Читать книгу Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King - Ben Macintyre, Ben Macintyre - Страница 18

The long-awaited meeting with Bahawal Khan would require all the pomp and dignity Harlan could muster. In his opinion, at least, this was considerable. ‘All my military retainers, now amounting to about one hundred armed men, were drawn up before the gateway,’ he wrote with pride of this ‘military pageant’. Harlan, mounted on Flora and wearing his Company uniform, took his place at the head of the troops, flanked by Masson and Brown. ‘I mounted, the bugle sounded, arms were presented,’ and with jangling spurs and clanking muskets, and some appreciative shouting from spectators, the American and his private army set off to meet the prince. Amirullah led the way on foot, carrying the silver mace like a club, while Gul Khan followed with the rest of the troops: first the sepoys, marching in time, then the Rohillahs, with rather less discipline, and finally a score of what Harlan euphemistically called ‘irregulars’ who did not march at all, but clattered along behind in a disorganised and enthusiastic mob.

Bahawal Khan was not going to be out-pomped, and had put on his own show of military force, assembling ‘his elite battalion of Seapoys armed in the European fashion and dressed in red jackets’. At least a thousand of these troops lined both sides of the town’s main street, and as the cortege passed, each saluted by putting his right hand in front of his forehead – a gesture which, Harlan observed, ‘appears extremely awkward with shouldered arms’. Behind the uniformed ranks milled an array of ‘irregular cavalry and dismounted cavaliers’, while the terraces of the houses on either side were packed with spectators craning for a look at the feringhee and his soldiers.

The nawab had set up a large pavilion about ten yards square in the middle of the town to receive his guest, but ‘so settled were his apprehensions of violence or sinister design’ that he had packed it with his own guards, leaving little room for the visitors. Harlan strode confidently into the enclosure in his most grand manner, and was unceremoniously mobbed. ‘The moment I entered, the Nawab’s confidential servants, armed to the teeth with every variety of weapons – spears, matchlocks, pistols, blunderbusses, swords, daggers, shields au bras – pressed around me and rather bore me up to the seat near the Nawab scarcely admitting the use of my legs!’

Gul Khan managed to squeeze in behind Harlan’s chair, ready to act as interpreter. Harlan studied Bahawal Khan closely: ‘He was a young man, apparently about twenty five years old, of middle stature and delicate form.’ The ‘unassuming deportment’ and ‘subdued bearing’ of the chief, who welcomed the visitor while ‘scarcely raising his eyes from the ground’, masked a man who was canny, ruthless and convinced that this tall stranger had come to depose or kill him.

Harlan beckoned Amirullah forward and presented the prince with a pair of valuable English pistols. Bahawal Khan examined the gift with undisguised admiration, remarking on the craftsmanship. The ice broken, Harlan instructed Gul Khan to tell the prince that he had ‘a confidential communication for the Nawab’s private ear’. Reassured that he was not about to be assassinated, the nawab ordered his bodyguards to draw back, and Harlan broached the subject of his mission, asking what treatment Shah Shujah might expect when he passed through his jurisdiction. The nawab’s reply was cautious: his house had always been faithful to the ex-king, he said, but then pointedly added that his country was a poor one. The hint was clear: if Shah Shujah wanted to be restored, he would have to pay for it. As Harlan rose to depart, the nawab’s vizier moved forward, bearing in his arms an exquisite tribal outfit which included a turban of gold brocade. This was a ‘dress of honour’, the first of many that would be presented to him over the coming years, a formal gift that, as Harlan elegantly put it, formed part of a ‘system of diplomatic language throughout the east’. With elaborate expressions of mutual regard, the meeting ended and Harlan rode back to his encampment, convinced that his first diplomatic foray on behalf of the exiled king had been a resounding success.

On 10 December Harlan and his troops marched out of Ahmadpur, leaving the Sutlej and heading west across country towards the river Indus. Harlan was in pensive mood, and with every step towards Afghanistan his past life seemed to grow more distant and irretrievable. ‘Heretofore I had not thoroughly divested myself of the familiar feeling one cherishes for the gradually receding associations of departing relations,’ he wrote, in an oblique reference to Eliza Swaim. The pain of that episode was slowly ebbing, for Harlan had little time for emotional reflection. ‘These scenes, a strange country, an unknown people and these objects in varied and diurnal recurrence filled up the tablets of observation.’ Finally, he was on the trail of Alexander the Great. ‘My mind was now full with the contemplation of the past,’ he wrote. ‘I was about to enter the country and become familiar with objects which have been made conspicuous to the world as the arena and subject of Alexander’s exploits.’

