his head rolled to the foot of the dais. The girl wailed and struggled with her bonds to reach him.
“The penalty for the woman taken in adultery is that she be stoned,” said the Mahdi.
The Khalifa Abdullahi rose from his cushion and went to the girl at the stake. With a strangely tender gesture he swept the hair back from her face and tied it behind her head, so that the believers could see her expression as she died. Then he paced back to the pile of stones that had been placed ready to hand. He selected one that fitted neatly into his hand and turned back to face the girl-child. “In the Name of Allah and the Divine Mahdi, may they have mercy on your soul.”
He hurled the stone with the strength and speed of a spearman, and it caught the girl in the eye. From where he sat Osman Atalan heard the rim of the socket crack. The eye popped out and hung by the vine of its nerve on her cheek, like some obscene fruit.
One after the other the khalifas the emirs and the sheikhs came forward, took up a stone from the pile and threw it. By the time Osman Atalan took his turn the front of the girl’s skull had been crushed and she was hanging lifelessly against her bonds. Osman’s stone struck her shoulder but she did not move. They left her hanging there while the Mahdi finished delivering his sermon.
“The Prophet, grace and eternal life be upon him, has said to me on many occasions that he who doubts that I am the true Mahdi is an apostate. He who opposes me is a renegade and an infidel. He who wages war against me shall perish from this life and be destroyed and obliterated in the next world. His property and his children shall become the property of Islam. My war against the Turks and the infidel is by the order of the Prophet. He has made me privy to many terrible secrets. The greatest of these is that all the countries of the Turks, the Franks and the infidels who defy me and who defy the word of Allah and his Prophet shall be subdued by the holy religion and law. They shall become as dust and fleas and small things who crawl in the darkness of night.”
When Osman Atalan returned to his tent in the palm grove beside the waters of the Nile and looked across at the fortress of the infidel, he felt exhausted in the flesh as though he had fought a mighty battle, but he was as triumphant in the spirit as though the victory had been granted to him by Allah and the Divine Mahdi. He sat on the precious carpet of silk from Samarkand and his wives brought him a gourd of sour milk. After he had drunk, his principal wife whispered to him, “There is one who awaits you, my lord.”
“Let him come to me,” Osman told her. When he came he was an old man but straight of limb with bright young eyes. “I see you, Master of the Pigeons,” Osman greeted him, ‘and may the grace of Allah be with you.”
“I see you, mighty emir, and I pray the Prophet to hold you to his heart.” He proffered the grey pigeon he held gently against his breast.
Osman took the bird from him and stroked its head. It cooed softly, and he untied the silk thread that held a tiny roll of rice paper to its scaly red leg. He smoothed it against his thigh and as he read it he began to smile and the weariness slipped from his shoulders. Carefully he reread the last line of the tiny script on the note.
“I have seen his face in the starlight. Verily, it is the Frank who escaped your wrath on the battlefield of El Obeid. The one who is known as Abadan Riji.”
“Summon my aggagiers and place the saddle on Sweet Water. We ride for the north. Mine enemy has come.” They scurried to do his bidding.
“By God’s grace we do not need to search the length and breadth of the Monassir Desert,” he told Hassan Ben Nader and al-Noor, who stood outside the tent with him while they waited for the grooms to bring their horses. “We know when and where he crossed the loop, and there is only one place to which he can be headed.”
“It is two hundred and fifty miles from where he crossed to where he aims to reach the river here opposite Khartoum,” said al-Noor.
“We know he is a tough warrior for we all saw him at El Obeid. He will travel fast,” said Hassan Ben Nader. “He will murder his camels.”
Osman nodded in agreement. He knew the type of man he was hunting. Hassan was right: this one would have no qualms about riding his camels to death. “Three days, four at most, and like a little fish he will swim into our net.” The groom brought Sweet Water to him and she whinnied when she recognized Osman. He fondled her head and gave her a dhurra cake to crunch while he checked her bridle and girth. “He will keep well away from the bank of the river until he is ready to cross.” Osman was thinking aloud with the mind of the chase. “Will he cross south of Omdurman or to the north?” he mused, as he came back to the mare’s head, and before any of his companions could speak he answered himself: “He would not cross to the north, for as soon as he entered the water the current would push him back and away from the city. He must cross to the south so that the flow of the Bahr El Abiad,” he used the Arabic name for the White Nile, ‘will carry him down to Khartoum.”
