Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) by Gibbins David

Author:Gibbins, David [Gibbins, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2013-05-22T23:00:00+00:00

15

Mayne opened the tent flap and stepped outside, waiting for Kitchener to collect the map case and join him. He walked a few paces into the desert, relishing the fresh air after the smoky atmosphere inside, breathing in deeply and smelling the coppery tang the sand exuded after a day in the burning sun, a smell like blood. After the heat of the afternoon the encampment beside the Nile was beginning to stir again, and the soldiers who would make up the desert column were preparing for departure the next day. In the marshalling ground to the south he could hear the snorting and bellowing of more than three thousand camels, along with curses and yells that showed the inexperience of the men who had been detailed to handle them. Beside the river the naval contingent were cleaning and oiling their Gardner machine gun, an unwieldy weapon mounted on a carriage that had already shown its vulnerability to sand and dust. In the distance he could hear the crackle of musketry from the rifle range as the infantry sharpened their skills for what might lie ahead. The picquets of dismounted cavalry he could see on the ridges were a reminder that although Khartoum and the Mahdi were two hundred miles away, dervish spies were everywhere and the troops were vulnerable to sharpshooters and suicide attacks. It was a lesson that the soldiers in the river column had learned all too well the previous day, and one that the desert column would confront soon enough as they struck out across the desolate wasteland to the south.

The sand turned blood-red as the rays of the setting sun streaked across from the south-west. Soon it would be a dazzling spectacle, deep oranges and maroons, the ridges and knolls of the desert framed black as the orb of the sun dropped below the horizon. He remembered first seeing a desert sunset three years before, one evening alone at the pyramids of Giza, when he had arrived in Egypt to carry out intelligence work in the wake of the British invasion. That was when he had first come south, too, though only as far as the border of Egypt at Aswan, before the first cataract of the Nile. The ruins he had seen at sunset there had seemed to draw him further on, and he had tried to imagine what it had been like for those who had gone before, for the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Arabs: what it was that had made them go against the flow of the Nile and travel into the land that would so often become their grave. During evenings sitting above the ruins, he had felt as if the red rays were reaching out across the sand, pulling him towards the setting sun and into the dangerous darkness that followed. He thought it had helped him to understand Gordon, to see what it was that could take a man like that and put him in a place that seemed beyond the edge of the world.

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