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you were starving.”
    “Just keep talking.”
    He shrugged. “Where was I?”
    “The fall of Khartoum.”
    “No,” he corrected her. “Earlier than that. There was a Sudanese warrior, a holy man known as the Mahdi—the Expected One. I think Sir Laurence Olivier played him in the movie. Typical Hollywood, eh? Anyway, we sent an army against him, and he led them deeper and deeper into the desert and eventually destroyed them, down to the very last man. It was one of the worst defeats in our history.”
    “I know. That’s when the government decided to send Gordon back to the Sudan.”
    “Well, yes and no. We were putting down uprisings in South Africa and all over the world, and the government didn’t want yet another war. But they couldn’t just wash their hands of it, not with an entire army dead in the desert and the public demanding action. So they hit upon sending their greatest hero—Gordon, of course—to the Sudan. But because they didn’t want a war, they sent him with just a couple officers and nothing else: no army, no money, no artillery. He was to go there, putter around for a while, and come home, and then the government could mollify the people by saying, in essence, ‘Well, if Gordon couldn’t solve the situation, then it obviously can’t be solved.’ “
    She nodded. “But it didn’t work out that way.”
    Mason smiled. “Gordon disobeyed his orders, as always. Even though the Mahdi commanded an army of more than a million men, Gordon put together a battalion of ragtag desert warriors, paid them out of his own personal fortune, and actually defeated the Mahdi at Omdurman.”
    “I know about the fall of Khartoum—every British student learns about it,” said Lara. “But I never heard of Omdurman.”
    “Most people haven’t,” replied Mason. “Omdurman is just across the Nile from Khartoum. Outnumbered twenty to one, Gordon managed to wrest a victory from the jaws of almost certain defeat. Military scholars think it was a brilliant job of soldiering.” He paused for a long moment. “The truth was much stranger.”
    “In what way?”
    “The Mahdi was not the simple illiterate most people think. He left many writings behind. Most have been lost or destroyed, but a few scraps still exist. According to them—and mind you, this was written in his own hand—he received his charismatic power, the ability he had to draw huge numbers of fanatical followers to his cause, even his supposed invulnerability in battle, from a mystic charm that he wore around his neck.”
    “The Amulet of Mareish?” asked Lara.
    “Right,” said Mason. “One day he was just an obscure peasant. Then he somehow stumbled onto Mareish’s tomb and appropriated the Amulet—he may not even have known what it was at the time. But two years later he controlled half of North Africa, with millions of men from Morocco to Abyssinia believing that he was truly the Expected One. His men swore that as long as he wore the Amulet, swords broke when they hit him and bullets bounced off him, just like a comic-book superhero.”
    “It’s still a fairy tale,” said Lara.
    “Why do you think so?”
    “You just told me Gordon beat him at Omdurman, and I know that Gordon held him off for almost half a year during the Siege of Khartoum. How could he do either of those things if the Amulet was as powerful as you say?”
    “Because Gordon or one of his lieutenants found out about the powers inherent in the Amulet and stole it just before the battle of Omdurman!” said Mason with an air of triumph.
    “I’m not buying it,” responded Lara. “Why would a modern, educated, sophisticated Englishman believe in the Amulet of Mareish?”
    “The answer is that Gordon was as much of a religious fanatic as the Mahdi.”
    “They were different religions,” noted Lara.
    “True,” he agreed. “But they had the same devout belief in the supernatural.”
    She stared at him thoughtfully. “Go on,” she said after a