Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (39 page)

In the 1880s, the more adventurous tourists could travel by boat on the Nile to Akhenaten’s capital at Amarna and the temple at Abu Simbel, its original site now submerged deep beneath the waters of Lake Nasser just north of the border with Sudan. Few ventured further south into the Nubian desert, where the Aswan dam has greatly changed the appearance of the Nile today, inundating the cataracts that proved such an obstacle to Wolseley’s expedition in 1884. The surrounding desert remains much as it was then; at the battlefield of Abu Klea, the British
zariba
can still be traced, and it is possible to find the odd Martini-Henry cartridge, but it is a place like others of much greater antiquity in the desert, from the time of the pharaohs and even earlier, where the wind and the scorching sun seem to have reduced evidence of human endeavour to the same dusty footprint.

Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, died in the same fateful year as Gordon, whether by illness or by poison is uncertain. The possibility that his assassination was ordered by the British cannot be ruled out; Kitchener’s intelligence network and loyal Ababda followers could have found a way to infiltrate his camp. Kitchener had sworn to avenge Gordon, to take a dervish life for every hair on Gordon’s head, a promise amply fulfilled in 1898 when he led his army against the Mahdi’s successor at the battle of Omdurman, just outside Khartoum; but his desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb earned the opprobrium of Queen Victoria herself, and helped to fuel a new generation of jihadists.

Today at Khartoum there is little left that was visible in 1885, with the palace being a more recent structure and the course of the Nile having altered the appearance of the foreshore and Tutti island. However, the palace was built on the site of the original, and it is possible to look out on it from the far shore of the Blue Nile as my character Mayne does, from the site where an abandoned fort is marked on contemporary maps. The disposition of the Mahdi’s forces and the appearance of Khartoum in its final days are documented by eyewitness accounts, including that of Colonel Wilson, who came within sight of the palace in the steamer
Bordein
the day after Gordon died.

Outside the city at Omdurman, the tomb of the Mahdi has been restored; Omdurman is also the site of one of the few surviving relics in Sudan of the 1884–5 campaign: the hull of the
Bordein
, saved from scrapping in 2010 and now on display. The site where the
Abbas
was wrecked, the basis for the dive in this novel, has never been investigated underwater, though the account of guns and equipment being thrown overboard suggests that artefacts must still exist on the bed of the Nile; the site was visited by Colonel William Francis Butler several months after the wrecking, when he saw much material strewn about. My inspiration for its appearance comes from a wreck of similar size, date and depth that I have dived on frequently in Canada, in a fresh-water environment that would have preserved timber and metal in a similar way to the Nile. You can see a film of me diving at night on that wreck, and another of me shooting a Martini-Henry rifle, as well as images of medals, contemporary illustrations of the Nile campaign and portraits of the main historical characters involved, on my website www.davidgibbins.com.

The quotes at the front of the book, and the quote on the Leviathan in Chapter 6, are derived from an 1885 edition of the King James version of the Bible; at the front of the book and in Chapters 14 and 21 (the letter from the Mahdi) from
The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon at Kartoum, printed from the original mss
(cited above); in the Prologue (the hymn to Sobek) from
Papyrus Ramesseum
6 (EA10759.1), translated in the British Museum online Research Catalogue; in Chapter 3 (the Semna dispatch) from
Semna Despatches
80–1 (BM10752), also in the British Museum online catalogue; in Chapter 4 (War Office report on Semna) from Lieutenant Colonel H. E. Colvile,
History of the Sudan Campaign, compiled in the Intelligence Division of the War Office
(1889); in Chapter 9 (on crocodiles) from Plutarch,
Moralia
75; and in the Author’s Note from William Francis Butler,
The Campaign of the Cataracts
(cited above), and Rudyard Kipling,
Barrack-Room Ballads
(1892).