they were ready to leave the Nile, the skins filled tight and the camels’ bellies swollen with water. Before they set out they tried to obliterate their tracks from the riverbank, but with that number of heavily laden animals and working in darkness it was impossible. They had to take a chance that the wind and the river waters would wipe away their tracks before they were discovered by Dervish scouts.
However, a dark premonition of evil rode on Penrod’s shoulders as they headed out into the Monassir desert. After a few hours’ travel the feeling grew so pervasive that he knew he must sweep the back trail to reassure himself that their crossing had not been discovered. He picked out the fleetest, most willing animal from their string by now they knew each beast well by temperament and capability. He sent Yakub ahead with the others while he returned along their back trail. When he was still some miles from the river, he left the trail and headed for a line of low hills he had noticed earlier that overlooked the river. He couched and tethered his mount below the skyline, then crept forward. As he neared the crest of the hill he dropped to his belly, slithered up behind an outcrop of rocks and peered down into the valley of the Nile. His heart jumped against his ribs, and his nerves whipped tight at what he saw below him.
A small party of Dervish scouts was dismounted on the near bank of the Nile, and it was obvious that they had discovered the spoor as it emerged from the water. Through the field-glasses he studied the enemy intently. There were six of them. He thought that one might be the man he had chased from Marbad Tegga, but he could not be certain. They were all lean, hard desert Arabs, probably of the Beja tribe. They wore the gaily patched jib has of the Mahdists, and carried the distinctive round targes and long-sheathed swords. They were leaning on the shafts of their spears and animatedly discussing the tracks on the bank. One turned and pointed south along the run of the spoor, and they all looked in the direction he had indicated. They seemed to be gazing directly towards the spot where Penrod lay.
He ducked behind the rocks while he assessed his situation. It seemed obvious that the man he had chased from Marbad Tegga, even if that was not him down there, had reached the river ahead of them. He must have spread the warning to the forward elements of the main Dervish army coming down from the north. Perhaps one of the commanding emirs had sent this scouting party ahead to reconnoitre the river crossings and intercept them. Penrod could tell at a glance that these were aggagiers, the finest Dervish warriors. He and Yakub were outnumbered by three to one, and the Dervish were on the alert. He put out of his mind any notion of a fight. Their only salvation lay in flight.
Now he switched his attention from the men to their mounts. Each rode a handsome horse. They had only one pack camel to carry the leather bags of small gear, food and ammunition, but there were no waterskins. Obviously they were a swift scouting party, but because they carried no water they were confined to the narrow strip of ground a few miles each side of the river. They were not equipped for a deep foray into the Monassir. To intercept Penrod’s caravan they would have to ride hard round the great loop of the river and try to get ahead of them on the riverbank opposite Khartoum. That journey was almost two hundred miles longer than the one that faced him and Yakub. He felt a great wave of relief as he realized that even the swiftest horses would not be able to cut them off before they reached their goal.
“I leave you to the mercy of Allah,” he murmured, in sardonic blessing, then wriggled back from the skyline to return to his mount and catch up with Yakub. Then an unexpected stir among the men below made him pause. Quickly he refocused the field-glasses. Two of the aggagiers had run back to the single pack camel and forced it to kneel. They unstrapped some equipment from the animal’s back. One of the Arabs squatted cross-legged with what appeared to be a writing tablet on his lap. He wrote with great concentration and care.
The other man took down a small crate from the camel’s load and removed the cotton cover that protected it. He opened a trapdoor in the lid and reached inside with both hands. Penrod quailed as he saw a small birdlike head bobbing and weaving between the man’s fingers. The writer laid aside his pen, carefully folded his message and stood up. The other man proffered the creature he held, and they were busy for a moment longer.
Then the scribe stood back and nodded. With both hands the other tossed the sleek grey pigeon high into the air. The bird exploded into flight, its wings clattering softly as it rose higher and higher above the river. All the Arabs watched it, heads thrown back. Their faint cries of encouragement reached Penrod even at that distance.
“Fly, little one, on the wings of God’s angels!”
“Swiftly to the bosom of the Holy Mahdi!”
