In 1884 Simon Fonthill is summoned to Cairo for a mission that may be impossible: penetrate the tightening Mahdist blockade of Khartoum and make contact with General Charles George Gordon. With Jenkins beside him, Fonthill must cross a landscape in revolt while Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, gathers forces around the isolated city. The race becomes more desperate as supplies diminish and the British relief expedition struggles to reach Gordon before Khartoum falls.
The siege of Khartoum was the defining crisis of the early Mahdist War. Gordon had been sent to oversee the evacuation of Egyptian garrisons from Sudan but chose to defend the capital, while the British government delayed before dispatching Garnet Wolseley’s Nile Expedition. Khartoum fell in January 1885 shortly before the relief column arrived, and Gordon was killed. Wilcox places Fonthill inside that famous failed rescue, linking individual survival to the larger collapse of Egyptian and British authority in Sudan.
