The Triumph of the Sun Read online

  ‘There is water at Marbad Tegga.’ In the Taka dialect, the well’s name meant Camel Killer. ‘Little and bitter, but just sufficient for the camels,’ Yakub replied.

  Yakub was a Jaalin Arab who had been driven from the tents of his people by a blood feud that started in a quarrel over dishonour to Yakub’s sister. Yakub was quick and expert with the blade and the man had died. However, he had been the son of a powerful sheikh. Yakub had been forced to flee for his life.

  One of Yakub’s eyes gazed in a different direction from the other. The ringlets that dangled from under his turban were greasy and his teeth, when he smiled at Penrod, were yellow and crooked. He knew and understood the desert and the mountains with the instinct of a wild ass. Before he had been driven out of the tribe he had taken a knife wound that had left him with a limp. Because of this affliction he had been refused service in the armies of the Queen and the Khedive. Thus, with no tribe and no other master, Penrod was all he had. Yakub loved him like a father and a god.

  ‘So we can still cut the snake?’

  When Penrod posed a question of such weight, Yakub gave it all his respect and attention. He tucked the skirts of his galabiyya between his legs and squatted. With his camel goad he scratched a large figure S in the dirt, but the upper loop was smaller by half than the lower. It was a rough charting of the course of the Nile from where they stood to the mouth of the Shabluka Gorge. To follow the riverbank through this serpentine meandering would add many weeks to the journey. This, of course, was the route that the flotilla of the River Division would be forced to take. The Desert Division, on their camels, would cut across the great loop and regain the river at Metemma. This shortcut was well marked by the caravans of the ages and by the bleached bones they had left behind them. There were two wells along the way that gave the traveller just sufficient water to make the crossing. Once they reached Metemma they could follow the upper limb of the Nile, keeping always in sight of the river as it swung back west again, until eventually it settled once more on its southerly course and headed for Khartoum. It was a hard road, but there was a harder one yet. The caravan masters called it ‘cutting the snake’.

  Yakub made a bold slash with the goad, drawing a straight line from their present position directly to the city of Khartoum. The line cut the S bend of the river neatly in half. It saved hundreds of miles of bitter, gruelling travel. But the trail was unmarked and to take a wrong turning meant missing the single well of Marbad Tegga, and finding instead a certain, terrible death. The well lay deep in the furnace-hot belly of the Mother of Stones, and it was well hidden. It would be easy to pass it by a hundred paces and never know it was there. The camels could drink the water, but its caustic salts would drive a man mad. Once they had watered the camels at Marbad Tegga it was still another hundred miles to the bank of the Nile at Korti below the fourth cataract. Long before they reached the river all the water in the skins would be finished. They might be twenty-four hours without a drop before they saw the Nile again, longer than that if the djinni of the desert were unkind to them.

  Once they reached the riverbank, they must cross the river. At this point the current was swift, the stream was a mile wide and the camels were reluctant swimmers. But there was a ford known to few. Once they had crossed, drunk their fill and recharged the waterskins, they would be forced to leave the Nile again and face the Monassir desert on the other bank, another two hundred waterless miles. Yakub reiterated all this, drawing it all on the earth with his goad. Penrod listened without interruption: although he had cut the snake three times before and won through to the river crossing at Korti, there was always something fresh to learn from Yakub.

  When he had explained it all Yakub announced, ‘With the fearless and cunning Yakub to guide you, and angels to watch over you, perchance we may indeed cut the snake.’ Then he rocked back on his haunches and waited for Penrod to make the decision.

  Penrod had been considering the gamble while he was talking. He would never have attempted it without Yakub. With him to lead, the gains in time and distance to reach Khartoum were worth the gamble, but there was another even more telling consideration.

  Bakhita had told him that the Mahdi and his khalifa were well aware of the British preparations to rescue Gordon. Their spies had kept them fully informed of the concentration of British regiments and the flotilla at Wadi Halfa. She said that the Mahdi had ordered a dozen of the most important emirs to leave the siege of Khartoum and take their tribes northwards along the river, to contest the way, to meet the enemy at Metemma, Abu Klea and Abu Hamed. She said that already both banks of the river from Khartoum down to the first great bend were swarming with Arab horsemen and camel troops.

