intentions. Even the authenticity of the messages could be suspect, brought by messengers whose loyalty could never be certain. In the desert, the truth shifted like the sands, changing subtly in complexion with each gust of wind, then being swept away by storms that left a whole new landscape of reality to understand and navigate.
Mayne steered the camel towards the flashing light, knowing that the sangar now lay directly ahead above the near bank of the river. The message being sent out would be relayed down the heliograph posts to Korti, the advance camp on the Nile where the camel corps was assembling, and then on to Wadi Halfa. He smiled wryly to himself, remembering what Corporal Jones and the other soldiers had called Wadi Halfa: Bloody Halfway . It had become a standing joke for the men of the river column to ask each other how far they had gone at the end of each day, after another few hundred yards of backbreaking toil, hauling and rowing the boats to the next obstacle; the answer was always the same: bloody halfway . The joke had become strained as the level of the Nile had steadily fallen through December, and the channels he had spotted during his reconnaissance trips upstream had become trickles by the time the boats reached them. Sometimes it seemed as if they were caught in a Greek myth of the underworld, where no matter how hard they tried, their goal remained forever elusive. Yet Mayne knew that if this were the underworld, then they were only in the first circle of hell; somewhere ahead was an invisible barrier beyond which lay a deeper reach, a place where a force of darkness was marshalling that could obliterate them with the speed and ferocity of a sandstorm. And in the eye of that looming maelstrom was General Charles Gordon, their sole purpose for being here, a man whose future seemed increasingly doubtful as the chances of the relief expedition ever reaching him faded hour by hour.
He turned and watched Shaytan receding noiselessly in the distance, his camel wavering in the heat haze as it sauntered away. The sun glinted off the brass-covered flintlock pistol with a handle like a rat’s tail that Shaytan had taken from the dismembered corpse of an Ottoman Turkish official they had found in the desert a few days previously, whether the work of the Mahdi’s men or brigands was unclear. With his golden gun and his belted dagger, Shaytan seemed from another era, yet Mayne had learned that the desert had a timeless quality in which the past seemed to live with the present. It had seemingly rebuffed every attempt by the British to introduce new technology: the railway his fellow engineers had pushed as far as they could beyond Korti, until the supply of track and their own energy had been sapped; the river steamers that Gordon had used in the upper reaches of the Nile near Khartoum, constantly breaking down and immobilised for want of wood for fuel; the Gatling and Gardner machine guns that should have assured their supremacy on the battlefield, but that jammed in the dust and the heat. They had learned through bitter experience that the only way to broach the desert was to adapt to it and learn the ways of desert survival as Mayne had done from Shaytan, yet even that put interlopers at a disadvantage against those who had been born to it. It was impossible to know where Shaytan would go next, or which side he would now join. What was certain was that his time with Mayne had come to an end, and they both knew that if they were to meet again, they might be trying to cut each other’s throats. It was the way of the desert, and signified nothing more than that they were both part of the eternal course of history in these lands.
Shaytan had called Mayne ‘Nassr’ayin’, meaning ‘Eagle Eye’. It was the same name he had been given in Iroquioan by the Mohawk Indians when he had spent a year living among them as a boy on the Ottawa river in Upper Canada, when his uncle had been in charge of a Royal
Mayne steered the camel towards the flashing light, knowing that the sangar now lay directly ahead above the near bank of the river. The message being sent out would be relayed down the heliograph posts to Korti, the advance camp on the Nile where the camel corps was assembling, and then on to Wadi Halfa. He smiled wryly to himself, remembering what Corporal Jones and the other soldiers had called Wadi Halfa: Bloody Halfway . It had become a standing joke for the men of the river column to ask each other how far they had gone at the end of each day, after another few hundred yards of backbreaking toil, hauling and rowing the boats to the next obstacle; the answer was always the same: bloody halfway . The joke had become strained as the level of the Nile had steadily fallen through December, and the channels he had spotted during his reconnaissance trips upstream had become trickles by the time the boats reached them. Sometimes it seemed as if they were caught in a Greek myth of the underworld, where no matter how hard they tried, their goal remained forever elusive. Yet Mayne knew that if this were the underworld, then they were only in the first circle of hell; somewhere ahead was an invisible barrier beyond which lay a deeper reach, a place where a force of darkness was marshalling that could obliterate them with the speed and ferocity of a sandstorm. And in the eye of that looming maelstrom was General Charles Gordon, their sole purpose for being here, a man whose future seemed increasingly doubtful as the chances of the relief expedition ever reaching him faded hour by hour.
He turned and watched Shaytan receding noiselessly in the distance, his camel wavering in the heat haze as it sauntered away. The sun glinted off the brass-covered flintlock pistol with a handle like a rat’s tail that Shaytan had taken from the dismembered corpse of an Ottoman Turkish official they had found in the desert a few days previously, whether the work of the Mahdi’s men or brigands was unclear. With his golden gun and his belted dagger, Shaytan seemed from another era, yet Mayne had learned that the desert had a timeless quality in which the past seemed to live with the present. It had seemingly rebuffed every attempt by the British to introduce new technology: the railway his fellow engineers had pushed as far as they could beyond Korti, until the supply of track and their own energy had been sapped; the river steamers that Gordon had used in the upper reaches of the Nile near Khartoum, constantly breaking down and immobilised for want of wood for fuel; the Gatling and Gardner machine guns that should have assured their supremacy on the battlefield, but that jammed in the dust and the heat. They had learned through bitter experience that the only way to broach the desert was to adapt to it and learn the ways of desert survival as Mayne had done from Shaytan, yet even that put interlopers at a disadvantage against those who had been born to it. It was impossible to know where Shaytan would go next, or which side he would now join. What was certain was that his time with Mayne had come to an end, and they both knew that if they were to meet again, they might be trying to cut each other’s throats. It was the way of the desert, and signified nothing more than that they were both part of the eternal course of history in these lands.
Shaytan had called Mayne ‘Nassr’ayin’, meaning ‘Eagle Eye’. It was the same name he had been given in Iroquioan by the Mohawk Indians when he had spent a year living among them as a boy on the Ottawa river in Upper Canada, when his uncle had been in charge of a Royal
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