‘Well, it might soon be up your sleeve. With the help of IMU equipment.’
Costas sprang up. ‘You mean diving? I’m ready.’
‘There’s some other stuff first.’ Hiebermeyer turned to Jack, beaming. ‘How’s your Victorian military archaeology these days?’
Jack peered back at him, and suddenly felt himself course with excitement. Since boyhood, he had been fascinated by the weapons and wars of the Victorian period, and during holidays from boarding school, when Hiebermeyer had stayed with him at the family home, he had dragged him to the range as he test-fired every antique military rifle and musket that had been accumulated by his ancestors over the years. He stood up, and grinned. ‘That sounds right up my street. Lead on.’
4
Hiebermeyer led Jack and Costas along the ridge beside the Nile to an awning over a trestle table covered with plastic finds trays. He picked out an object and handed it to Jack. It was a spent rifle cartridge, the brass blackened with age; the shape was distinctively bottle necked, with a wider lower body than most modern rifle cartridges, and the primer was dented where it had been struck by the rifle’s firing pin.
Costas peered at it. ‘I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. It looks as if it could take out an elephant.’
‘It’s a Martini-Henry cartridge, .577 necked down to .450 for the bullet,’ Jack said. ‘It was the last of the big British black powder cartridges, designed to put down a fanatical enemy running at you at full tilt. Even so, there are many accounts of tribesmen out here taking multiple hits and still charging screaming into the British lines with their spears levelled and swords raised.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Probably spurred on by the fact that there was no provision for treating the wounded in the Mahdi’s army, and death in battle for a jihadist guaranteed an exalted place in heaven.’
‘How closely can you date this?’ Costas asked Jack.
‘The Martini-Henry was the main British service rifle from the early 1870s until 1888. To be archaeological about it, there’s a terminus post quem in the fact that this particular cartridge is drawn brass, essentially a modern-style cartridge. The earlier cartridges of rolled brass foil were found to be deficient during the Zulu War in 1879, and were replaced soon after that. Given what we know about the chronology of British military deployment in the Sudan in the 1880s, I have no doubt that this cartridge dates from the time of the Gordon relief expedition of 1884 to 1885.’
‘I can be even more specific,’ Hiebermeyer said. He rummaged in a satchel on the table and pulled out a battered book, opening it at a marked page. ‘This is Colonel William Butler’s Campaign of the Cataracts: Being a Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884 to 1885. The relief force under General Wolseley was divided into a river column and a desert column, with most of the effort until quite late in the campaign, really too late to save Gordon, being put into the river column. The plan was to drag over eight hundred whaleboats up the Nile against the flow through the cataracts. Once they had reached open water, they were to be filled with British troops and used to break through the Mahdist lines besieging Khartoum.’
‘Come again?’ Costas said. ‘Dragging boats against the flow of the river, for hundreds of miles? What was wrong with going across the desert?’
‘Exactly the question that many asked at the time, not least Gordon himself,’ Jack said. ‘Wolseley had done something similar in Canada in 1870 when he took an expedition up the Red River against a rebellion led by Louis Riel, a mixed-blood Métis. The expedition was a remarkable success and ended without bloodshed after Riel capitulated. Wolseley conducted much of his subsequent campaigning career by precedent, and the Nile expedition was to be his tour de force. He even brought over the same Canadians he’d used on the Red River expedition, including more than fifty Mohawks from the Ottawa valley, as well as west African Kroomen from the Gold Coast, because he had campaigned there against the Ashanti in 1873 and had admired their boating skills.’
Costas shook his head. ‘It’s hard to know who was more unhinged, Gordon in Khartoum going stir-crazy, or Wolseley insanely dragging boats upriver to rescue him.’
Jack gave a wry smile. ‘By the time the river column reached this point, Wolseley had finally been persuaded to create a separate camel corps to advance across the Bayuda desert and cut out the bend of the Nile, and it was that force that finally did reach Khartoum in the steamers that Gordon had sent downriver to wait for them.’
