David Gibbins - Pharaoh

I am most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Sherise Hobbs in London and Tracy Devine in New York; to my previous editors, Martin Fletcher and Caitlin Alexander; to Jane Selley for her excellent copyediting of this and my earlier novels; to Lucy Foley for her work in getting this book into production; to the rest of the team at Headline, including Katie Day, Darragh Deering, Marion Donaldson, Frances Doyle, Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, Barbara Roman and Ben Willis, and to the Hachette representatives internationally; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates, and to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; and to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates.

I am grateful to my mother Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my work, to my brother Alan for diving with me and for his photography and video work for my website www.davidgibbins.com, and to Angie Hobbs for her support. Much of the inspiration for this novel came during periods of travel and exploration funded in part by grants from the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. For unpublished material and help during research, I am grateful to the staff of the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Oriental Collections of the British Library, the National Army Museum and the Royal Engineers Museum and Library at Chatham in Kent; I am also grateful to John Denner, Fred Van Sickle and Paul Clare for assisting in my experimental archaeology with Martini-Henry and Remington rifles of 18845 vintage; and to Peter Nield of Warwick School for his help with books onthe Sudan of the 19th century.

This novel is dedicated to my daughter Molly, with much love.

Buller, Major-General Sir Redvers Brigade commander in the Gordon Relief Expedition, a veteran of many campaigns who won the Victoria Cross in the 1879 Zulu War in South Africa

Burnaby, Colonel Frederick Cavalry officer and adventurer killed at the Battle of Abu Klea in January 1885

Chaill-Long, Charles American Civil War veteran and adventurer who was commissioned into the Egyptian Army in the 1870s and served under Gordon in the Sudan

Earle, Major-General William Commander of the River Column in the Gordon Relief Expedition, killed at the Battle of Kirkeban in February 1885

Gladstone, William Ewert British Prime Minister at the time of the Gordon Relief Expedition

Gordon, Major-General Charles, Royal Engineers Governor-General of the Sudan, popularly known as Chinese Gordon for his exploits in putting down the Taiping Rebellion in 18604

Kitchener, Major Herbert, Royal Engineers Intelligence officer with the Gordon Relief expedition who became Sirdar of the Egyptian army, Commander-in-Chief in India and in 1914 British Secretary of State for War

Mahdi, the Muhammad Ahmad, a former boatbuilder and Sufi who became leader of the Islamist forces in the Sudan in the early 1880s, dying of illness or poison in June 1885

Riel, Louis Rebel Mtis (mixed French/Indian) leader in western Canada who was the object of Wolseleys Red River expedition in 1870, and was eventually caught and hanged in November 1885

Schliemann, Heinrich German-born archaeologist who rediscovered Troy and Mycenae, and also explored in Egypt and the Sudan

Stewart, Major-General Sir Herbert Commander of the Desert Column in the Gordon Relief Expedition, mortally wounded at the Battle of Abu Kru in January 1885

Stewart, Lieutenant-Colonel John Gordons deputy in Khartoum who was murdered while accompanying the steamer Abbas downriver in September 1884

Von Slatin, Rudolf Carl Austrian-born provincial governor in Sudan under Gordon who converted to Islam, spent eleven years as a captive of the Mahdists and was later Inspector-General of the Sudan, knighted and made an honorary Major-General by the British

Wilson, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Charles, Royal Engineers Founder of the Intelligence Department in the War Office who was intelligence chief in the Gordon Relief Expedition and commanded the Desert Column after Major-General Stewarts death

Wolseley, General Sir Garnet Commander of the Gordon Relief Expedition, a veteran of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Red River expedition in Canada, the Ashanti War and the Zulu War, and head of the so-called Ashanti Ring of officers he kept with him through successive campaigns

The man carrying the staff of a high priest and the ankh symbol of a pharaoh stood at the entrance to the temple, watching the shaft of light from the setting sun rise up the body of the statue that loomed out of the far wall. Ahead in the gloom the others stood aside to let him pass forward, sprinkling incense and mouthing incantations as they did so. They were all present, the priests of this cult and also the priests of the god Amun from Thebes: those who had grown fat on the wealth that was rightfully his, and had doubted his allegiance to the gods. They had come here, a thousand miles to the south of the pyramids, to the edge of the known world, believing that he had chosen this place to prostrate himself before them, to recant his heresy and purify himself before the gods, to arise once again with the trappings of priesthood that had weighed down his father and generations of pharaohs before that. He passed them now, men with shaven heads and pious expressions who wore the gold-hemmed robes and upturned sandals that showed wealth, and he felt nothing but contempt. Soon they would know the truth.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he began to make out stacks of mummies in the recesses behind the statue, mummies with faces that seemed to snarl out at him from where they had been left as offerings by the priests who had officiated here since the temple was first hacked out of the rock thirty generations before, at the time of the pharaoh Amenenat and his sons. Then, Egyptian armies had fought their way far into the Nubian desert, hoping to extend the kingdom of the pharaohs over the source of the Nile at the vast lake beyond the horizon, to gain control of the very source of life. But they had been repelled by an enemy so terrifying that they had never again come beyond this point on the Nile, instead building this temple to appease the one who ruled over the river, into whose dark realm they had transgressed; never again would an Egyptian army pass through the veil of dust to the south into the land where the warriors held sway. They had depicted them on the very wall of this temple, a battle scene in which naked men with spears were shown hacking Egyptian soldiers to death; the pharaoh had turned back and left the bodies to the vultures and the scavengers of the deep, the ones they had found lurking in the pool at this place that seemed so like their image of the primeval fount of darkness.