Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)
“It had been hot outside, uncomfortably so in the late afternoon sun, but here it was like walking into the overheated parlour of a London gentlemen’s club, or one of the native sweat lodges that Charrière had shown him in Canada when they were boys. He envied Charrière remaining outside, sitting with the sentries in the shade of a palm tree close to the Nile. The British had not yet learned the Arab way of keeping a tent cool in the desert sun, and the heavy canvas was more suited to a Crimean winter than the furnace of the Sudan. To Mayne it was symptomatic of the campaign as a whole: the British had half adapted, wearing desert-coloured khaki instead of scarlet uniforms, riding camels instead of horses, some of them even ditching their pith helmets for Arab headdress, yet the tactics were those of earlier campaigns. Mayne knew that there were those in this tent now who had the originality of thought to break free, to adapt to the desert; yet with time running short and Wolseley in t...ight control, there seemed little chance of altering a course of action that had been fatally flawed from the start.MoreLess
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