A man coughed and shuffled his feet in the dust. Osman glanced at him. Only one of his aggagiers would dare question his words. He turned to the most trusted of his men. “Speak, Noor. Let your wisdom delight us like the singing of the heavenly cherubim.”
“It comes to me that this Frank is as wily as a desert jackal. He may reason as you have just done and, knowing your mind, decide to do the opposite. He may choose to cross far to the north, then swing wide towards the mountains and cross the Bahr El Abiad rather than the Bahr El Azrak.”
Osman shook his head. “As you have said, he is no fool and he knows the lie of the land. He also knows that the danger for him will not be in the empty desert but on the rivers where our tribes are concentrated. You think he will choose to cross two rivers rather than one? No, he will cross the Bahr El Abiad to the south of the city. That is where we will wait for him.”
He swung up easily into the saddle, and his aggagiers followed his example. “We move south.”
They rode into the cool of the evening, and a long veil of red dust spread behind them. Osman Atalan was in the van, with Sweet Water striding out in a flowing canter. They had covered only a few miles when he reined in the mare, and stood in the stirrups to survey the terrain ahead. The tops of the palm trees that marked the course of the river were just visible on the left, but on the right stretched the great void of the Monassir, which after two thousand miles would give way to the infinite wastes of the Sahara.
Osman swung down from the mare’s back and squatted at her head. Immediately his aggagiers did the same. “Abadan Riji will circle out wide to the west to keep well clear of the river until he is ready to make the crossing. Then he will come out of the wilderness, and in the night try to slip through our lines. We will lay our net thus and thus.” He sketched out the lines of his pickets in the dust and they nodded their agreement and understanding as they watched. “Noor, you will take your men and ride thus and thus. You, Hassan Ben Nader, will ride thus. I shall be here in the centre.”
Penrod drove the camels at a pace that not even the hardiest men and beasts could keep up for long. They covered the ground at eight miles an hour, and kept it up for eighteen hours without rest, but it taxed even their endurance to the limit. Both men were also exhausted when he called the first halt. They rested for four hours by his pocket watch, but when they tried to rouse the camels to go on the oldest and weakest refused to come to his feet. Penrod shot him where he lay. They distributed the water that the dead beast was carrying among the other camels, then mounted up and went on at the same pace.
When they reached the end of the next eighteen-hour stage of the march Penrod calculated that they had roughly another ninety to one hundred miles to go to reach the Nile ten miles south of Khartoum. Yakub agreed with this estimate, although his calculations were based on different criteria. They had broken the back of the journey, but it had cost them dear. Thirty-six hours’ hard going, and only four hours of rest. When they tried to feed them, the camels refused to eat their meagre ration of dhurra.
Once the six camels were couched Penrod went to each waters king and lifted it to judge the remaining contents. Then he pondered over the equation of weights and distances and the condition of each beast. He decided on a deliberate gamble. He explained it to Yakub, who sighed, picked his nose and lifted the skirts of his gcdabiyya to scratch his crotch, all symptoms of doubt. But in the end he nodded lugubriously, not trusting himself to voice approval.
They selected the two strongest camels and took them out of sight of the other four weaker animals. They watered them from the skins they carried, pouring the sweet water into leather buckets. The animals’ thirst seemed unquenchable, and they sucked down bucketful after bucketful. They drank almost thirty gallons each. The change in their condition was startlingly swift. They rested them another hour, then fed them all the rations of dhurra that their companions had refused. The two chosen beasts devoured it gluttonously. Now they were strong and alert again. The resilience of these extraordinary creatures never failed to amaze Penrod.
When the four hours of rest ended they led the two camels back to where the other four lay listlessly. They forced the used-up animals to their feet. Now when they began the next stage of the journey the two pampered