In these deserts, in 325 BC, Alexander had battled the warlike Indian tribe of the Malloi. Besieging the fortress of Multan to the north, the great Macedonian general had led the charge, receiving an arrow in the chest that nearly killed him. While his troops slaughtered the inhabitants of Multan, the wounded Alexander was carried away on the shield of Achilles. An attendant quoted Homer: ‘The man of action is the debtor to suffering and pain.’ Harlan would have reason to recall the motto of Achilles.

With Masson, whose classical knowledge was equal to his own, Harlan eagerly discussed possible links between the names of the villages they passed and the places alluded to by Plutarch and Quintus Curtius. ‘All the evidence to confirm the fact of Alexander’s invasion is to be found in numismatology and etymological inferences,’ observed Harlan, noting with regret that ‘the devastations of two thousand years have not, I believe, left a single architectural monument of the Macedonian conquests in India’. The ferocious warrior tribes that had once opposed Alexander’s troops were now ‘a population oppressed with poverty’. They ran away as the troops approached, or peered out furtively from behind the walls of crumbling mud huts.

Crossing the Sutlej south of Ahmadpur, Harlan used his compass to set the march in a north-westerly direction, hoping to cross the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Alexander’s time, about seventy miles downriver from Multan. ‘Our march lay through high grass and the country was overgrown with vast forests of tamarisk,’ wrote Harlan. The soil was covered with an ‘efflorescent soda, resembling snow’. The Jhelum marked the westernmost frontier of Bahawal Khan’s lands, and there Harlan dismissed the nawab’s guide. ‘For the remainder of my route to Derah Ghazee Khan, I was left to my own resources, and [the] assistance of guides procured from the villages in our line of march.’

The land teemed with wild game. On the eastern bank of the river the mud had been churned up, with tracks suggesting a recent fight between a tiger and a buffalo. ‘Wild boar, Mooltaun lions and tigers abound,’ Harlan recorded. The wildlife seemed more plentiful, or at least more visible, than the population. Word of the approaching troops had preceded them, and ‘the few miserable mud huts or wagwams of nomadic shepherds were often found deserted’. The people had fled, Harlan reflected, fearing ‘the rough treatment which poverty usually receives at the hands of an inconsiderate soldiery, especially those constituting a foreign army’. Successive armies, from Alexander on, had passed through, looting and destroying; nothing in the appearance of Harlan’s troop betrayed the fact that its leader was an invader of a very different stamp.

Five days after crossing the Jhelum, Harlan caught his first glimpse of the Indus, the mighty river that flows from deep in the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, so vast that its Sanskrit name, Sindhu, means the ocean itself. The Greeks called it Sinthus, which became Indus, from which India derives its name. Harlan was elated. The Indus valley had seen a flourishing of early civilisation, Aryans, Buddhists, Mauryans, Scythians and Kushans. For Harlan, the waters of the Indus with their backdrop of towering hills spoke of Alexander’s empire. ‘To look for the first time upon the furthest stream that had borne upon its surface the world’s victor two thousand years ago. To gaze upon the landscape he had viewed. To tread upon the earth where Alexander bled. To stand upon that spot where the wounded hero knelt exhausted when pierced by the arrows of the barbarians.’ The river marked the furthest boundary of India, the edge of the unknown. When Elphinstone got here in 1809, he had found that even the local tribes were uncertain what lay beyond. ‘All we could learn was, that beyond the hills was something wild, strange, and new, which we might hope one day to explore.’ Charles Masson was also moved by the sight of the Indus, reflecting, like Harlan, ‘on the people and scenes I was about to leave behind, and on the unknown lands and races the passage of the river would open’.

Here a new hazard presented itself, for the river was bordered by plains of quicksand, indistinguishable from dry land, which could swallow a horse or a man in moments. Harlan ordered the troops to form a single file and follow a high narrow path snaking towards the river through the sands and high reeds. ‘A step upon either side would be attended with disaster,’ he reflected, wishing he had a sure-footed elephant under him rather than the skittery and nervous Flora: ‘When an elephant falls into a difficulty of this nature, he instantly throws himself upon one side and lies perfectly still. His great breadth and quietness will save him from sinking. His keeper throws him boughs of trees and reeds or bundles of jungle grass. These he takes with his trunk and places them under his body by rolling over upon them, thus forming a bridge towards the solid ground.’ The river itself was yet more treacherous, fast-flowing, infested with crocodiles and crossed by a narrow submerged ford with yet more quicksand on either side. After several tense hours the men, horses and camels had successfully reached the opposite bank, where Harlan found a large and malodorous reminder of how lucky they had been to cross without loss of life. There lay ‘an immense dead crockodile, about sixteen feet long and about six feet around the thickest part of its body’.

