The dancing blade held Kahruba in a cage of light. Then, abruptly, it stopped, pointing at her right eye from the distance of an inch. The point advanced slowly, until it touched her lower lashes. The child blinked but did not pull away.
“Enough!” said Osman, and stepped back. He threw the sword to al-Noor, who snatched it out of the air. Then Osman stooped and picked up his daughter. He held her close to his chest, and looked around at their taut expressions. “In this one, at least, my blood has bred true,” he told them. Then he tossed her high in the air, caught her as she fell back and carried her to Rebecca. “Breed me another like this one,” he ordered, ‘but, wife, this time make certain it is a boy.”
Later that evening Rebecca lay sprawled on his angareb. She still felt devastated by the events of the day and by the controlled fury of his lovemaking, which had ended only minutes before. She had watched her daughter come close to death under the dancing silver blade, while she herself seemed to have come even closer.
She was stark naked, a vessel overflowing with his fresh seed, aching pleasurably where he had been deep inside her. The lovemaking had rendered her ha from unclean in the eyes of God. She should cover herself, or go immediately to bathe and cleanse her body, but she felt languorous and wanton. She opened her eyes and found that he had come back from the bedroom window and was standing over her. He was still half erect, his glans glistening with the juices of her body. As she studied him she felt herself becoming aroused once more. She knew, with sure feminine instinct, that he had just impregnated her again, and that she would be forced to many months of abstinence until she was delivered of the infant. She wanted him, but saw that now his seed was spent his restless mind had moved on to other concerns.
“There is aught that troubles you, my husband.” She sat up and covered herself with the light bed cloth
“We spoke once of the steamer that runs on land, that travels on ribbons of steel,” he said.
“I recall that, my lord, but it was many years ago.”
“I wish to discuss this machine again. What was the name you gave it?”
“Railway engine,” she enunciated slowly and clearly.
He imitated her, but he lisped and garbled the sounds. He saw in her eyes that he had not succeeded. “It is too difficult, this language of yours.” He shook his head angrily, hating to fail in anything he attempted. “I shall call it the land steamer.”
“I shall understand what you mean. It is a better name than mine, more powerful and descriptive.” At times he was like a small boy and must be jollied along.
“How many men can travel upon this machine. Ten? Twenty? Surely not fifty?” he asked hopefully.
“If the land over which it passes is levelled it can carry many hundreds of men, perhaps as many as a thousand, perhaps many thousands.”
Osman looked alarmed. “How far can this thing travel?”
“To the end of its lines.”
“But surely it cannot cross a great river like the Atbara? It must stop there.”
“It can, my lord.”
“I do not believe it. The Atbara is deep and wide. How is that possible?”
“They have men they call engineers who have the skills to build a bridge over it.”
“The Atbara? They cannot build over a river so wide.” He was trying desperately to convince himself. “Where will they find tree trunks long and strong enough to span the Atbara?”
“They will make the bridge of steel, like the rails it runs upon. Like the blade of your sword,” Rebecca explained. “But why do you ask these questions, my husband?”
“My spies in the north have sent a message that these God-cursed Englishmen have begun to lay these steel ribbons from Wadi Haifa south across the great bight of the river, towards Metemma and the Atbara.” Then, suddenly, his temper flared. “They are devils, these infidel tribesmen of yours,” he shouted.
“They are no longer my tribesmen, exalted husband. Now I am of your tribe and no other.”
His anger subsided as suddenly as it had arisen.
“I am leaving at dawn tomorrow to go to the north and see this monstrosity with my own eyes,” he told her.
She dropped her eyes sadly: she would be alone again. Without him she was incomplete.
The year 1895 dawned and events were put in train that would change the history and face of Africa. British South Africa’s conquests were consolidated under the new nation of Rhodesia, and almost immediately the predatory men who had brought it into existence attacked the Boer nation of the Transvaal, their neighbours to the south. It was a puny invasion under Dr. Starr Jamieson that was immediately dubbed the Jamieson Raid. They had been promised support by their countrymen on the Witwatersrand gold fields which never materialized, and the tiny band of aggressors capitulated to the Boers without firing a shot. However, the raid presaged the conflict between Boer and Briton that, only a few years later, would cost hundreds of thousands of lives, before the Transvaal and its fabulously rich gold fields came under the sway of Empire.
In England the Liberal Party of Gladstone and Lord Rosebery was ousted by a Conservative and Unionist administration under the Marquess of Salisbury. In opposition they had always been vociferously opposed to Gladstone’s Egyptian policies. Now they had a massive majority in the House of Commons, and were in a position to change the direction of affairs in that crucial corner of the African continent.
The nation still smarted from the humiliation of Khartoum and the murder of General Gordon. Books such as Slaves of the Mahdi had set the mood for exonerating Gordon of shame. In the new Egypt, which was now virtually a colony of Great Britain, the tool was at hand in the shape of the new Egyptian army, reorganized, trained and equipped as no army in Africa before. The man to lead it was already at its helm in the person of Horatio Herbert Kitchener. Great Britain contemplated the prospect of repossessing the Sudan with increasing pleasure and enthusiasm.
By the beginning of 1896 Britain was ready to act. It needed only a spark to set off the conflagration. On 2 March, at the battle of Adowa, the Abyssinians inflicted a crushing defeat on Italy. Another European power had been thrashed by an African kingdom. This sent a clarion call to all colonial possessions. Almost immediately the gloomy forebodings of rebellion were fulfilled. The Dervish Khalifat Abdullahi threatened Kassala and raided Wadi Haifa. Reports reached Cairo of the gathering of a great Dervish army in Omdurman. Added to this, the French made covert hostile moves towards British possessions in Africa, especially in southern Sudan.
Thus a number of concurrent events had cast Great Britain in the role of far-seeing saviour of the world from anarchy, the avenger of Khartoum and Gordon, the protector of the Egyptian state. The honour and pride of the Empire must be preserved.
The order went out from London to General Kitchener. He was to recapture the Sudan. He was to do it swiftly and, above all, cheaply. The attempts to rescue Gordon and destroy the Mahdi had cost Britain thirteen million pounds: defeat is always more costly than victory. Kitchener was allowed a little over one million pounds to succeed in the job that, thirteen years before, had been botched.
Kitchener summoned his senior officers and told them the momentous news. They were ecstatic. This was the culmination of years of gruelling training and desert skirmishes, and the laurels were at last within their reach. “There will be more sweat and blisters than glory,” the sirdar cautioned them. Never one to seek popularity, he preferred to be feared rather than liked. “From the twenty-second to the sixteenth parallel of north latitude we are faced with waterless desert. We will go to capture the Nile, but we cannot use that river as a means of access. The cataracts stand in our way. The only route open to us is the railway we will build to carry us overland into battle. We can use the river only in the final stage of our advance.” He regarded them with his cold misanthropic stare. “There are no mountains to cross, the desert is level and good going. It will not be a matter so much of engineering technique as of hard work. We will not rely on private contractors. Our own engineers will do the job.”
“What about the Atbara river, sir? At its confluence with the Nile it is almost a thousand yards wide,” said Colonel Sam Adams.
“I have already called for tenders to supply the components for a bridge to be manufactured in sections that can be taken up on the railway trucks. Another call for tenders will soon be going out for the supply of steel-hulled river gunboats. They will be sent up by rail to the clear water above the fifth cataract. There, they will be reassembled and launched.”
The Egyptian officer corps was immediately plunged into a hurly-burly of planning and action.
There was only one respect in which the times and circumstances were not propitious. The delta of Egypt had been the bread basket of the Mediterranean since the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ. For the first time
