Читать книгу Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King - Ben Macintyre, Ben Macintyre - Страница 16

The Afghan empire had once been powerful beyond legend, wealthy beyond words. As Harlan wrote: ‘During the rule of the antient regime the kings possessed countless treasures and jewels and gold, supplying the expenses of licentiousness and luxury from previously accumulated hereditary wealth. Vast sums were disbursed in the capital cities of Kandahar, Cabul and Peshour.’ This was the empire forged in the mid-eighteenth century by the Afghan conqueror Ahmad Shah Abdali, founder of the Durrani dynasty, who had extended his rule from Kabul to Peshawar and Lahore, and finally to Delhi, Kashmir and Sind. He had crossed the Hindu Kush, subduing the Hazara tribes en route, and then vanquished the Uzbeks of Balkh and Kunduz, taking his realm to the border of modern Afghanistan. The death of Ahmad Shah in 1773 started the steady, bloody disintegration of his empire, and by the 1820s it had fragmented, shot through with fantastically complex internecine feuds, like veins through marble. For as long as anyone could remember a brutal civil war had raged in Afghanistan, punctuated by occasional interludes of tranquillity. Like the Wars of the Roses, two great families, rival clans within the Durrani elite, battled for supremacy: the Saddozai, of which Shah Shujah was the leading claimant, and the Barakzai, whose paramount chief, Dost Mohammed Khan, now ruled in Kabul. The Saddozai princes fought each other while resisting the growing power of the Barakzai clan, whose scions fought bitterly among themselves for supremacy.

The period immediately before Harlan set out for Afghanistan had seen some particularly Byzantine plotting and fratricidal violence. In 1783, Zaman Shah, Ahmad Shah’s grandson (a Saddozai), ascended the throne with the support of Painda Khan (a Barakzai), who became his vizier. Nervous of Painda Khan’s growing power and aware that he was plotting a coup, Zaman Shah first dismissed, then executed him. The Barakzai vizier, however, had left behind no fewer than twenty-three sons, each anxious to avenge him and take power himself. The eldest of these, Fatah Khan, immediately set about provoking a rebellion: Zaman Shah was ousted in favour of his half-brother Shah Mahmud, and then blinded by having his eyeballs pierced with a lancet, the traditional fate of a deposed Afghan king. Shah Mahmud held on for just three years before he was deposed by another Saddozai, Zaman Shah’s brother Shah Shujah al-Moolk.

Shah Shujah was in Peshawar, opening presents from Mountstuart Elphinstone, when he learned that Shah Mahmud was up in arms once more, with the backing of the troublesome Fatah Khan. After six years as king, Shujah was himself ousted and set off on the wandering path that would eventually lead him to Ludhiana. Shah Mahmud was reinstalled, but not for long. In 1818, history repeating itself, he became deeply suspicious of his Barakzai vizier, and Fatah Khan was put to death with an imaginative cruelty spectacular even by the exacting standards of the time. His eyes were removed with a dagger, and the top of his head was peeled off (‘an operation similar to the African mode of scalping’, observed Shah Shujah in his memoirs) before a slow public dismemberment. The blind vizier was led to a large tent erected for the purpose outside the western city of Herat, surrounded by his mortal enemies, and systematically murdered: ears, nose, hands and beard were cut off, and then his feet, before his throat was finally cut.

This lingering death drove Fatah Khan’s many surviving brothers to a peak of vengeful fury (and temporary unity), and after a series of battles Mahmud, the Saddozai king, was beaten back to Herat. The Barakzai brothers set about dividing up the country among themselves: four of them held Peshawar, another five ruled over Kandahar, while Dost Mohammed Khan, the ablest of them all, established himself as chief of Ghazni and gradually set about extending his rule over Kabul. Having divided up the country as completely as their brother had once been dismembered, the remaining brothers naturally now fell to fighting each other.

The Barakzais were a polygamous recipe for friction, sharing a single father but divided by multiple mothers: siblings sharing both mother and father tended to be allies, while half-brothers were more often at loggerheads. The bewildering confusion of plot and counterplot, blood feud coagulating on blood feud, brother against brother, king against vizier, had reduced what is now Afghanistan to a Hobbesian war of all against all, riven with feuds between interrelated warlords. As one commentator said: ‘Sovereignty was an exceedingly uncertain commodity. One moment the Amir of Kabul might be a potent monarch, in the next he might be an object of ridicule, an outcast whose life would be very precarious, if indeed it existed at all.’