Soon they were marching through a land still more savage than Bahawalpur, where even the merchant caravans seldom penetrated. ‘The communities bordering the shores of the Indus are nearly altogether predatory [and] semi-barbarous,’ wrote Harlan. Marching with the Indus to his right, he led his army upriver, finally reaching the town of Dera Ghazi Khan on Christmas Day 1827. The sight of the settlement, surrounded by date groves and gardens, lifted the spirits of the troops. That night Harlan and the two Englishmen shared a nutritious Christmas dinner composed of the fruits of Kabul.

Dera Ghazi Khan came under the ever-expanding dominion of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, but until recently it had been part of Afghanistan, ruled over by an Afghan governor, the most recent of whom was Nawab Jubber Khan, half-brother of Dost Mohammed Khan, amir of Kabul. The locals ‘affectionately remembered Jubber Khan, extolling his liberality and humanity’. Harlan would soon come to know the nawab’s liberality more intimately.

‘A vast distance intervened between our position and the frontier of British India,’ wrote Harlan, in expansive vein. ‘We were in a community far beyond the control of European influence and I felt myself fairly launched upon the sea of adventure with self reliance alone for my guide.’ Self-reliance, and Alexander the Great. Harlan’s study of ‘the system by which Alexander the Great conquered, civilised and maintained possession of Persia, Scythia, Bactria and India’ had led him to conclude that the key to imperial success lay in establishing a linked chain of military bases, each located in a natural defensive position. ‘The genius displayed by Alexander in the selection of sites for this purpose’, he wrote, had made him ‘the unrivalled architect of empires’. If Harlan were now to conquer Afghanistan, he would need to do the same, and establish a fortified outpost on the Afghan frontier on the Alexandrine model, somewhere between the Indus to the east and the mountains to the west. Ranjit Singh held sway over Dera Ghazi Khan, but in the countryside, where there was no centralised government of any sort, various petty tribal chieftains vied for supremacy among themselves, in the traditional bloodthirsty manner. These clan chiefs included several secret supporters of Shah Shujah, Harlan wrote, ‘some from hereditary respect, some as antagonists to the aspiring and increasing power of the Siks’.

West of Dera Ismail Khan, the next large town up the Indus, lay the bastion of Tak, or Takht-I-Sulaiman as it is known today. ‘On the skirt of the mountains, there was an ancient fortress which commanded one of the passes from the upper region of the valley of the Indus. The fortress was situated on a ridge of the rocky ledge of mountains extending some distance into the river and might have made an impregnable stronghold.’ Harlan had heard of the place before setting out from Ludhiana; indeed, he had blithely informed Captain Wade that he intended to take possession of it. Charles Masson was sent ahead to reconnoitre. Tak, he reported, was a formidable fort, ‘the most massive piece of defensive erection I have seen in these parts’, with high, mud-brick walls, a deep trench, and at least a dozen pieces of artillery emplaced at the towers on each of its corners. It would make an ideal outpost. There was only one problem: it already had a chief, by the name of Sirwa Khan, a self-made warlord with a reputation for extreme brutality and paranoia, who was said to be constantly adding additional defences because ‘a faquir predicted to him that the duration of his rule and prosperity depend upon his never ceasing to build’. Harlan’s mind was made up: ‘The fortress of Tak was deemed in every respect a favourable position for our purposes.’ Most of Sirwa Khan’s forces were not local warriors, but Rohillahs, the same tribe as Gul Khan. Harlan’s lieutenant was instructed to make contact with his fellow mercenaries and find out if they would care to desert, for a consideration. Harlan felt no compunction in attempting to bribe the Rohillahs, since ‘their profession as military adventurers left them perfectly free to choose their leader amongst the highest bidders’. From among his own Rohillahs Gul Khan produced a man who had once been part of the garrison at Tak; this ‘secret messenger was accordingly dispatched to the head of the Rohillah garrison of Tak, with private instructions to tamper with his late comrades if he found their leader accessible to our design’.

