David Gibbins - Pharaoh

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.

The few people he had seen were like the wretches he had once watched sifting through rubbish on the Thames foreshore on a foggy London morning, only here they were naked and there was no tide to wash away the filth of the river. It was as if the city had collapsed in exhaustion during the day, and what little energy remained – for scouring the alleyways yet again for anything edible, for raising ever more fetid water from the river – came out in a brief burst at dusk, before it dissipated again and the night-time bombardment of the city resumed. The people had been living in the shadow of death for too long to care what tomorrow might bring; they knew as Mayne knew that this day could be their last, that the arrival of the steamers with the relief force would surely provoke the Mahdi to order a final assault in which everything squalid would be cleansed, in which the city would be cleared of its suffocating pallor and the divine light would be allowed to shine through, in which all those who did not see it and who still clung to Gordon would be raped and mutilated and butchered.

He turned again to the foreshore, and spotted a group of women and children dragging two corpses down to the river; they left them in the mud and scurried back up the bank. He looked at the dark pool below the bodies, and wondered whether the vultures were the only ones here with a taste for human flesh. Shaytan had told him that the slave-traders had captured crocodiles from the Nile and kept them in special underground tanks, feeding them with those who had crossed them. Perhaps these women were doing the same, leaving offerings to beasts that had been set free in the river but still lingered nearby, expecting a feast of death. He remembered the underground chamber beside the cataract and the image of the ancient Egyptian crocodile god Sobek. Perhaps these people, in this place too shrouded in horror for the divine light to break through, had reverted to worshipping the beasts the ancients believed radiated the divine presence. He wondered whether Gordon had seen that too, when he had first come here, and whether his zeal to lift the shroud and bring light to these people had brought darkness down upon himself, a darkness that Mayne could now see swallowing up the city, leaving only the lights of the palace flickering in the gloom.