Penrod stood on the parapet of the forward redoubt on the riverbank opposite Tutti Island. He stamped on the sandbags to test their solidity. As the stores of dhurra were used up he had the empty sacks filled and worked into weak points in the fortifications. “That will do!” he told the Egyptian sergeant in charge of the work detail. “Now we need a few more timber baulks in the embrasures of the gun pits.” Under General Gordon’s orders, he was stripping the abandoned buildings, and using their timbers to strengthen the fortifications.
He strode along the top of the sandbagged wall, pausing every fifty or hundred paces to survey the riverbank below. He had placed marker pegs in the strip of muddy earth between the foot of the wall and the edge of the water. A month ago the Nile had lapped the wall three feet from the top. Two weeks ago a few inches of mud had appeared at the foot of the wall. Now the strip of bank was six feet wide. Each day the river was falling. Within the next few months it would enter the stage of Low Nile. This was what the Dervish were waiting for. The wide banks would dry out to give a safe mooring for the dhows ferrying their legions across the river, and a firm footing from which to launch a final assault on the city.
Penrod jumped down on to the mud flat and moved his pegs out to the edge of the receding river. In places there were now fifteen or twenty feet of exposed bank. They will need a lot more ground from which to launch a full’ scale attack, he decided, but the river is falling rapidly. The Mahdi had shrewd and experienced warlords commanding his army, men like Osman Atalan. Soon they would start probing the de fences with midnight raids and sorties. Where will they strike us first? he wondered. He walked on along the perimeter, looking for the weak spots. By the time he reached Mukran Fort he had picked out at least two points where he could expect the first raids to strike.
He found General Gordon at one of his favourite lookouts on the parapet of the fort. He was seated under a thatched sunshade at a camp table on which were laid out his binoculars, notebooks and maps. “Sit down, Ballantyne,” he said. “You must be thirsty.” He indicated the earthenware water jug on the table.
“Thank you, sir.” Penrod filled a glass.
“You may rest assured that it has been boiled the full half-hour.” It was a barbed jest. Under threat of flogging, Gordon had ordered all the garrison water to be boiled to those specifications. He had learnt the necessity of this during his campaigns in China. The results were remarkable. Although at first Penrod had believed this was another whim of Gordon’s he had since become a fervent believer. Cholera was raging among the civilian populace of the city, who openly flouted Gordon’s decrees and filled their waterskins from the river and the canal, into which discharged the city sewers. By contrast the garrison troops had suffered only three cases, and all of those had been traced to disobedience and the use of unboiled water. All three victims had died. “Damned lucky for them,” Penrod had remarked to David Benbrook. “If they had lived Gordon would have had them shot.”
“The death of the dog, they call it. Reeking torrents of your own hot excrement and vomit, every muscle and sinew of your body knotted in agonizing cramps, a desiccated skeleton for a body and a head like a skull!” David shuddered. “Not for me, thank you very much. I’ll take my water boiled.”
Penrod felt his skin crawl as he recalled that description: it was so accurate. Yet thirst could kill as swiftly as the cholera. The heat and the desert air sucked the moisture from his body so his throat was parched. He raised the mug, savoured the smell of woodsmoke, which proved it was safe, then drained it in four long swallows.
“Well, now, Ballantyne, what about the north bank?” Gordon never wasted time in pleasantries.
“I have marked a number of weak spots in the line.” Penrod spread his field map on the table and pinned down a corner with the water jug. They pored over it together. “Here and here are the worst. The river level is dropping sharply it’s down another three inches since noon yesterday. Each day exposes us more. We will have to strengthen those places.”
“Heaven knows, we are hard pressed for men and material to keep pace with the work.” Gordon looked up shrewdly at Penrod. “Yes? You have something to suggest?”
“Well, sir, as you say, we cannot hope to maintain the entire line impregnable …” Gordon frowned. He could not abide those he referred to as ‘dismal Johnnies’. Penrod hurried on before he could level the accusation. ‘… so it occurred to me that we should deliberately leave some gaps in our outer de fences to entice the Dervish to attack them.”
“Ah!” Gordon’s frown lifted. “Poisoned gifts!”