Elphinstone and others had painted what they knew of Afghanistan’s turbulent history in the most lurid colours, and Harlan marvelled at the duplicity of the various contenders, the bewildering rise and fall of the claimants. ‘Prince after prince in confused succession mounted the tottering throne,’ he wrote. ‘The prize was literally handed about like a shuttlecock. The king who in the battle may have dispatched a favourite son in the command of his army would probably before night find himself flying from his own troops.’

Yet by 1826 a vague pattern of power had emerged from the bloody morass, with the rise of Dost Mohammed Khan as amir of Kabul, the nearest thing to an Afghan monarch. He was owed at least nominal allegiance by his restive brothers, and ruled by a volatile combination of dictatorship and oligarchy. As Harlan observed: ‘In the course of civil war distant provinces threw off their allegiance or were seized by neighbouring powers. The dominion of Cabulistan became contracted and reduced. The government was seized by an usurping dynasty and the royal family banished.’ Whatever Shah Shujah, lurking in Ludhiana, may have told Harlan about the man currently in power in Kabul, Dost Mohammed Khan was proving a tenacious and increasingly popular ruler. Even today, Afghans use the phrase: ‘Is Dost Mohammed dead, that there is no justice?’ He would not be easy to unseat. Shah Shujah and Dost Mohammed Khan, the old Saddozai pretender and the young Barakzai prince, would represent the opposing political poles of Harlan’s life for the next two decades.

The chronic instability of Afghanistan had infected the surrounding regions. Harlan estimated that his six-hundred-mile route to Peshawar led through at least ‘four independent principalities, divided into many subordinate chieftainships, some as fiefs and others as tributaries to the above mentioned principalities’. None of these was remotely predictable, and any or all might be hostile. The region was also infested with bandits, and Harlan had to restrain his natural inclination to wander off alone in search of plants. The most immediate menace, however, came from his own troops; he had not been out of Ludhiana more than a few days before the first threat to his life.

From among his Indian domestics Harlan had appointed a quartermaster, whose task was to travel ahead of the main body of troops to select that night’s campground and obtain supplies. Although Harlan chose the man he believed to be the most honest of his staff, he rapidly came to suspect that the quartermaster was buying cheap food and retaining a profit. ‘More than human patience and foresight are necessary for one to guard against the chicanery, deceit and falsehood of domestics in India,’ Harlan wrote in exasperation, a familiar complaint among colonists. Once Harlan had established his guilt, the quartermaster was promptly demoted. This should have been a routine matter, but it swiftly erupted into Harlan’s first major crisis when the former quartermaster appeared at his tent, determined on revenge and carrying a loaded and cocked musket. As Harlan emerged, the man aimed the weapon at his head. Harlan reacted instinctively. ‘To knock up the fellow’s musket and throw myself upon him and seize him by the throat was the act of a moment. He fell back and prostrate from the force with which I projected myself against him. The musket changed hands and he was now the victim with the weapon at his breast! He had not a word to utter or a struggle of resistance.’

By disarming the mutineer, Harlan subdued a potentially wider revolt. ‘Had this fellow’s insolence been suffered with impunity, I should have been utterly at the mercy of my servants,’ he wrote. The rest of the entourage, expressing elaborate abhorrence at such behaviour, cheerfully offered to kill the miscreant on the spot to demonstrate their own fidelity. Harlan preferred clemency, and merely ordered the man to be manacled and placed under guard. At the next village he was handed into the custody of the local headman. Harlan remarked: ‘He was probably released immediately after I left.’

The incident convinced Harlan that there was only one member of the party he could trust implicitly: ‘Amongst my followers there was one of low degree who held an elevated position in my regard and was certainly the most faithful, disinterested and by no means the least useful of the cortege.’ He was referring, of course, to his dog, Dash.