Up and up the pigeon climbed, and then it described a series of wide circles in the sky, a speck against the blue, until at last it found its bearings and shot away in a straight, swift line, headed into the south across the loop towards the Dervish city of Omdurman.
Penrod watched it out of sight, longing to see the knife-winged silhouette of one of the desert Saker falcons towering above it, then beginning the deadly stoop, but no predator appeared and the pigeon vanished.
Penrod ran down the back slope of the hill and sprang into his camel’s saddle. He turned its head in the same southerly direction as the pigeon had taken and urged it into the pacing gait that it could maintain for fifty miles without rest. But the pigeon would reach Omdurman before nightfall, while he and Yakub still had at least two hundred and fifty miles to ride. He knew now what a terrible gauntlet they had yet to run before he could reach Khartoum and deliver his despatch to Chinese Gordon.
Osman Atalan marched in the horde of worshippers towards the great mosque of Omdurman. Over his head floated his personal banner, which had been awarded to him by the Mahdi. It was worked with texts from the Koran, and it was carried by two of his aggagiers. All around him throbbed the massive copper war drums. The ombeyas bleated and brayed, and the crowds shouted praises to God, to the Mahdi and his khalifa. The heat clamped down upon the moving mass of humanity and the dust rose in a cloud from the trampling feet and hung over their heads. As they approached the outer wall of the mosque the excitement built up steadily for they knew that today the Mahdi, the light of Islam, would preach the word of God and his Prophet. The Ansar began to dance. Once they had been called Dervish, but the Mahdi had forbidden the use of that name as demeaning.
“The Holy Prophet has spoken to me several times and he has said that whosoever calls my followers Dervish should be beaten seven times with thorns and receive a plague of stripes. For did I not give a proud name and a promise of Paradise to my own true warriors who triumphed on the battlefield of El Obeid? Did I not decree that they be known as my Ansar, my helpers and partisans? Let them be known only as Ansar, and let them glory in that name.”
The Ansar danced in the sunlight, whirling like dust devils, faster and faster, spinning so that their feet seemed barely to touch the earth, and the ranks of worshippers that pressed around them ululated and shouted the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah: “Al-Hakim, the Wise. Al-Majid, the Glorious. Al-Haqq, the Truth…” One by one the dancers were overtaken by holy ecstasy and fell to the ground, frothing at the mouth and twitching until their eyes rolled back in the sockets and only the whites showed.
Osman entered the gates of the mosque. It was a vast enclosure open to the sky, and surrounded by a twenty-foot-high wall of mud bricks. It was eight hundred paces square and the whole expanse was packed with the kneeling ranks of jibba-uniformed faithful. At the far end of the mosque an opening was screened off by a rank of black-robed Ansar, the Mahdi’s executioners.
Osman made his way slowly through the crowds towards this space. The ranks of kneeling figures gave way to him and called his praises as he passed, for he was the foremost of all the great emirs. In the first row of worshippers his aggagiers spread out his prayer mat of fine dyed wool. Beside it they piled the six great tusks that they had taken in the hunt in the Valley of the Atbara. Osman knelt on the mat and faced the narrow gate in the wall, which led to the private compound of the Mahdi.
Gradually the wild hubbub of the worshippers descended to a hum, and then to a charged, expectant silence. This was shattered by a ringing blast on an ombeya and through the gateway appeared a small procession. At the head were the three khalifas. In appointing these men as his successors the Mahdi had simply followed the precedent set by the first Prophet Muhammad.
There should have been a fourth khalifa, Al Senussi, the ruler of Cyrenaica. He had sent an emissary to the Sudan to report to him on this person who claimed to be the Mahdi. The man had arrived while the sack of the city of El Obeid was in full swing. He had watched in horror the massacre, the pillage, the torture, the children being chopped into pieces by the Ansar. He did not tarry to meet the Mahdi and fled from the carnage to report back to his master the inhumanities he had witnessed.
“This monster cannot be the true Mahdi,” Al Senussi decided. “I want no truck with him.”
Thus there were only three khalifas, of whom Abdullahi was the first. Compared to him the other two were of no significance. Abdullahi led them to the prayer mats that had been laid out for them on the raised dais. When they