‘But too late,’ Costas said.
Jack nodded. ‘By two days. But there have always been bigger questions about the expedition, about whether Wolseley ever realistically intended to relieve Gordon. He and his superiors in Cairo and London seem to have convinced themselves that Gordon had gone off on a loop of his own, that he had become insane. But I’ve never really bought that. Gordon was certainly an individualist, to put it mildly, but he was also an exceptional administrator and a committed Christian. He was horrified by the plight of those besieged in Khartoum, who had come to rely on him for the dispersal of food and medicine, and he refused to leave them. The idea that he was a self-appointed messiah may even have been encouraged by the government in London, who knew they could never rescue him and were apprehensive about losing face. There must have been those who would rather he died and became a martyr, especially with the fear that he might be captured by the Mahdi and paraded in front of the world, a complete humiliation for the British.’
Costas gestured at Hiebermeyer’s book. ‘So what happened at this place?’
Hiebermeyer checked his notes. ‘The river column reached Semna on the twenty-third of December 1884.’ He took out a folded photocopied sheet from the book. ‘Here’s the official War Office report: “At the head of this rapid is the great ‘Gate of Semna’, a narrow gorge between two rocky cliffs, partly blocked by two islands about equidistant from the shores and from each other. Through the three passages thus formed, the whole pent-up volume of the Nile rushes as through a sluice gate.”’ He pulled out another folded sheet and passed it to Costas. ‘And that’s a contemporary print from the Illustrated London News, based on a sketch sent to them by an anonymous officer. You can see the central channel, and the ropes used by the Royal Navy sailors to haul up the boats, with the voyageurs paddling and steering them. It shows what a monumental task this would have been. The river column was encamped here for several days, waiting for the boats to come up from the previous stretch of rapids and then for them to be taken one by one up through that narrow defile, now completely submerged by the effect of the Aswan dam.’
Jack leaned over and examined the print. ‘The detail on these drawings is astounding. It’s easy to forget the training in draftsmanship and survey these officers had, especially the engineers. This looks good enough to be used for range-finding.’
Costas took the cartridge from Jack and peered at it. ‘So we’ve got a guy up here shooting a Martini-Henry rifle, probably one day in December 1884. Is there a chance he was one of the enemy, the Mahdi’s men? In Afghanistan, the tribesmen were good at getting hold of British rifles from battlefields and by stealing them, and their own gunsmiths were skilled at making copies. I remember seeing a photograph in the news a couple of years ago of a cache of arms seized by US Marines from the Taliban, and as well as old Lee-Enfields there were a couple of Martini-Henrys.’
Jack shook his head. ‘The Sudanese tribesmen hadn’t yet had the opportunity. They’d first encountered the British army less than a year before, and even though the battles were generally bloody stalemates, the British were left in control of the battlefields and were careful not to lose their arms. The Egyptian army as well as the Sudanese irregulars under Gordon were armed with Remington rifles; thousands of these were captured after the first big battle against the Mahdi in late 1883. Some of the Egyptian soldiers spared by the Mahdi, those who promised to convert to his cause, served as musketry instructors and even produced halfway-competent snipers. The Remington took a .43 calibre round, so th
at would have been a further disincentive to acquiring Martini-Henrys, as they used different ammunition.’
Costas looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Where exactly did you find this?’
Hiebermeyer straightened up and pointed. ‘About fifty metres to the west, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the river. Let’s go there now.’ Jack and Costas followed him, making their way over the bare sandstone and igneous rock and then through a shallow dusty gully full of dried-up camel dung that led to the cliff. They stopped beside a freshly excavated square about three metres across where the bedrock had been completely exposed, along with the lower courses of a finely constructed masonry wall that blocked off access to the cliff face to the south-west. Hiebermeyer jumped into the trench, moved aside a measuring rod and squatted by the wall, pointing at the worked stone. ‘This is part of the fort complex built by our friend Senusret in the early second millennium BC. It’s the final part of the lookout he ordered constructed on either side of the cataract. There were further outposts to the south, as we saw in that papyrus dispatch, but I think a veil of mist rose above that torrent in the river and beyond was a land of darkness, a place they feared.’