Sirwa Khan, Harlan reasoned, held his fort only by virtue of force, and by force, or bribery, he might therefore be legitimately deprived of it. Alexander, after all, had not hesitated to subdue and subvert local chiefs in building his empire. ‘The strong fortress of Tak,’ Harlan wrote, is ‘one of those many retreats and fastnesses which the feudal system has made an essential construction for the safeguard of fortuitous power. Its possessor portrayed in his precautions the precarious nature of authority where might governs right by tyranny.’

While awaiting word from Tak, Harlan was visited by an Afghan noble, a member of the Saddozai clan and a relative of Shah Shujah. This fellow claimed to have been in service with Gul Khan, and described the Rohillah as a turncoat of the worst sort, who had had his hand cut off for treason. Harlan put the story down to malice.

Meanwhile his convoy was growing, with the addition of a group of Afghan pilgrims returning from Mecca to Peshawar who asked if they could join them on the march north for protection. Harlan was impressed by the resilience of these humble Muslims, whose resolute piety seemed reminiscent of his own Quaker faith. He did not have the heart to turn them away.

With pilgrims in tow, the army made its way through ‘flat country densely covered with camels, grazing in great herds upon the everlasting tamarisk’, guarded by a lone herdsman armed with a matchlock, sword and shield. Harlan was fascinated by these ungainly but hardy beasts, and he began to take copious notes of their habits and peculiarities, their food, character, milk, speed, voice and gait. The camel might be mocked as a horse designed by committee, but the committee had done its research and this peculiar animal was ideally adapted to its world. Harlan described it in his own intimate, inimitable style:

The camel is a great eater of fresh forage, with which he swells himself out thoroughly. He browses throughout the day, resting during the noon heat, and ruminates immediately after he ceases to feed. His forage sometimes ferments upon the stomach when his eructations become disgustingly offensive. When his food is digested he has a habit of gritting his teeth. Nothing can be more vociferous than the camel in his intercourse with man; he never allows his person to be touched either to load or unload without roaring louder and not unlike a tiger. The simultaneous preparations of the camp followers when about to march with the roaring camels creates a tremendous uproar and noise that rouses all the camp however desirous one may be to indulge undisturbed in the sweet luxury of a matin slumber. The horse is an excellent carrying beast but the camel less costly, more hardy, surer, is better adapted to the poor man, and his slow methodical gait is congenial to his driver’s indolent habits. His great strength and a rude diet make him an invaluable auxiliary. He is a hard working creature and when in health a faithful attendant, but he has a delicate temperament. The camel is perfectly docile in his temper and of admirable tractability. His gait is patient, moving both feet at the same, and will go at his utmost speed one hundred miles daily in consecutive marches with proper periods of rest and food. Camel milk is nutritious and used with avidity by the tribes who have access to it. They say the matrons amongst the Arabs who are anxious for their daughters to appear attractive in the eyes of an intended husband cause the affianced bride to drink freely and profusely of it until the victim rapidly increasing in obesity becomes grossly fat. In that state, the lady is an object of admiration.

Over the years Harlan would assemble an immense dossier on camel behaviour. Afghan camels, like the fruits of Kabul, would become a fixation.

A march of three days brought the troop to Surgur, the fiefdom of one Asad Khan, who duly appeared with food and forage in abundance as the men were making camp. Asad Khan was a striking figure in full tribal regalia, a great beard reaching to his waist and a long talwar thrust in his belt. This was the first Afghan chief Harlan had met, and he was struck that his ferocious-looking visitor made no demands in return for his generosity except ‘a request for medicine modestly proffered’. Hitherto the army had encountered only the tribes of the Indus valley, but now Harlan was entering the country of the Pathans, the frontier tribe ruled by an uncompromising code of personal honour valuing hospitality and revenge above all else. Winston Churchill, who encountered the Pathans in 1897 as a twenty-two-year-old soldier, wrote: ‘The Pathan tribes are always engaged in public or private war. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.’ Pukhtunwali, the way of the Pathans, was strict and uncompromising: anyone seeking asylum or hospitality, even an enemy, should be welcomed, and any injury or insult, or offence to a Pathan’s personal honour, should be met with retaliation. In time, Harlan would adopt much of the code as his own.

