The Dark Defile (6 page)

By early June they were out of the towering defiles of the mountains and entering the plains sloping northward to the Oxus River. Ahead lay the lands of Murad Beg, ferocious Uzbek ruler of Kunduz, of which it was said, “If you wish to die, go to Kunduz.” Burnes hoped to move swiftly onward without attracting attention. He and his party never changed their clothes, ignoring the lice, used their sleeves as towels and their nails as combs, ate hard bread and slept on dung-covered floors, but Burnes thought these just petty inconveniences “when compared with the pleasure of seeing new men and countries, strange manners and customs, and being able to temper the prejudices of one’s country, by observing those of other nations.” One of those customs, though, was the sale of sad, dejected slaves in the bazaars. Mohan Lal watched a prospective purchaser take a girl behind a wall to examine her body: “when her veil was lifted up by the seller and gradually her cap and sheet, the woman, turning her face towards the sky, began to rend the air by her screams.”

However, through the officiousness of the Afghan that Nawab Jubbar Khan had sent with the party, Murad Beg learned of their presence and summoned Burnes to Kunduz, seventy miles away. Leaving Dr. Gerard and Mohan Lal behind, Burnes set out, uncomfortably aware that some years earlier another expedition led by an East India Company veterinary surgeon called William Moorcroft, the first Englishman to reach Bokhara, had been imprisoned by Murad Beg. Reaching Kunduz, Burnes put on a pair of high felt boots to conceal his “provokingly white ankles” and with some trepidation waited on the Uzbek chief, an ugly man “with harsh Tartar features.” However, Murad Beg believed Burnes’s story that he was just a poor Armenian traveler, and he returned with relief to his companions.

They traveled onward to Balkh—the ancient Bactria, homeland of Alexander’s wife, Roxane—where an Uzbek customs official tried unsuccessfully to seduce Mohan Lal, sending him lovelorn Persian verses. By then they had exchanged their horses for camels, on which they were carried in woven panniers four feet long and three feet wide, banging against the camels’ bony ribs. As they traveled over the arid desert toward the Oxus River, sand whipped their faces and their parched lips burned. After being towed in a boat by swimming horses over the Oxus, they found themselves among nomadic Turkoman tribesmen, whose chief livelihood was plundering caravans and who purchased their wives; the price of a girl was five camels, while a woman could cost up to a hundred since experience counted for more than beauty.

Fearing that after their arduous journey they might be denied entry into Bokhara, Burnes dispatched a letter to the principal minister requesting the protection of the emir, whom he hailed as the “Commander of the Faithful.” It was granted, and on 27 June, they passed through the city gates. Exchanging their turbans for Bokharan sheepskin caps to avoid attracting attention, they stayed in the city nearly a month. The slave markets, where on Saturday mornings human flesh was trafficked, shocked them. They also witnessed how justice was dispensed when they came across Muslims being flogged for sleeping after sunrise and missing their morning prayers or for smoking. Anyone caught flying pigeons on a Friday was paraded on a camel with one of their birds dead around their neck.

Yet they also found much to enjoy in this city intersected by canals, shaded by mulberry trees, bringing water from the Zerafshan River.
¹⁰
They lodged in a small house, one attraction of which was that “it presented an opportunity of seeing a Turkoman beauty, a handsome young lady, who promenaded one of the surrounding balconies.” Burnes went to the hamman to be “laid out at full length, rubbed with a hair brush, scrubbed, buffeted and kicked,” which was “very refreshing.” In Bokhara’s thriving bazaars they examined silks, spices, silver and tea, and Burnes discovered English chintz for sale, on which, so the merchants told him, they could make a 50 percent profit. They ate grape jelly with crushed ice and strolled in the Registan—the great square in front of the emir’s palace—where a stranger only had to seat himself on a bench to “converse with the natives of Persia, Turkey, Russia, Tartary, China, India and Kabul.”

Burnes was disappointed to be refused an audience with Bokhara’s ruler, Emir Nasrullah, but observed him leaving the mosque, noting his pale gaunt face and small eyes. He was in fact a man of vicious habits already on the path to insanity, who had those who displeased him thrown into the
zidane
—a pit which he kept well stocked with flesh-biting insects, reptiles and rotting filth.