‘The British in the river column must have begun to feel the same,’ Jack said. ‘This was their biggest obstacle so far, and everything ahead must have seemed almost insurmountable. They hadn’t experienced battle yet, but they’d begun to encounter the odd dervish sharpshooter.’
‘You’ll be interested to see where I found the cartridge.’ Hiebermeyer vaulted out of the trench and on to the ancient wall, and then disappeared over the other side only a few metres from the cliff edge. The other two followed and joined him in a pit about four metres across and two metres deep in the centre, eroded around the sides but clearly man-made. The edge forming a parapet beside the cliff had been excavated down to bedrock in a section about three feet wide, exposing the construction sequence. Hiebermeyer got inside and turned around so he was facing the other two, and pointed at the section. ‘Here you can clearly see the pharaonic wall, in five surviving courses. This was a blockhouse attached to the larger complex we were standing in earlier, overlooking the river. But above the masonry you can see unworked slabs of gneiss and smaller stones, as well as compacted clay that must have been brought up from the river shore. There’s clearly an amount of wind-blown fill inside the pit, but as you’ve seen, there isn’t much sand in this part of the desert and certainly not enough to explain that material on top of the wall. I have no doubt it was built up by the British in 1884.’
Jack looked around. ‘It’s a sangar,’ he murmured. ‘That’s a Pashtun word the British picked up in Afghanistan, meaning a protected built-up pit, basically a firing position or sentry post.’ He shaded his eyes and scanned the far bank of the river, where a group of Hiebermeyer’s team could be seen excavating another complex of ruins. ‘My guess is that there would also have been one of these on the other side, and that they were temporary sentry posts established above the pool while the column was camped here during December 1884.’
‘The sentry post on the other side also served as a heliograph station,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘We found smashed glass from the reflective mirror, which must have been damaged while they were putting it up or taking it down.’
Jack continued to gaze at the cliffs opposite, moving slightly so that he was looking south-west. ‘If I were a dervish sharpshooter, I’d be in the rocks over there, above the gorge,’ he said, pointing. ‘That would give me a clear line of sight to the work being carried out on the river, as well as to this sangar. The distance to here is four hundred, maybe four hundred and twenty yards, within range of a Remington.’
‘And presumably of a Martini-Henry, from this side,’ Costas said.
‘Could you do it, shoot accurately at this range?’ Hiebermeyer said, looking at Jack.
‘I’ve had a go with a Martini-Henry, 1883 vintage,’ Jack said. ‘It’s difficult as the sights take a lot of getting used to, but it could be done. I’ve shot accurately at this range before with a Lee-Enfield, no problem.’
‘I’ve seen that,’ Costas said, squinting at Hiebermeyer. ‘Four years ago, in the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan, when Jack used an old British rifle loaned to him by an Afghan warlord to take out a guy who’d been stalking us.’
Jack continued staring at the cliffs, saying nothing. Hiebermeyer leaned over a finds tray and picked up a labelled plastic bag with a small lump in it, then pointed at the other debris in the tray. ‘This material came from inside the pit, and shows that British soldiers were here for some time, several days at least. You can see the rusted lid from a tin of army-issue bully beef, and the paper wrapper from a package of Wills tobacco. Of course the conditions here are as elsewhere in the desert, and organic material survives very well.’ He handed Costas the bag. ‘Take a look at this.’
Costas peered at the lump bemusedly and then handed it to Jack, who opened up the bag and carefully rolled it out on to his hand. ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. ‘It’s a spent bullet, only partly compacted, so fired from a considerable range, conceivably from those cliffs opposite. And that’s a little bit of fabric with it. This bullet went through a clothed human body.’ He weighed it in his hand, and then peered closely at it. ‘This isn’t heavy enough for a Martini-Henry bullet, but I’d swear it’s from a Remington. The base is still intact, so we’ll be able to measure it.’