Word of Harlan’s medical skill travelled ahead of him, and every morning a line of sick and injured people could now be found waiting silently outside his tent. ‘During my frequent halts, numbers of the people applied for medical aid, upon all of whom I conferred the benefit of my clinical experience,’ wrote Harlan, who never turned a patient away. Eye diseases, and particularly cataracts, were endemic. In some cases Harlan was able to restore the sight of cataract sufferers by means of a simple operation. ‘My fame in this particular department of surgery had been conveyed from one to another, until the miracle of curing blindness by the touch was accredited to me,’ he wrote with some embarrassment. His cataract operation was crude in the extreme, requiring only ‘a steel lancet, a copper needle similar to a bodkin’ and a steady hand. One such operation was particularly memorable:

An elderly woman came to me who had been totally blind many years. When I alluded to the precarious nature of remedial measures and told her the painful nature of the means by which she could hope for relief, she promptly replied, with a firmness of invincible decision: ‘Why should I fear? Am I not an Avghaun?’ The lens of the right eye was depressed, the patient refusing to have her head restrained. She remained unmoved as the point of the lancet penetrated the eye, and in a moment the light of day again illumed the vision that had been so long extinguished. I told her to look up, which she did, and with a calm and pious fervour she ejaculated her gratitude to Heaven. I desired to apply the usual dressings, consisting of a compress and bandage lightly bound, but she resisted and explained: ‘Let me first look upon the face of my deliverer to whom I owe a second creation.’ She prostrated herself before me with expressions of devout adoration whilst I endeavoured to proceed with the bandaging.

Having given instructions for her convalescence, Harlan told the delighted woman she should now go home.

This she would by no means agree to, insisting that I would ‘thrust the lancet into the other eye’. I found it impossible to satisfy her importunity without complying with her request as she repeated ‘I am an Avghaun. Proceed. I fear nothing.’ After the operation she rose up from the carpet upon which she had been seated, invoked endless blessings upon myself and posterity for seven generations, and suffered herself to be led away, repeating as she walked off with surprising self-confidence in her step and exultation in her voice: ‘God is great! Thanks and praise be to God, and blessing on the Christian!’

After a three-day pause the party resumed its progress up the west bank of the Indus towards Dera Ismail Khan, passing through a landscape of desert scrub, jungle and rocky outcrops. The few inhabitants seemed peaceable, but food and forage were becoming scarce. Harlan always offered to pay for what he needed, a gesture that puzzled the locals, who were more used to being pillaged than paid: ‘Their surprise at just treatment from one who had the power to exact submission gave proofs of the misery through which the poor here struggle against the oppressors of their race.’ To supplement the increasingly sparse diet Harlan resorted to his fowling piece, providing the pot with hare, partridges, doves and other birds. A crack shot, he had caught the British passion for hunting, the shikar, in India, and such forays provided opportunities to study the local flora, while killing some of its fauna.

Lean as a wolf, Harlan carried the privations lightly, and like Alexander he declined to eat when his men were hungry. ‘A man may fast throughout the day without much concern for his comfort. He may in some measure for a limited period dull the hungry edge of appetite with bare imagination of a feast,’ he wrote cheerfully, quoting Shakespeare’s Richard II. ‘One substantial meal in twenty-four hours taken about bedtime will supply the wants of life during that period.’ The men grumbled when there was not enough food to fill the dekshies for the evening meal, but Harlan was far more concerned that the animals should be properly fed, giving rice from his private store to the horses when there was no grain to be had.