Harlan was anxious to push on quickly, but the baggage animals flatly declined to be hurried. ‘The old camels especially cannot be made to move above one coss and a half per hour,’ he complained. A coss was the old unit of Indian measurement, which Harlan calculated at one mile and three quarters. Distance seemed to expand as the column trudged on through a landscape of desert fringed with jungle, and such measurements became almost meaningless, Harlan reflected. ‘The peasant whom you interrogate as to the distance of the next village will sometimes reply, “As far as the twice boiling of a pot of milk” [or] “As far as you can carry a leaf without [it] wilting.”’ The population was sparse, but the local tribespeople seemed reasonably well-fed, with a diet that included mutton from the fat-tailed sheep, goats’ meat, beef, fowl, eggs and butter. Harlan gorged on ‘the finest perch and a species of catfish peculiar to the Indus’, but noticed that locals seemed to regard fish as an inferior food. Finding grain and forage for the cattle was far more problematic. As a visiting dignitary he expected to be sustained with free supplies from the local chiefs, in accordance with the ancient traditions of hospitality. If they seemed unwilling to provide such necessities, Harlan believed he would be within his rights, according to local custom, in taking what he needed. The local chiefs had once lived under Afghan rule, but they were now unwilling subjects of the aggressively expanding Sikh empire; each paid tribute, either directly or through a superior, to Ranjit Singh. Since Harlan was assumed to be a representative of the great British power to the east, and therefore a potential counterweight to Sikh domination, he expected a cautious welcome from the native barony. ‘All who were opposed to the Lahore paramount – and the tributaries generally were – showed by their alacrity of service and obsequious bearing the candidness with which they desired to recognize in every Christian traveller a representative of an antagonist power.’ Harlan was only too happy to be mistaken for a British officer, and if the local rulers thought that by providing him with food and forage they were currying favour with the powers in India, that was just fine with him.

Harlan’s attitude towards the local inhabitants, in common with most white men in India, was paternalistic, haughty and often dismissive, and a vein of cultural condescension runs through much of his early writing. Yet his outlook was similar to that of Thomas Jefferson himself, who maintained that the American Indians were noble savages who could be absorbed into the expanding American empire through education and religion. ‘I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman,’ wrote Jefferson in 1785. In the same way, Harlan regarded the various Indian, Sikh and Afghan tribesmen he would encounter over the next two decades as potential equals, held back not by any inherent racial inferiority but by physical circumstance and ignorance. He would immerse himself in the local ethnology, history and languages with all the enthusiasm that Jefferson devoted to his Indian studies. He might scorn the local customs as superstitious and barbaric, yet he observed them with fascination and described them with care. This openness of mind would develop over time, as his early distrust and disdain of native ways turned to understanding, and in many cases admiration. The colonist would eventually be colonised, not merely comprehending Afghan culture more profoundly than any foreigner before him, but adopting it.

About seventy coss from Ludhiana, after two solid weeks of marching, Harlan’s troop entered the district of Mamdot, the dominion of Qutb ud-Din Khan, one of those chiefs who was eager to rid himself of the obligation to pay tribute to the Sikh maharajah. The men were pitching camp when an envoy appeared from Qutb, accompanied by a troop of horsemen, to welcome the supposed British envoy with an avalanche of compliments. ‘This was the first instance in which I had been received with the ostentation that marks the Oriental display of festive diplomacy,’ Harlan observed. The envoy explained that although Qutb himself was on a hunting trip, he had sent a message for the noble feringhee, to be delivered in person by his son. This, Harlan calculated, would be an excellent moment to make an impact on the locals, in the knowledge that the bush telegraph would swiftly pass on news of the arrival of a powerful foreign prince, and so ensure a welcoming reception further ahead. The etiquette for the occasion was planned with care: first the tents were pitched to form a large, covered reception area, the floor spread with the finest hessian carpet. At one end of the enclosure, on an elevated platform, Harlan placed his armchair, where he would receive the prince in seated grandeur. Amirullah, toting the mace, formed a reception committee alongside Gul Khan in the full regalia of a native officer, while the guard of sepoys were drawn up before the tent door to greet the prince.