“Exactly, sir. We leave an opening, then behind it we set a trap. We run them into one of the blind alleys, and cover it with enfilading fire from the Gatlings.”
Thoughtfully, Gordon rubbed the silver stubble on his chin. They had only two Gatling guns, the rejects of Hicks’s expedition. He had declined to take them with him on the march to El Obeid as he had considered them too cumbersome. Each weapon was mounted on its own heavy gun-carriage, a sturdy axle and two iron-shod wheels. It needed a span of at least four oxen to drag it into action. The mechanisms were fragile and prone to stoppages. Hicks had believed in traditional volley fire from squares of infantry, rather than sustained fire from a single exposed position. He conceded that the Gatlings might be useful in a static defensive position, but he was convinced that there was no place for them in a flying offensive column. He had left the two guns and a hundred thousand rounds of the special .58 bore ammunition in the arsenal at Khartoum when he marched away to annihilation at El Obeid.
Penrod had found them stored in a dark recess of the arsenal, where he had collected a pistol to replace the one Yakub had lost, under dusty tarpaulins. He was familiar with the Gatling. He had selected two teams of the most likely Egyptian troopers under his command, and within a week had taught them to serve the weapons. Even though it was a complicated firing mechanism, they had learnt swiftly. The copper-cased rimfire .58 bore cartridges were fed by gravity from a hopper on top of the weapon. The gunner turned a hand crank, and the six heavy brass barrels rotated around a central shaft. As each bullet dropped from the hopper it was seized by one of the six cam- operated bolts, locked into the breech, fired and ejected by gravity. The rate of fire depended on the vigour with which the gunner turned the crank handle. It required strength and stamina to keep up a sustained fire for longer than a few minutes, but in practice Penrod timed one gun at nearly three hundred rounds in a half a minute. Of course, as soon as it heated it jammed. There was no machine-gun he knew of that did not.
In one respect Hicks had been correct, the Gatling guns were not very mobile. Penrod had realized that, in the event of a surprise night attack, it would not be possible to move them swiftly from one position to another on the ten-kilo metre perimeter of the city’s defence works.
Penrod summarized his plan: “Suck them through the pretended weak spots on to the Gatlings and cut them up, sir.”
“First rate!” Gordon beamed. “Show me again where you propose to set your traps.”
“Well, sir, I thought that here below the harbour would be the most obvious point.” Gordon nodded approval. “The other spot would be here, opposite the hospital.” Penrod prodded the map with his forefinger. “Behind both those positions there is a maze of narrow streets. I will block them with piles of rubble and timber baulks, then site the Gatlings behind strong brickworks…” They discussed the plan over the next hour.
“Very well, Ballantyne. Carry on.” At last Gordon dismissed him.
Penrod saluted and headed for the ramp that led away from the parapet of the fort. Half-way down he paused to peer into the north. Only eyes as sharp as his could have picked out the tiny dark speck in the cloudless steel blue sky. At first he thought it was one of the Saker falcons coming in over the wastes of the Monassir desert from the north. He had noticed that a pair of the splendid birds were nesting under the eaves of the arsenal roof. He watched the tiny shape approaching, then shook his head. “Not the typical falcon wing beat The distant shape grew in size and he exclaimed, “Pigeon!”
He was reminded sharply of his last ride down from the north when he and Yakub had cut the loop of the river. He watched the pigeon’s approach with keen interest. As it approached the river, it began a wide circle high in the steely sky with the city of Omdurman as its centre.
“Pigeon returning to loft.” He recognized the manoeuvre. A pigeon nearly always began a long flight with a number of circles to orient itself, and ended in the same way before it descended to its home. This bird swung wide over the river, then passed almost directly overhead where Penrod stood.
“It’s another bloody Dervish carrier!” He had seen the tiny roll of rice paper tied to its leg. He pulled his watch from his hip pocket and checked the time. “Seventeen minutes past four.” He had bought the watch from Consul Le Blanc at an exorbitant price to replace the one that had been doused on his last crossing of the river.
He watched the pigeon come round in another sweeping circle that carried it over the grounds of the consular palace, then begin a long, slanting descent across the broad waters of the Nile. The last glimpse he had of it was as