Burnes left Bokhara in July 1832 convinced that, provided secure trade routes could be established along the Indus and through Afghanistan, English manufactured goods could compete on price as well as quality with those the Russians sent through their network of internal waterways. As Burnes and his party headed westward for the long trek across the feared Turkoman desert to Meshed in Persia, they passed lines of slaves trudging toward Bokhara. Mohal Lal saw a group “walking barefoot in the fiery desert. Their hands and necks were fastened together with an iron chain. They were completely exhausted with hunger, thirst and fatigue. They were crying and begging for something to eat and Burnes gave them a melon.” Before long, though, their own plight was nearly as bad. Both people and animals were dying of thirst, and Burnes watched desperate men opening the veins of their camels to drink their blood. By September 1832, however, they finally reached Meshed, and the group now divided. Mohan Lal, to whom Burnes gave a testimonial praising his great tact and diplomacy, and Dr. Gerard set out back overland to India, while Burnes headed for the Caspian Sea and thence to Tehran.

He was received by the elderly Persian shah, who greeted him with the strange question demanded by court etiquette, “
Dumagh i shooma chak ust
?” (Are your brains clear?) before interrogating him closely. He was interested to know whether Burnes had taken notes to which he truthfully replied, “Yes, I have measured the roads … and sounded the rivers.” The shah also inquired into such minutiae as whether the journey had been expensive and whether Burnes had sampled horseflesh while among Uzbeks. Having satisfied the shah’s curiosity, Burnes finally headed south to the Persian Gulf, where he took a ship for Bombay.

Burnes’s reports on all he had seen—in particular on the potential for British trade as a source both of profit and of influence to counter Russian ambitions and on the potential for military advances by the Russians toward Kabul—so impressed the governor-general that he sent him to London to tell his story to the government in person. When he arrived there in October 1833, a gratified Burnes found himself lionized by every society hostess anxious to secure “Bokhara Burnes,” as he had become known, for her parties. He met the prime minister, was presented to the king and began preparing his journals for publication. However, if he expected promotion to some exalted position, he was mistaken; some, like Lord Ellenborough at the Board of Control, thought him cocksure and “immensely vain.” Though promoted to the rank of captain, the young man who had “beheld the scenes of Alexander’s wars, of the rude and savage inroads of Genghis and Timur” and “marched on the very line of route by which Alexander had pursued Darius,” after turning down a subordinate post in the British mission at Tehran, accepted a posting back to the relatively junior position he had occupied before his travels up the Indus as assistant to the company’s resident in Kutch. However, events would shortly thrust him forward again.

Chapter Three

Everything tends to show the gigantic scale upon which Russia’s projects of aggrandisement are formed, and how necessary it is for other nations to keep vigilant watch, and have their horses always saddled.

—LORD PALMERSTON, SEPTEMBER 1834

Alexander Burnes soon learned that he had underestimated Shah Shuja. While the Scotsman had still been traveling, the exiled Afghan king, whom he had thought too uncharismatic and lethargic to inspire his countrymen’s support, had begun a bid to retake his throne. Encouraged by rumors that the Persians were planning to attack the western Afghan city of Herat and knowing this would distract Dost Mohammed, Shah Shuja had approached Ranjit Singh. Though by no means natural allies, each could offer something the other wanted. They negotiated a treaty under which Shah Shuja agreed to let the Sikh ruler have Peshawar and some surrounding territory—if he could take it from Dost Mohammed’s half brother Sultan Mohammed Khan—while Ranjit Singh would help Shah Shuja oust Dost Mohammed himself from Kabul. During the negotiations Shah Shuja refused a request that he return to India the gates of the Hindu temple at Somnath removed to Ghazni eight hundred years previously by the emperor Mahmud. Conscious that he was under British protection, Shah Shuja also tested the British reaction to his plans. Governor-General Bentinck responded blandly that the British government
“religiously abstains from intermeddling with the affairs of its neighbours,”
but he did not attempt to dissuade him from his expedition and later granted Shah Shuja four months’ advance on his pension to help him recruit an army.