Finally the tired troops struggled into Dera Ismail Khan, a trading post on the upper Indus, inhabited mainly by Baluchis. The town had been conquered by Baluchi chiefs in the sixteenth century and now came under the rule of Ranjit Singh. Standing out from the Baluchis and Sikhs were numerous Afghan traders from the mountains, ‘large, and boney men, with long, coarse hair, loose turbans, and sheepskin cloaks: plain, and rough, but pleasing in their manners’. There was another exotic species in Dera Ismail Khan that was far harder to pick out from the crowd: the ‘news-writers’, creatures peculiar to imperial India, who combined the roles of gossip, journalist, undercover agent and spy. Native news-writers gathered information, usually of a political nature, and secretly sold it to whoever would pay them. Captain Wade and Ranjit Singh both deployed networks of newswriters to tell them whose star was rising and whose was falling, who had murdered whom, the blood feuds, plots and dynastic marriages that formed the convoluted politics of the region. Such unofficial reports were invaluable, although often wildly inaccurate. As Harlan observed: ‘These people are employed to furnish the daily report of occurrences and form a numerous body in the service of chiefs and princes who require to be informed of their neighbours’ designs. By means of bribery they gain access to the most direct springs of action, one or more of them being always stationed as spies upon the actions of every leader or man of note.’ Harlan now became aware, probably through a rival newswriter, that he was under surveillance, his movements being reported back to Ranjit Singh in Lahore. ‘One of these worthies, I had good reason to believe, had followed in the rear of my march from the day I left Loodianah and was still secretly engaged in this clandestine employment.’ This unnamed spy was about to make Harlan’s life very difficult indeed. Ranjit Singh, the Prince of the Punjab and Shah Shujah’s onetime jailer, appears to have been aware of Harlan’s plans to restore Shujah from the moment he left British-controlled India. Ranjit detested Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler in Kabul, but equally he had no desire to see the exiled king return to power. He had therefore sent instructions to the various princes along Harlan’s route, who held their territories as fiefdoms of the Sikh potentate, to treat the American with extreme care but to give no encouragement to any plan for the restoration of Shujah. He had also told his feudal underlings that the feringhee should not be permitted to remain ‘anywhere within their territories for a longer period than the ordinary necessities of an amateur traveller might suggest’.

This had placed the nawab of Dera Ismail Khan in a most uncomfortable position. The nawab was a Saddozai, a cousin of Shah Shujah himself, and thus favourable to the restoration of the exiled king. Like other chiefs, he chafed under Sikh domination. But equally he was anxious not to antagonise Ranjit Singh, who would welcome an excuse to oust him and annex Dera Ismail Khan. The nawab’s messenger duly appeared before Harlan with a gift of three hundred rupees to explain, delicately, that while the visitor was most welcome, it would be altogether better if he left quickly. Harlan tried to reassure the nawab’s envoy that he would soon be travelling on to Peshawar, but at this the man looked doubtful. There were, he explained, only three ways to get past the exceptionally hostile Afghan tribes between Dera and Peshawar: bribery, violence or stealth. ‘The road to Peshawar would be unpassable through the mountain tribes by any party which was too numerous for disguise,’ he explained, ‘whilst our force was not sufficient to effect a passage by arms.’ One might try to buy a way through, he added, but the mountain tribes were treacherous and cruel, and likely to assume that if a traveller was rich enough to pay a bribe, then he was certainly worth robbing.

Idly, the man observed that the Rohillah garrison at Tak had mutinied for lack of pay. If Harlan had money, he might enlist these men as a guard against the mountain tribes. Harlan was astonished. ‘This was the first intimation I had received of the movements of my agents at Tak,’ he wrote. Did the nawab know that the mutiny had been instigated by Harlan himself? Was this some sort of ploy? Harlan carefully cross-examined his informant, but concluded that he had no suspicions as to the true cause of the mutiny.

That night, the Rohillah commander from Tak presented himself in person. Dusty and bedraggled from the thirty-mile ride, he saluted and declared, in Harlan’s words, that he and his three hundred men were ‘mad with the prospect of entering my service’. Subsequent questioning, however, revealed that the mutiny was still at the negotiating stage. If Harlan would send his sepoys, the Rohillah told him, the fortress could be taken with ease. For the first time Harlan began to have misgivings. How did this fellow expect a handful of men to accomplish a result that was beyond his three hundred Rohillahs? Even more worrying was the demeanour of Gul Khan. Harlan summoned the scarred old fighter to a private council of war, but found him distinctly unwarlike. Was this not the moment to launch a full-scale assault on the fortress, Harlan asked. Gul Khan looked at his feet. Perhaps Gul Khan might care to go to Tak and coordinate the mutiny in person? Once more, Gul Khan demurred: he would not be able to live with himself, he said, ‘if any misfortune happened to Saheb’. The Rohillahs could not be relied on, added the old mercenary, and Tak was miles away, ‘near the mountains which are inhabited by spirits and demons’.

Perhaps Gul Khan was right, Harlan pondered: ‘Caution is creditable where desperation does not marshal our designs. Those who have no other hope may be justly desperate: To win or lose, to sink or swim as fortune may approve, death or victory.’ This was not yet the moment for a desperate gamble. Even so, Gul Khan’s spinelessness was not encouraging. The Rohillah from Tak was handed a thousand rupees, an advance against the five thousand payable if the mutiny was successful, and instructed to return to the fortress. While he organised the mutiny, Harlan would slowly advance on Tak and lead, if necessary, an assault in support of the mutineers.