  ‘The Mahdi knows that he must stop the Franks before they reach the city.’ She used the word that described all Europeans. ‘He knows that their army is small and poorly equipped with horses and camels. They say he has sent twenty thousand men northwards to meet the British and to hold the river line until Low Nile, when he can complete the destruction of Khartoum and send General Gordon’s head to his queen.’ She had added, ‘Be careful, my dear lord. They have cut the telegraph lines to the north and they know that the generals in Cairo must send messengers to Khartoum to keep in contact with the general. The Mahdi will be expecting you to try to win through to the city. His men will be waiting to intercept you.’

  ‘Yes, they will be looking for us to cross the loop, but will they guard the road to Marbad Tegga, I wonder?’ Penrod mused aloud. Yakub shook his head for he had no English. Penrod switched back into Arabic: ‘In God’s name, brave Yakub, take us to the bitter well of the Camel Killer.’

  They mounted up on the high wooden saddles. Penrod checked the rifle in its scabbard under his leg, and the bandolier of ammunition tied to the crosspiece of the saddle, then prodded the grey camel. Groaning and spitting, she lurched to her feet.

  ‘In God’s Name let us begin,’ sang al-Saada.

  ‘May He open our eyes to make the way clear,’ Yakub cried. ‘And may He make the Camel Killer plain for us to behold.’

  ‘God is great.’ Penrod said. ‘There is no other God but God.’

  Each led a pack camel and the water sloshed softly in the skins. At first, loose equipment squeaked or clattered to the rocking gait of the camels, but quickly they readjusted the straps and bindings that held the burdens. Once they stopped briefly and bled the air from the waterskins so that they no longer gurgled. When they went onwards it was in silence, a weird and unnatural silence in the void of heat and unfathomable horizons. The spongy pads of the camels’ feet fell soundlessly on the sands. The men wrapped their heads so that only the slits of their eyes showed and they did not speak. They slumped low on the tall wooden saddles and gave themselves over to the rhythm of the camels’ gait.

  They followed the ancient caravan road across a level expanse of orange-coloured sand that glowed in the sunlight until their eyes ached with the glare. The way was only faintly marked by the pale bones and desiccated carcasses of long-dead camels, preserved by sun so that some might have lain there for centuries. The air they breathed scalded and abraded the lining of the throat. The horizon wavered and dissolved in the silver lake of the mirage. The camels and their riders seemed to hang in space and though they rode forward as soundlessly as wraiths, they seemed never to move against the shimmering background. The only point of reference was the tenuous outline of the caravan trail, but even that seemed not to be attached to the earth but to rise up before them like a drifting tendril of smoke.

  Penrod let himself lapse into the mesmeric trance of the desert voyager. Time was suspended and lost all significance. His mind ranged free and he thought how easy it would be to believe, as the Bedouin did, in the supernatural powers that inhabited this otherworldly landscape. He dreamed of the jinn, and of the ghosts of lost armies that had perished in these sands. Though Yakub was only half a pistol shot ahead of him he seemed at times to be as distant as the mirage, fluttering like a sparrow on t
he wings of his robe. At other times he loomed gigantically on the back of his elephantine beast, swollen and elongated by the treacherous play of light. On they went, and silently on.

  Slowly something began to appear before them, a mighty pyramid that dwarfed the man-made constructions of the delta. It quivered in the silver mirage, detached from earth, hanging inverted above the horizon, balancing on its point with the flat base filling the southern sky. Penrod stared at it in awe, and again his credibility was taxed as it shrank swiftly, disappearing to a dark spot, then began to grow again, this time with its pointed summit uppermost and its base anchored to the earth.