In February 1833 Shah Shuja left Ludhiana with three thousand soldiers, crossed the Indus and advanced into Sind, where he defeated its rulers in battle, forcing them to acknowledge his supremacy and pay him a huge sum in tribute. Fortified financially and politically, Shah Shuja and his army, which had grown to twenty-four thousand, advanced through the Bolan Pass toward the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

As increasingly urgent demands for help from Kandahar’s rulers, his unreliable half brothers, reached Dost Mohammed, he debated what to do. Recalling Burnes’s protestations of British goodwill, he wrote to the governor-general seeking an alliance but was gently rebuffed and decided to lead his armies to the relief of Kandahar. Arriving in the summer of 1834, he fell on his rival’s besieging forces. According to some accounts, at the height of the battle, Shah Shuja, who had been viewing the fighting from a distance, lost heart and fled on elephant back, sparking panic among his men, who began streaming from the field. Whatever the case, Dost Mohammed was victorious. He was probably not surprised when among the captured baggage his men found letters written by the British political officer Claude Wade urging the Afghan tribal leaders, including Dost Mohammed’s own chiefs, to support Shah Shuja.

However, Dost Mohammed had more pressing matters to deal with than British double-talk. Returning to Kabul, he learned that Peshawar had fallen to Ranjit Singh. Deploying his favored weapons of “cunning and conciliation,” as Burnes had called them, the Lion of Lahore had gulled Peshawar’s Sultan Mohammed Khan into believing he might assist him in dethroning his half brother Dost Mohammed. In May 1834 one of Ranjit Singh’s most senior commanders, Hari Singh, had arrived outside Peshawar with nine thousand Sikh troops. The purpose of his visit was supposedly diplomatic, but there was nothing diplomatic about the way he occupied the city and ejected Sultan Mohammed Khan, who fled with his forces to Jalalabad. For a while he contemplated trying to capture Kabul from his half brother but learning of Dost Mohammed’s victory at Kandahar instead sought his protection.

Although he had never ruled the city of Peshawar and its surrounding territory, to Dost Mohammed its loss to the infidel Sikhs was a shameful blow to Afghan and Islamic prestige. He declared himself Amir-al-Mominin (Commander of the Faithful), and began striking coins bearing the words
Amir Dost Mohammed, by the grace of God
, ghazi (holy warrior). He also displayed to the populace, as a sign of his commitment to the cause, a cloak believed to have belonged to the prophet Mohammed.
¹¹
Before long he had amassed a large army to engage in jihad, holy war, against the Sikhs. The American adventurer Josiah Harlan described how Dost Mohammed appeared “with fifty thousand belligerent candidates for martyrdom and immortality. Savages from the remotest recesses of the mountainous districts, who were dignified with the profession of the Mohammedan faith, many of them giants in form and strength, promiscuously armed with sword and shield, bows and arrows, matchlocks, rifles, spears and blunderbusses … prepared to slay, plunder and destroy for the sake of God and the prophet, the unenlightened infidels of the Punjab.”

The thirty-three-year-old Harlan, born in Pennsylvania, had originally come to India as a supercargo on a merchant ship before finding employment—despite a lack of relevant academic qualifications—with the East India Company as a surgeon and then transferring to the company’s artillery and serving in Burma. At this time he was in Ranjit Singh’s service with the Sikh rank of general. He cultivated a dashing, buccaneering appearance. Dr. Richard Kennedy, a British army surgeon who encountered him later in Kabul, described “a tall manly figure, with a large head and gaunt face … dressed in a light, shining, pea-green satin jacket, maroon-coloured silk small-clothes, buff boots, a silver-lace girdle fastened with a large, square buckle bigger than a soldier’s breast-plate, and on his head a white cat-skin foraging cap with a glittering gold band and tassels.” But Kennedy also deduced that
“though he dressed like a mountebank,”
Harlan was no fool. He had a vast amount of local knowledge and great shrewdness.

While Josiah Harlan observed events from the Sikh side, a British agent calling himself Charles Masson was accompanying Dost Mohammed. Masson was another of the eccentrics and mavericks who, like Harlan, flitted in and out of the Great Game. He had first come to the attention of the British authorities at Bushire on the Persian Gulf in 1830 when he had claimed to be an American archaeologist born in Kentucky with important political information to impart about Russian ambitions in Central Asia. His assertion that he was American was, like his supposed name, false. He was, in fact, an English deserter named James Lewis who in 1827 had assumed an American identity to avoid detection. An educated man with a passion for archaeology and coin collecting, he had embarked on an extraordinary odyssey through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, where he had met and been impressed by Dost Mohammed.
¹²
Journeying onward to Kandahar, he had been repeatedly robbed and at one stage stripped completely naked, surviving only through the kindness of a stranger who gave him a sheepskin coat.