At the appointed hour, Qutb’s son swept into the encampment mounted on a richly caparisoned horse and surrounded by a small army of retainers armed with swords, shields and matchlocks. Gul Khan held the prince’s bridle as the young man dismounted, and then ushered him into the tent. Harlan was immediately struck by the ‘grace and dignity’ of the handsome, olive-skinned youth who now bowed before him, clad in a shimmering white robe embroidered with gold, a huge shield in one hand and a long sword tucked into his waistband. Long dark curls tumbled down to his shoulders from beneath a striped silk turban decorated with golden thread, while his slippers were similarly spangled in gold and silver. Even more remarkable than his exquisite outfit, however, was his age: the prince of Mamdot, calculated the astonished Harlan, could not have been more than seven years old.

‘His manner and address were no different from a man of mature condition and polite education,’ Harlan observed. This dignified, heavily-armed child approached with a peace offering: ‘a beautiful green bow of Lahore and a green velvet gold embroidered quiver’. After a lavish exchange of compliments the boy-prince presented a letter, complaining of the iniquities of Sikh rule, which he asked Harlan to forward to the British lords of India. Harlan, of course, had no formal connection with the British, and was anyway heading in the other direction. Tactfully, he advised the young man ‘that his father should represent his case in person to the Company’s resident at Delhi’.

The following morning, accompanied by a small contingent from Qutb’s tribe to guarantee safe passage through the bandit-infested region, Harlan crossed the frontier into Bahawalpur, the land of the formidable Nawab Bahawal Khan. Founded and named after Bahawal Khan Abbasi I in 1748, the princely state of Bahawalpur had won a large measure of independence during the civil war that dissolved the Afghan empire, but it now faced simultaneous threats from the expansionist Sikhs to the north and the looming British in the east. As Harlan wrote, ‘the present incumbent stood in an unenviable posture, with the prospect “of being ground between two stones” as the Persian proverb goes’. Like many native princes, Bahawal Khan was tempted to throw in his lot with the British. But as Captain Wade had warned Harlan, the nawab remained exceedingly nervous, and might not take kindly to having a force under an unknown flag marching unannounced through his territory.

Harlan, however, was breezily confident. ‘The friendly relations existing between that prince and the British government precluded the possibility of hostilities against a Christian,’ he wrote, noting that Elphinstone had been graciously received by Bahawal Khan’s father. If the nawab could be persuaded to believe Harlan was a British official, he was probably safe. Moreover, he wanted to make contact with Bahawal Khan, for it was likely that Shah Shujah would have to cross Bahawalpur with a far larger army in the event of an invasion.

Harlan’s troop had penetrated some ten miles into the nawab’s territories, when a body of armed men, mounted on camels and horses, suddenly bore down on them. The little army immediately prepared for battle: the sepoys took up positions among the baggage animals, with muskets levelled, while Harlan and the other mounted men rode a few yards ahead, ‘threatening them by the evolutions of our firearms with a reception at once repulsive and determined’. The demonstration had the desired effect. ‘They rode down upon us in a swarm, but our display made them draw up [and] they spread out upon the plain, apparently intending to surround our party.’ Harlan ordered Gul Khan to shout out that unless they halted where they were, the men would open fire.

Retreating just beyond rifle range, the riders now stared at the intruders with what seemed to Harlan more like curiosity than hostility. They were a fearsome-looking group. ‘Their filthy appearance and barbarous visages peering out from beneath long black and greasy locks of matted hair seemed to forbid the conclusion that they could be men entertained in the military service of a chief.’ This, however, is precisely what they proved to be. A series of shouted exchanges between Gul Khan and the leader of the other troop established that these were scouts of Bahawal Khan’s army who had heard of the approach of ‘an army of feringees accompanied by Shah Shujah’ and had come to reconnoitre.

While the local warriors watched from a distance, Harlan ordered the advance, collecting the sepoys around his horse with bayonets fixed. Still looking distinctly unfriendly, the hairy horsemen and camel-riders fell in some distance behind. The strange procession had gone less than a mile when a smartly dressed individual, flanked by two horsemen, rode up to Harlan and presented himself as ‘the attaché of Nadir Shah, commander of the Nawab’s forces’. With a low bow the envoy welcomed Harlan in the name of Bahawal Khan, and invited him to pitch camp at a village a little way ahead, where he promised that supplies of every kind could be found. In spite of the man’s polite manner, Harlan was deeply suspicious. The line moved off once more, with Bahawal Khan’s man leading the way, and an hour later they pitched camp outside a small, apparently deserted village.

