David Gibbins - Pharaoh

Mayne saw no reason to deny it. ‘Sir.’

‘What is your estimation of the distance to that fort?’

Mayne remembered Kitchener’s map. ‘Six hundred and fifty metres, give or take twenty.’

‘Six hundred and sixty-five metres. Bravo. You are good. Even at that range, with a cartridge that powerful a body shot could be a clean kill. Am I right?’

‘I’ve hunted deer with my Sharps at a thousand yards and dropped them stone dead.’

‘Have you ever hunted men, Major Mayne?’

Mayne swallowed, suddenly discomfited. ‘I’m a soldier, sir. Like you.’

Gordon stared at him, then smiled and slapped his shoulder. ‘Indeed we are. Soldier first, engineer second, dilettante fossicker down the byways of archaeology and geography and natural history third. That’s what they taught us. Isn’t that right?’

‘Sir.’

‘I know why you’ve come. And you know that I won’t leave with you. There’s nothing more I can do for the people here, but if the world knows the truth of why Gordon of Khartoum stayed to the end, then perhaps it will not be a pointless sacrifice. The Mahdi is coming at dawn. I will be on the balcony when they break through the gates. I will be in this full dress uniform, with a red tunic. You will not mistake me. I believe the sun will shine tomorrow, for the first time in days; I can sense it. You must choose your time well. For a few moments at dawn a sliver of light from the eastern horizon lights up the balcony and the mosque behind, but then as the sun rises it reflects off the Nile and obscures this place. I have seen it myself, from the fort on the opposite shore. And watch your back. There will be others with their eyes on you. Mark my words.’

Mayne did not know what to say. ‘Sir.’

‘Have I done my best for these people? For my country?’

Mayne looked into his eyes, and suddenly felt a flood of compassion, and a flash of anger towards those who had orchestrated all this. ‘For Queen and country, sir.’

Gordon put a hand on his shoulder, and then picked up a leather-bound volume from his desk. ‘Good. Now, before you go, I trust that you will allow a condemned man one final request. It is of the utmost importance.’

Gordon led Mayne to his desk, pointed him to a chair and sat down himself behind the writing pad. He opened up the book he had been holding, and Mayne could see that it was a journal, filled almost to the last page with closely lined writing. Gordon gave him a penetrating look. ‘When I dispatched Colonel Stewart to safety in the steamer Abbas , little knowing the fate that awaited him downriver, I sent with him the largest part of my archaeological collection as well as the latest volumes of my journal. All of that was lost when the Abbas was sunk and Stewart murdered.’

‘Kitchener mentioned your collection,’ Mayne said. ‘He told me you had an ancient stone slab packed beneath the boiler.’

Gordon nodded. ‘That was the day that Kitchener was here. Our discussion was almost exclusively concerned with archaeology. And the loss of that slab would have been an utter tragedy, had I not sketched the carvings on it.’

He opened the back page of the journal, and passed it to Mayne. An inked drawing filled the page, neat, precise, the work of a trained draftsman. But the image was bizarre, different from any other ancient depiction Mayne had seen in the Sudan, almost like something occult. He looked at it with a sapper’s eye. ‘It’s a map, a plan,’ he murmured. ‘Rectilinear interlocking lines of communication, perhaps trenches or tunnels. They all seem to originate from one opening at the bottom, like a maze, a labyrinth.’

‘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.’