‘Already done,’ Hiebermeyer said, beaming. ‘I’ve got an electronic caliper measurement of .445 inch, just right for .43 calibre Remington. The bullet wasn’t loose in the pit but had penetrated the clay on the side of the sangar. Fortunately I was here supervising when it was revealed and I had the student stop excavating while the bullet was still in situ so that I could measure the angle of trajectory. You’re right, Jack. It had been fired from the opposite cliff and had penetrated the sangar below the maximum possible line of sight of the shooter, so was coming in on an arching trajectory. I used a laser rangefinder and got a range of four hundred and thirty-five yards to an opening on the upper ridge where a sniper could have been positioned. I then did a little research of my own with a friend in Germany who is a military re-enactor, and he told me that the drop of a bullet from a regulation Remington cartridge in dry desert conditions over that distance would be about twenty-nine inches. That allowed me to find the exact spot on the opposite cliff where the sniper sat when he took the shot that hit the British soldier.’
‘And the spot where the sniper may have died,’ Jack said.
‘How can you know that?’ Costas asked.
Jack picked up the Martini-Henry cartridge again, and turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Did you find any more of these?’
Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘That came from where you’re standing, and we swept the entire sangar with a metal detector. My friend told me that the British generally didn’t collect their cartridges after use. Any expended cartridges here would probably quickly have been trampled into the dust underfoot, and not been visible to locals who might have come scavenging this place afterwards.’
Costas looked around. ‘Yet if this was a sentry post, there’d be at least a couple of guys here at any one time, and if they were being sniped at, you’d expect them to fire a barrage of rounds at that cliff.’
Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘I think there was someone here who knew his business, and got them to hold their fire. I think he was a skilled sharpshooter himself. He would have known he had only one chance before his opponent moved. One shot, one kill.’
‘One down on each side,’ Costas said. ‘Even score, nobody wins.’
Jack looked pensively back at the cliff. ‘A single sniper up in those cliffs could have held back the British column for hours, inflicting officer casualties and battering the morale of exhausted men who must already have been questioning the worth of what they were doing. So despite the casualty here, I think that if the dervish sniper was killed, then it was one up for the British.’
Hiebermeyer replaced the fi
nds tray and stood up. ‘Except that two men were killed that day in this sangar.’
Jack stared at him. ‘How do you know?’
Hiebermeyer made his way out of the section and into the pit, and then leapt up on the wall again. ‘This is where it gets really fascinating, because what we’ve found takes us back from 1884 almost three thousand years. But before then, we’re going to meet up with Aysha and hear her take on all this. After all, it is her site.’
Jack climbed up to the rim of the sangar and stared to the south. He could hear the helicopter drumming along the course of the Nile, and he wondered how much deeper the echo would have sounded a hundred and thirty years earlier, before the Aswan dam had been constructed and the river level raised. He looked into the waters now, imagining the gorge as it had been then: the rocks with the torrent in between, the boats queuing up awaiting their turn to be hauled through the cataract, the shouts and singing of the men below, British and Canadian, west African and Egyptian and Sudanese. He turned back and looked at the sangar again, and thought about how thin the veil of dust was that lay over the detritus of the past in the desert, how quickly it reduced everything to the same level: the remains from that day in 1884 could be as old as the ancient Egyptian walls that surrounded them. Yet the absence of any overburden, of any stratigraphy, also meant that the past was immediate, and he could almost put himself back there on that fateful day, hear the screams of the soldier who had been hit and lay dying in the dust in front of him, and see the man with the rifle who had lain against the parapet and fired at the far cliff. In the blink of an eye their modern clothes could become the khaki of a hundred and thirty years earlier, and in another blink the skirts and sandals of the ancient Egyptian soldiers who had manned this outpost three thousand years before that, all of them sharing the same apprehension about what lay through the pall of dust beyond the horizon to the south.
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