As he had feared, Harlan was now effectively a prisoner. ‘Our camp was quickly surrounded by numerous irregular infantry of the Rohillah and Beloochee races, soldiers in the service of Nawab Bhawal Khan.’ These had been instructed to prevent the advance of the newcomers until orders arrived from Bahawal Khan himself. Harlan was furious. ‘I entertained a feeling of infinite contempt as a military force for the miserable guards surrounding us,’ he wrote. Summoning Gul Khan to his tent, he told his lieutenant that they would march the following day, and if the nawab’s troops tried to stop them, they would fight their way out. The Rohillah accepted this order with visible, and entirely justified apprehension. The nawab’s army might look a fright, but they were numerous, heavily armed and, if provoked, likely to prove murderous. But Harlan was not to be dissuaded. Not for the last time, he wondered quite how valiant his warlike commander would prove in a fight.

At sunrise the next morning, the bugle sounded, the camels were loaded and the men were preparing to march when Gul Khan, who had spent the previous hour ‘in earnest conversation’ with the leader of the native troops, approached Harlan, ashen-faced, and warned that the nawab’s men were ‘determined to prevent our baggage from leaving without orders from their chief’. The surrounding troops began to close in. Harlan’s solution to the impasse was simple and dramatic. ‘I called the captain of Bhawal Khan’s men into my presence and immediately placed him under a guard of fixed bayonets, holding him as a hostage with the threat of instant death in case of any turbulent movement on the part of his troops.’

Feeling exceedingly pleased with himself, Harlan now marched off with his new hostage in chains alongside him, the troops in fine regimental order, and a mob of Bahawal Khan’s soldiers trailing angrily behind. They had not marched two miles before, as Harlan put it, ‘the consequences of my headstrong efforts began to show themselves’. On the eastern horizon, he saw ‘a vast cloud of dust rising in the desert’. Minutes later, a troop of tribesmen mounted on camels appeared just out of range, and then vanished. They were followed by horsemen, galloping in circles, their cries carrying across the flat land, impossible to count due to the clouds of dust raised by their mounts. Through the gritty haze Harlan glimpsed footsoldiers stretched out across the desert, and finally, in the distance, ‘a train of heavy artillery drawn by oxen slowly lumbered upon carriages lazily creeping over the plain’. It was now that Gul Khan belatedly passed on a rather crucial piece of information: the man Harlan had taken hostage was none other than the brother of Nadir Shah, military commander of Bahawalpur, who had now mobilised the full force of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s army to get him back.

As Harlan was wondering what to do next, a horseman appeared through the dust and respectfully invited the visitor to pitch camp at the next village where his master, Nadir Shah, ‘desired the honour of an interview’. Harlan reluctantly complied. ‘We found ourselves in the same situation as we were at sunrise,’ he remarked. The only difference being that they were now surrounded by an entire army, ‘encamped a short distance from us, out of view, secluded within the vast jungle of high reed grass which grew in tufts tall enough to hide a mounted spearman [for] many miles in all directions’. Any attempt to force their way out would be suicide. Releasing his hostage, Harlan now adopted a different, but equally brazen tactic: he would treat this Nadir Shah with complete contempt. ‘I refused to see him,’ he wrote, ‘replying to his earnest solicitude with the cool and phlegmatic indifference of a superior.’ Whenever Nadir’s mirza or envoy politely tried to arrange a meeting, the American replied, with feigned petulance: ‘I’m not in the vein.’ Nadir Shah was a man to be reckoned with in Bahawalpur, and Harlan’s lofty manner sent the envoy, despite being surrounded by thousands of hostile warriors, into a paroxysm of toadying. ‘With reverential respect and servile attitude, he said that his master was a great man, a very great man, no less a person than the dignified commander in chief of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s invincible army, the unconquered and exalted chief of chiefs, the cream of his contemporaries and the pillar of empire etc, etc.,’ wrote Harlan, who resolutely declined to be impressed and sent the mirza back with the message that he intended to march the next day. ‘I gave him to understand I acknowledged no superior and that my sword was my passport.’