  They rode on and now it assumed its true form, a cone-shaped hill with two smaller ones standing close behind it. In a clairvoyant flash Penrod perceived that natural features such as these must have been the model for those other man-made pyramids that had astonished mankind over the ages. The caravan trail ran straight towards them, but before they reached the first Yakub turned aside, leaving the trail on the left hand. He led them forward into a wilderness that was no longer marked by the faintest trace of man or of his passing. This was the hidden way to Marbad Tegga.

  Penrod was lulled back into the hypnotic suspension of time and feeling, and the hours passed as the sun made its noon and began its fiery descent to earth. At last he was roused by the altered gait of his she-camel. He looked around quickly and saw how the landscape had changed. The sand was no longer orange but ashen grey and seared. On the horizon all around were heaps of volcanic ash and lava several hundred feet high, as though all the worlds of the universe had been cremated and their remains dumped in this infernal cemetery and covered by these forbidding tumuli. The breath of ancient volcanoes had charred the very desert. There was no vestige of vegetation or of any living thing, except the three men and their pacing beasts.

  Penrod saw why his mount’s gait had changed. The earth was thickly littered with boulders and stones. Some were as large and perfect as round shot for heavy cannon, and others as small as musket balls. It was like the detritus of some long-forgotten battlefield. But Penrod knew that these were not the munitions of war. These rocks were the efflorescence left over from the eruption of the volcanoes. The liquid lava had been expelled into the sky in a deadly rain. As it fell back to earth it had cooled and solidified into these shapes. The camels were forced to pick their way across this dangerous footing, and their speed was much reduced.

  The sun sank, and as it touched the earth it seemed to erupt in an explosion of green and crimson light, then fall away to give the world over to sudden night.

  ‘Sweet night!’ Penrod whispered, and felt his lip crack. ‘Blessed cool night!’ They couched the camels and fed them a small ration of crushed dhurra meal, then checked their harness and saddles for any sign of galling or chafing. While the men laid out their prayer mats and prostrated themselves towards Mecca, Penrod walked out into the desolation to loosen his cramped muscles and stiff joints. He listened to the night, but the only sound was the evening breeze along the dunes, whispering with the voices of the jinn.

  When he returned Yakub was brewing coffee on the tiny brazier. They drank three cups each, and ate dates with thin rounds of dhurra biscuit. They anointed their lips and exposed skin with mutton fat to prevent them flaking and cracking. Then they lay down beside the camels and slept. Yakub roused them after two hours’ rest. They mounted and went on southwards in the night.

  The heavens were brilliant with stars, such a profusion that it was difficult to find the major navigational bodies in the silver dazzle. The air was cool and tasted sweet, but it was so dry that it baked the mucus in Penrod’s nasal passages into pellets hard as buckshot.

  Hour after hour the camels paced on. At intervals Penrod swung down from the saddle and strode along beside his mount, to rest her and stretch his legs. They stopped again before dawn, drank hot, unsweetened coffee, slept for an hour, then remounted and went on with the sun coming up on their left hand. The first rays struck and they quailed beneath the tyranny, covering their heads.

  The desert was never the same. It changed its character and aspect as subtly as a beautiful courtesan, but always it was dangerous and deceptive. At times the dunes were soft and fleshy, pale ivory as the breasts and belly of a dancing girl, then turned the colour of ripe apricots. They flowed like the rollers of the ocean, or writhed together as sinuously as mating serpents. Then they collapsed over jagged escarpments of rock.

  The hours and the miles fell behind them. When they paused to rest in the shade of the waterskins, it was often too hot to sleep. They lay and panted like dogs, then went on. The camels groaned and bellowed softly when they were couched and again when they were forced to their feet to resume the march. Their humps shrivelled. On the fifth day they refused to eat the small ration of dhurra meal that Yakub offered on the straw feeding mats.

  ‘That is the first sign that they are nearing the limit of their strength,’ Yakub warned Penrod. ‘We must reach the well before dusk tomorrow evening. If we do not they will begin to die.’

