Engineers detachment maintaining the canal from Lake Ontario to the new capital. The Iroquioan name, ‘Kahniekahake’, had stuck when he had returned to Canada as a newly commissioned subaltern and joined the Mohawk scouts in Wolseley’s expedition up the Red River in 1870 to quash the rebellion of Louis Riel. It was an extraordinary fact that some of those same men, including his boyhood friend Charrière, were here today, employed by Wolseley for their expertise with river craft to help haul the hundreds of whaleboats to be used to transport soldiers up the Nile towards Khartoum.
To the followers of Islam, the eagle was a perfect creation of Allah; to the Mohawks it was the spirit of a young warrior on a vision quest. Yet Mayne knew that Shaytan wore Islam as lightly as his ancestors had worn the beliefs of others who had passed through the desert in the distant past, and that for the Mohawk the spirit world required no special belief; it was simply the world they inhabited. Spending time with Shaytan had allowed Mayne to understand the desert people in a way that the staff officers in Korti and Wadi Halfa never would. The call to jihad that lay at the core of the rebellion was not the main motivation for the majority of the Mahdi’s army, a vast and motley gathering of tribesmen drawn from all quarters of the Sudan, some of them from the deepest reaches of the desert, where the influence of Islam was peripheral at best. For many, their instinct was to fight each other rather than join in a common cause. And yet this truth, that they were not all converts to militant Islam, was not a weakness; in the hands of the Mahdi, it was a strength. The Mahdi himself was one of them, born on the Nile, and he knew what drove his people. He knew how to use his holy vision to attract and rally his core of fanatical followers, the Ansar, and how to use their suicidal courage to draw others to follow his banner. And the tribesmen were not simply fighting to expel foreigners – Turkish and British and Egyptian and even Arabs – in order to defend their families and their traditions. The Mahdi knew how to stir them so that they were fighting because they relished it, because their pulses quickened at the sight of blood, because they could not resist following when the Ansar surged forward screaming and brandishing their spears at the enemy. Mayne had realised that the war had become self-fuelling, and that the only hope the British would ever have of containing it would be to return with an army large enough to mount a campaign of attrition and annihilation.
He looked back one last time at the wavering form in the distance. A gust of wind took one end of Shaytan’s headscarf and unfurled it like a banner, until it seemed to join the distant streaks of black cloud that appeared above the horizon; his camel appeared to stretch outwards and upwards like a mirage, and then was gone. It was like this in the desert, a place of mirages, of illusions, where desperate thirst could feel like dust in the throat, where there was no moral compass, where cruelty could be as casual and transient as the camaraderie he had felt over the last few weeks. Of all the places where he had been on campaign, he had never experienced the insidious draining that he had felt in the desert. The worst of it was when your body dried up until you were like a camel; they said that if you survived that without going insane, you learned to feed it with just what was necessary to keep from collapsing. Mayne knew he had been there often over the past few days, that Shaytan had made him experience it to show him how to survive; but it had left him with a desiccated feeling that would take days to resolve, and he knew that his body would try to convince him he was sated when he needed to drink more than he ever had done before in his life.
He turned back, pulled hard on the reins to keep the camel’s head in the direction of the river and kicked its flanks again. He
To the followers of Islam, the eagle was a perfect creation of Allah; to the Mohawks it was the spirit of a young warrior on a vision quest. Yet Mayne knew that Shaytan wore Islam as lightly as his ancestors had worn the beliefs of others who had passed through the desert in the distant past, and that for the Mohawk the spirit world required no special belief; it was simply the world they inhabited. Spending time with Shaytan had allowed Mayne to understand the desert people in a way that the staff officers in Korti and Wadi Halfa never would. The call to jihad that lay at the core of the rebellion was not the main motivation for the majority of the Mahdi’s army, a vast and motley gathering of tribesmen drawn from all quarters of the Sudan, some of them from the deepest reaches of the desert, where the influence of Islam was peripheral at best. For many, their instinct was to fight each other rather than join in a common cause. And yet this truth, that they were not all converts to militant Islam, was not a weakness; in the hands of the Mahdi, it was a strength. The Mahdi himself was one of them, born on the Nile, and he knew what drove his people. He knew how to use his holy vision to attract and rally his core of fanatical followers, the Ansar, and how to use their suicidal courage to draw others to follow his banner. And the tribesmen were not simply fighting to expel foreigners – Turkish and British and Egyptian and even Arabs – in order to defend their families and their traditions. The Mahdi knew how to stir them so that they were fighting because they relished it, because their pulses quickened at the sight of blood, because they could not resist following when the Ansar surged forward screaming and brandishing their spears at the enemy. Mayne had realised that the war had become self-fuelling, and that the only hope the British would ever have of containing it would be to return with an army large enough to mount a campaign of attrition and annihilation.
He looked back one last time at the wavering form in the distance. A gust of wind took one end of Shaytan’s headscarf and unfurled it like a banner, until it seemed to join the distant streaks of black cloud that appeared above the horizon; his camel appeared to stretch outwards and upwards like a mirage, and then was gone. It was like this in the desert, a place of mirages, of illusions, where desperate thirst could feel like dust in the throat, where there was no moral compass, where cruelty could be as casual and transient as the camaraderie he had felt over the last few weeks. Of all the places where he had been on campaign, he had never experienced the insidious draining that he had felt in the desert. The worst of it was when your body dried up until you were like a camel; they said that if you survived that without going insane, you learned to feed it with just what was necessary to keep from collapsing. Mayne knew he had been there often over the past few days, that Shaytan had made him experience it to show him how to survive; but it had left him with a desiccated feeling that would take days to resolve, and he knew that his body would try to convince him he was sated when he needed to drink more than he ever had done before in his life.
He turned back, pulled hard on the reins to keep the camel’s head in the direction of the river and kicked its flanks again. He
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