Apparently bowing to the inevitable, Nadir Shah sent a guide, a senior member of his entourage, to show the strangers the way, but no sooner had the army set off again than it became clear the man was deliberately trying to buy time by leading Harlan on ‘a devious line, sometimes to the right and at others to the left, like a ship in a headwind’. Once again, Harlan’s riposte was to place the guide in chains.

Gul Khan made no secret of his belief that by chaining up the locals at every turn Harlan was inviting disaster, and contravening all the rules of Oriental diplomacy. ‘The old blear-eyed Rohillah rolled up his eyes in astonishment, exclaiming: “May God bring good in the future.”’ Nettled by his lieutenant’s negativity, Harlan demanded: ‘Wherefore is Gool Khan afraid of these ragged mendicants?’, and then immediately regretted it, for the question prompted a torrent of oratory from the one-armed soldier on the subject of his own bravery and the corresponding villainy of the local people. Exhausted by the tense march, and Gul Khan’s loquacity, Harlan ordered a halt near a small village. As soon as the tents were pitched he released the guide and sent him to collect supplies, and retired to rest. ‘The whole camp excepting a single sentry soon fell into a deep sleep solicited by unusual fatigue,’ he wrote, but less than an hour later Harlan awoke to find yet another crisis brewing. Outside his tent stood Gul Khan, looking more than usually glum. ‘It’ll be later before we get the forage, unless Your Highness is disposed to become responsible for the unoffending blood of our guide,’ he said gloomily.

While Harlan had been asleep, the luckless guide had requested food at the nearby fortress, where he had promptly been taken prisoner. The commander of the fort, Gul Khan explained, was not only refusing to provide food and forage but threatening to cut off the guide’s head if the troops helped themselves. Harlan faced a dilemma. Seizing what he needed by force could lead to the death of an innocent man, and that, he reflected, would be ‘ungenerous and unbecoming a man of high sentiments’. A little of Shah Shujah’s money would surely bring the commander round. Sure enough, after some bargaining by Gul Khan, the guide was released and supplies provided. Grateful that the unpredictable feringhee had seen fit to prevent him being beheaded, the guide was now as helpful as he had previously been obstructive. Instead of pushing on quickly, it was agreed that the force would proceed slowly towards Bahawalpur and await a decision by the nawab.

After three days of slow marching, a messenger from Bahawal Khan was conducted to Harlan’s tent. There he ceremoniously handed over a letter, written on the finest paper, embellished with gold leaf and tucked into a bag of gold brocade with a pair of the nawab’s oval seals attached, each three inches in diameter. The letter, in Persian, was addressed to: ‘His Highness the Saheban of exalted dignity’. Saheban is the plural of the honorific Sahib – ‘a term’, as Harlan observed, ‘applied to the Christians governing India’. The nawab had concluded that Harlan must be a British official, albeit a most eccentric one, and his letter ‘set forth in florid terms the Nawab’s regard and was profuse in the profession of friendship’. The chief of Bahawalpur looked forward to a meeting when Harlan reached Ahmadpur, his capital south of the Sutlej on the edge of the Cholistan desert, but in the meantime ‘the country, himself and his possessions were at my service’. Finally the nawab’s envoy handed over a gift that made Harlan’s hungry eyes light up. ‘A large quantity of the fresh fruits of Kabul were presented, such as delicious grapes packed in boxes upon layers of cotton, apples and pears of Samercand, cantaloupes, dried apricots, raisins and watermelons of the country.’ Harlan adored fresh fruit, and the crops of Kabul were fabled throughout Central Asia. This was the first time he had tasted them; in time, they would become an obsession.