  It was not necessary to speak of the consequences for the men if the camels failed. The following morning, as they paused on the rim of a deep saucer of ground, Penrod pointed ahead. Along the opposite rim a frieze of gazelle stood in silhouette. They were as tiny and dainty as creatures in a dream, the colours of cream and milk chocolate, with lyre-shaped horns and white masked faces. After a moment they disappeared down the far side of the ridge as silently as if they had never existed.

  ‘They drink at Marbad Tegga. We are close now.’ It was the first time Yakub had spoken in many hours. ‘We will be there before sunset.’ He squinted with satisfaction.

  At noon the camels refused to couch. They grumbled and moaned and shook their heads. ‘They have smelt the water. They are eager to go to it,’ said Yakub happily. ‘They will lead us to the well like hunting dogs to the quarry.’ As soon as the men had prayed and drunk their coffee, all three mounted again and rode on.

  The camels quickened their pace and moaned with excitement as the scent of the water grew stronger in their nostrils. When they stopped again in the late afternoon Penrod recognized the terrain ahead from the last time he had passed that way. It was a fantastic array of shale hillocks, sculpted by wind and the ages into a gallery of weird shapes and fanciful carvings. Some resembled marching armies of stone warriors, others were crouching lions, and there were winged dragons, gnomes and jinn. But above them all stood a tall, striking column of stone that resembled a woman in a long robe and a widow’s veil in an attitude of mourning.

  ‘There is the Widow of Ahab,’ said Yakub, ‘and she faces towards the well where her husband died.’ He prodded his mount with the long goad and they started forward again, the camels even more eager than their riders.

  ‘Wait!’ Penrod shouted urgently, and when Yakub and al-Saada looked back he stopped them with a peremptory gesture. He turned his own camel into a shallow wadi that hid them completely. They followed him unhesitatingly. They had to wrestle with the camels to force them to couch, goading and twisting their testicles before they sank down, bellowing in protest. Then they hobbled them with rawhide ropes so they were unable to rise again. Al-Saada stayed to guard them, and make certain they did not try to break away to reach the water. Then Penrod led Yakub to the top of the ridge and they found a vantage-point among the shale hills. Penrod lay stretched on his belly and panned his field-glasses over the rugged ground beyond the Widow of Ahab. Yakub lay beside him, squinting hideously into the sunset. After a long wait he muttered, ‘There is nothing but the sand and the rocks. You saw a shadow, Abadan Riji. Not even a jinn would inhabit this place,’ and he began to stand up.

  ‘Get down, imbecile,’ Penrod snapped. They were silent and unmoving for another half an hour. Then Penrod handed Yakub the field-glasses. ‘There is your jinnee.’

  Yakub stared through the lens, then started and exclaimed when he picked out the distant shape of the man. Sitting in the shade at the ba
se of one of the shale monoliths, he had been invisible. Only the pinprick of reflected light on the blade of the sword he was honing had alerted Penrod to his presence. Now he came to his feet and walked out into the slanting sunlight, an alien shape in the brooding landscape.

  ‘I see him, Abadan Riji,’ Yakub conceded. ‘Your eyes are bright. He wears the patched jibba of the Mahdists. Is there more than one?’

  ‘You can be certain of it,’ Penrod murmured. ‘Men do not travel alone in this place.’

  ‘A scouting party?’ Yakub hazarded. ‘Spies sent to wait for the soldiers to come?’

  ‘They know that the well of the Camel Killer is too small and the waters too bitter to supply a regiment. They are waiting to intercept messengers carrying despatches to Gordon Pasha in Khartoum. They know there is no other road. They know that we have to come this way.’

  ‘They are guarding the water. We cannot go on without water for the camels.’

  ‘No,’ Penrod agreed. ‘We must kill them. None must escape to warn those men of our passing.’ He stood up and, using the cover of the hillock, went back to where al-Saada waited with the camels. They dared not brew coffee while they waited for night to fall, for the smell of the smoke might carry to the enemy and betray their presence. Instead they drank water sparingly from the skins, and sharpened their blades as they ate the evening meal of dates. Then the Arabs spread their mats and prayed.