“What you’re saying is you’ve got that feeling,” Costas said.
“I’ve got that feeling.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
“You’ll be busy too,” Jack said.
“Not much call for submersibles engineers up in the mountains of Ethiopia, if that’s where you’re thinking of going.”
“I meant while I’m in the library, you’re going to be in charge of the Phoenician wreck,” Jack said.
“What do you mean, in charge?”
“I mean in charge. Archaeologist.”
“You must be joking. I can barely spell the word.”
“Maybe, but after all these years you can talk the talk, just as Louise said. Anyway, Jeremy will help.”
“Me?” Jeremy said, looking up from his tablet. “Bit nippy in the sea off England, I find. If you want any help in the Indian Ocean, though, I might be persuaded.”
“I need you on site in case any more inscriptions come up. And in case Costas needs help spelling that word.”
Jeremy’s phone vibrated. “Will Rebecca be there? Anyway, I thought she was taking over the site.”
“You should know. It seems you’re engaged. Anyway, I’m going to need Rebecca’s help with the Abyssinia material. Maybe that’s her calling you now.”
“Nope. Text from Maurice,” Jeremy said, munching an apple and trying to read the screen as the vehicle bounced over a cattle grid. “Seems a bit miffed that you’re not answering your phone. That’s all.”
Jack glanced at his phone. There were no new texts or phone messages, just missed calls. His pulse quickened. That meant Maurice would only speak to him personally, and that usually meant something big. He remembered Rebecca saying that he was saving up something he had found at Carthage. He pulled the vehicle up on the grass verge before reaching the main road and quickly returned the call. A familiar voice answered, cursed in German as the phone seemed to go flying and then issued instructions loudly in French, the sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer competing with the roar of machinery in the background. Jack clicked on the speaker phone. “Maurice, is that you? Costas and Jeremy are here too. Tell us what you’ve got.”
Part 4
16
Captain Edward Gillespie Wood of the Madras Sappers and Miners stood with his telescope on a ledge behind the battlefield, staring at the wide saddle that separated his position from the great granite plateau of Magdala less than half a mile to the west. It was an extraordinary sight, at the end of an extraordinary expedition. For more than two months since leaving their forward supply base at Senafe, he and his sappers had reconnoitered ahead of the main force, surveying, taking photographs, and tracing the road that had been hacked out of the rock for the animals to get through. On the way they had encountered almost every physical obstacle known to man: scorching salt pans on the coast, nearly impenetrable juniper forests in the foothills, terrifying ravines and defiles beset by rock falls, and almost impassable scree slopes, an obstacle course that only seemed to get worse as they ascended ever higher to the upland plateau of Magdala, a dead end that had made it nearly impregnable as a fortress.
Day by day the army behind them had progressed, inch by relentless inch, the ridges getting higher and the canyons deeper until finally, three hundred miles from the sea, they had reached the mountainous spur he was standing on now. He raised his telescope, training it on the entrance to the fortress. The crenellated mud — brick battlements seemed almost inconsequential set against the grandeur of the place, with sheer cliffs and vertiginous scree slopes dropping thousands of feet on all sides of the plateau except for the saddle in front of him. He had only ever seen anything like it at the ancient fortress of Masala in the Holy Land, another place where the besieging army of a mighty empire had forced an enemy into a desperate last stand, one from which escape was beyond all possibility.
He looked down to where he could see the entrenched troops on the edge of the saddle, his engineer’s eye taking in all of the details. They were the vanguard of a force of nearly twelve thousand; among them were hundreds of mules from India and Egypt, dozens of camels from Arabia, still snorting and stamping from the noise of the battle, fifteen elephants, and the Armstrong guns that were shortly to be used to attempt a breach in the walls of the fortress. All of that had come grunting and bellowing and sweating from the sea, through sweltering days and freezing nights, through mountain passes that rose ever more precipitously until at the end there was only a narrow fissure above, barely wide enough to squeeze the elephants through. Even after they had reached the tablelands the rigors had not let up, as frequently they had been obliged to descend thousands of feet between the plateaus only to ascend again, pushing men and animals to the limits of physical endurance. And always there had been the nightmare of supply; they had found some grass and barley and meat and wood on the way, but not nearly sufficient, meaning that a continuous mule train of provisions was snaking behind them over the hundreds of arduous miles to and from the coast, making that same soul-destroying journey over and over again.
The smell of the battlefield was beginning to permeate the air unpleasantly; the sulfurous reek of gunpowder had been replaced by a sickly-sweet odor that he knew would only grow stronger. It always astonished him how quickly bodies left on a battlefield began to decay. Already the vultures had begun to pick away at the corpses; another day in this heat and the stench would be intolerable. It had only been a few hours since General Napier’s disciplined infantry with their Snider — Enfields had lined up against the Abyssinians, pitting the latest breech-loading rifles capable of ten rounds per minute against shields and spears. It had all been over in a matter of minutes, leaving more than seven hundred of the enemy dead and many more wounded, the remainder having been driven back into the fortress at the point of the bayonet. With King Theodore’s force now so depleted, it had become feasible to think of an artillery barrage and a frontal assault using infantry, a tactic straight from medieval warfare that Wood had never imagined he would see being acted out for real in a place so far removed from civilization as this.
The young sapper who had been struggling up the slope with the camera apparatus finally reached the ledge and dropped his burden, panting hard and sweating profusely. His skin was darkened by the sun and by the dust that seemed to penetrate every pore, finding its way into every conceivable part of the body, within and without. Wood offered him his water bottle, and the sapper took it gratefully, drinking deeply and then passing it back. “Excellent work, Jones,” Wood said. “Now let’s get the thing set up while the light’s still good.”
“It’s too bloody hot, sir,” Jones said, sinking back against a rock. “And I can hardly breathe.”
“It’s the altitude. We’re over ten thousand feet up. There’s about a quarter less oxygen in the air here than there is at sea level.”
Jones gestured at the plateau ahead. “Down in the camp they say he’s got gold up there, tons of it — mad old King Theodore.”