure that the Mahdi had sent his emirs to discover when they waylaid and murdered Stewart and his men.’
Mayne looked at the crocodile symbol on the drawing, and suddenly remembered the channel that Lieutenant Tanner had discovered at the cataract, from the Nile to the crocodile temple. He studied the drawing again, seeing the interconnectedness of the lines, their origin at one source. ‘Do you remember at Chatham studying hydraulic engineering, looking at Venice and the island cities of northern India? This isn’t a labyrinth. It’s a complex of canals, some of them rising over the others. That entrance must lead from a water source, a river. I think the reason why this has never been found is that it’s underground.’