The evidence of the nawab’s friendly intentions was a relief to all, not least the guide who had so nearly been decapitated. Harlan sent him on his way with a handful of rupees, ‘as a reward, and to solace his feelings for the cavalier regard bestowed upon him’. After days of wondering whether he and his men would be massacred, Harlan was thoroughly enjoying his new incarnation as the honoured guest of the nawab, who had given orders that the newcomers should be provided with every necessity. Another march of three days brought them to the town of Bahawalpur, which had been the province’s capital before Bahawal Khan had moved his court to Ahmadpur, thirty miles to the south. Bahawalpur was a substantial town ‘about four miles in circumference, with gardens of mangoe trees within the walls [and] houses of unburnt bricks’. Here Harlan received another gold-leafed missive from the nawab, even more polite than the last, ‘conveying his impatience to be exalted by an interview’. Harlan declined to be rushed, calculating that the longer he took to get to Ahmadpur, the keener Bahawal Khan would be to pay his respects to the haughty feringhee chief. A terse message was sent back, declaring that Harlan was suffering from ‘a phlegmon’, a skin inflammation, and would not reach Ahmadpur for at least ten days.

While encamped at Bahawalpur, Harlan made a point of staying inside his tent, thus ensuring the cultivation of his own mystery. ‘A crowd assembled daily from the town to get a view of the stranger,’ and wild rumours about the tall, bearded foreigner spread rapidly. It was even claimed that he was none other than ‘the ex-king Shujah Ul Moolk travelling under the incognito of a Saheb from Ludhiana’. The story, put about by Gul Khan, that Harlan was ‘merely an amateur traveller’ met with blank incredulity from Bahawal Khan’s envoys: ‘What could have attracted an amateur traveller to an insignificant, worthless, poverty-stricken country like this region of Bhawulpore that yielded nothing but sand and thorns?’ they demanded. ‘An amateur traveller would have passed on with the rapidity of a flowing stream.’

The locals seemed more inquisitive than threatening; which was just as well, Harlan reflected, since he was now several hundred miles from the nearest English outpost. If relations turned nasty, there was nowhere to flee. Only one Westerner had come this way before and lived to record the fact. ‘The Honourable Mount Stewart Elphinstone passed through Bhawulpore about twenty years before my transit on an embassy to the king of Cabul,’ Harlan recorded proudly, ‘but with this exception no Christian of note had been known to appear in the territory.’ He was therefore astonished, and a little piqued, to learn from an excited Gul Khan just hours before leaving Bahawalpur that he was not the only feringhee in the vicinity. A few weeks earlier, the locals reported, two ragged white men had staggered into Ahmadpur, claiming to be European soldiers and offering their military services to the nawab. Both were said to be stricken by chronic fever. Harlan now recalled that before he left Ludhiana Wade had shown him a message from Calcutta, warning that two deserters from the Company artillery, named James Lewis and Richard Potter, might be heading west and should be apprehended if possible. ‘I concluded these men were probably the individuals alluded to in that document,’ wrote Harlan.

Eager to see if his hunch was right, Harlan hastened to Ahmadpur. After a two-day march the troop pitched camp on the outskirts of the town, where Harlan was welcomed by ‘a person of grave deportment’ who turned out to be the nawab’s vizier, Yacoob Ally Khan. The vizier explained that his master would be returning shortly from a hunting trip, and after numerous ‘messages of congratulations, tinged with inflated protestations of service’ he handed over a large, dead antelope which he explained had been killed by the nawab himself. It was agreed that an interview would take place in five days’ time. Harlan wondered whether the nawab was really away hunting, or merely stalling. Taking advantage of the delay, he despatched a messenger to the two sickly Europeans lodged in the town, inviting them to his camp and offering to provide them with medical treatment.

The two white men were indeed the deserters Lewis and Potter, who had changed their names respectively to Charles Masson and, somewhat unimaginatively, John Brown – names by which they would be known for the rest of their lives. Masson was no ordinary soldier. An educated and cultured man, a fluent French speaker and classicist with a passion for archaeology and chronic wanderlust, over the next thirteen years he would excavate early Buddhist sites and amass a vast collection of ancient coins in Baluchistan, the Punjab and Afghanistan, in a solitary quest as impressive as it was eccentric. This nomadic scholar would eventually become one of the foremost antiquarians of Central Asia; but at the time he encountered Harlan he was merely a deserter, an outcast who faced the death penalty if caught by the British.

The path which had led Masson to a desert on the edge of India was as circuitous as that of Harlan himself. Indeed, their past histories and present passions were oddly similar. In 1822, at the age of twenty-one, London-born Masson, then James Lewis, had enlisted in the Company’s army and sailed for Bengal, looking for adventure. But after five years’ service in the artillery, when his regiment was stationed near Agra, he and a comrade, Richard Potter, decided they had had enough of soldiering. Unlike Harlan, they did not wait for permission to quit the ranks or purchase their discharges, but simply set off on foot, heading west. Masson’s biographer speculates that ‘as it is certain that he had already studied with some thoroughness the routes of Alexander the Great on his Persian and Indian campaigns, he may have had at the back of his mind a desire to explore Afghanistan’. Potter’s aspirations were less elevated, and his past far hazier. He appears to have deserted with the intention of entering the service of one or other of the native princes offering better pay and the possibility of swift advancement.

The two former artillerymen were very different characters. Masson was highly intelligent, and became capable of enduring astonishing hardships as he trudged, often barefoot and in rags, from one corner of Central Asia to the other. But he could also be quixotic and ill-tempered, dismissive of those he considered inferiors, overly free with his criticisms and often petulant. He made close friendships with Afghans, Sikhs and Persians, but some of his fellow Europeans found him priggish, cold and impenetrable. Potter, or Brown as he became, was by contrast steady and unimaginative, a gentle soul with neither Masson’s arrogance nor his resilience.

In his memoirs, written when he had acquired respectability and an official pardon, Masson makes no reference to his desertion, noting merely that ‘having traversed the Rajput States of Shekhawati, and the Kingdom of Bikanir, I entered the desert frontiers of the Khan of Bahwalpur’. The journey, and the illnesses they picked up en route, had almost killed them both. The nawab had provided sustenance but showed no eagerness to employ these two diseased and disreputable-looking Europeans, and the deserters were facing a grim choice between pushing on into the unknown or returning to face the rough justice of British India, when Harlan came to their aid.

Two days after Harlan’s arrival in Ahmadpur, a man appeared at the door of his tent, clad ‘in the dress of a native with his head shorn in the Indo-Muhammadan style’. Harlan studied the tattered figure before him with amused interest. ‘The light and straggling hair upon the upper lip in conjunction with the blue eyes at once revealed the true nativity of his caste. I addressed him without hesitation as a European deserter from the Horse Artillery at Mut’hra, of whom I had already read a description at Loodiana.’ Charles Masson attempted a bluff, ‘asserting that he belonged to Bombay and was merely travelling for amusement in this direction with the intention of proceeding home over land’. The performance was undermined by Masson’s demeanour, for he was visibly petrified, convinced that Harlan was a Company officer about to arrest him. ‘Perceiving his extremely uncomfortable position by the tremor of his voice and personal demonstrations of alarm, I quieted his terror with the assurance that I was not an Englishman and had no connection with the British government and consequently neither interest nor duty could induce me to betray him now or hereafter.’ A relieved Masson gave up the pretence and admitted that he and his ‘chum’, who was too weak to walk, were indeed fugitives from the British army. He himself had suffered from fever but had now recovered, and was desperate to get away from Bahawalpur.

Recognising a kindred spirit, Harlan made Masson an offer, even though by aiding deserters he was putting his own tenuous relationship with the British in jeopardy. He provided him and Potter with medicines and promised them horses and subsistence if they agreed to accompany him to Kabul. Masson accepted with alacrity and gratitude, and the following day the two Englishmen were installed as Harlan’s mounted orderlies. They had retained their artillery uniforms and broadswords, and Harlan remarked to himself that the addition of two officers in Western dress would add to the military panache of the outfit. Moreover, he believed he now had companions he could trust. ‘I reflected that I should be provided with at least two confidential retainers of interests identical with my own in case of personal danger arising from my peculiarly insulated situation.’

Harlan and Masson swiftly discovered their shared interests, and the American was delighted to have some educated company after so many weeks with no one to talk to (or rather, listen to) but Gul Khan. Masson and Brown decided that a pretence of American citizenship would offer additional protection against exposure as deserters, and they studied Harlan closely to pick up the manners of the New World. Masson would henceforth claim to be from Kentucky, a deception so successful that long after his death he was still being described, quite erroneously, as an American. The two Englishmen would play important roles in Harlan’s life: one would become his friend, stand by him in bad times, and then vanish into obscurity; the other would become his enemy, blacken his name at every opportunity, and become more famous than Harlan ever did.