The following day, after stocking up on powder and lead shot at the town bazaar, Harlan led his men out of Dera and set out for Tak, ‘still holding the Indus on my right within a convenient distance to secure a retreat in case of adverse results in the audacious enterprise’. He was not leaving Dera a moment too soon, for strange stories were circulating, and the nawab’s behaviour had become increasingly unfriendly. ‘He had been informed that I possessed a wonderful missile of violence which could be thrown into the area of a fort by the hand where its explosion would cause the death of the garrison and blow down the walls in an instant.’ In addition to this magical hand-grenade, the feringhee was said to possess other weapons of mass destruction, including a rapid-assembly cannon whose parts could be put together at a moment’s notice. Even more worrying, from the nawab’s point of view, there was a rumour that Shah Shujah himself was hiding inside one of Harlan’s trunks. The gossip was patently absurd, but it was enough to convince the already nervous nawab that Harlan represented a serious threat to his own security.

Fourteen miles out of Dera, Harlan made camp in the ruins of an ancient fortress known as Kafir Qila, or Fort of the Infidel, to await word on the progress of the mutiny. From the low hill the plain stretched away to mountains, the dense jungle of dwarf tamarisk broken here and there by patches of cultivation. Herds of camels and goats browsed among the thorn trees, and small plumes of white smoke rose quietly into the still air from the fires of unseen herdsmen. In this landscape, unchanged for centuries, Harlan reflected that his tented encampment made an improbable tribute to American endeavour.

Over the principal tent, a few feet above the apex, the American flag displayed its stars and stripes, flickering in the quietly drifting breeze. There were no villages in sight but the curling smoke told of many abodes, and the tinkling bells of the flocks that fed unheedingly in the waste, broke the desolation of the scene. In the midst of that wild landscape, the flag of America seemed a dreamy illusion of the imagination, but it was the harbinger of enterprise which distance, space and time had not appalled, for the undaunted sons of Columbia are second to no people in the pursuit of adventure where ever the world is trodden by man.

Waiting anxiously for news from Tak, Harlan decided to hold a dress parade of his troops. ‘A hundred men in a single rank dressed in the costume of Rohillahs, armed with long matchlocks sloped over their left shoulder, Hindustani swords and shields, some with the addition of pistols thrust into the waist belt and a few with blunderbusses.’ To the right of the line, in rather more regimental order, the uniformed sepoys were drawn up, with musket and bayonet. His officers, Harlan observed, were also a mixed bag: ‘Two Europeans in military habits and forage caps with English broadswords suspended from their belts attended in advance of the line, accompanied by a portly Rohillah minus the left hand.’

Harlan studied Gul Khan’s expression, and did not like what he saw. The mercenary ‘gazed wistfully towards the mountains, his bleared right eye partially closed, as he stood grasping the stump of his arm in his hand’. Gul Khan’s anxiety seemed to have affected the troops, for ‘silent expectation and enquiring glances amongst the men expressed apprehension and doubt’.

Dismissing the troops, Harlan summoned Gul Khan into his tent. ‘Gool Khan,’ he began, ‘you are an old soldier and if report speaks truly, a brave man. My confidence in you has been unbounded. To you as a native acquainted with the country and the people I submitted the direction of my will.’ Why, Harlan demanded, had the Rohillah turned down the opportunity to launch an assault on Tak? ‘Had you not discountenanced my determination to proceed in person to attack, Sirwa Khan would now have been my prisoner, the fortress in our possession, the King proclaimed and the whole country forthwith up in arms for the royal cause.’

Gul Khan’s self-defence was a masterpiece of ‘querulous loquacity’, rising in a crescendo. ‘Death to the King’s enemies and may his salt become dirt in the mouths of traitors! Tell me where death is the reward of duty, and I swear by your salt, an instant’s hesitation shall not delay the execution of Your Highness’s will. Now, this instant, speak but the word and the Saheb’s slave is ready!’

But Harlan had by now heard enough of Gul Khan’s belligerent bombast. ‘’Tis too late,’ he said, glumly. ‘I apprehend the scheme has failed, for good news would have reached our camp quickly if Tak has fallen. This long silence can proceed only from hesitating cowardice.’ Gul Khan said nothing, but ‘raised his arms in an attitude of respectful supplication, his right hand grasping the stump of his mutilated limb’, and backed out of the tent.

Harlan’s gloomy prediction proved only too accurate. The next morning, a message arrived from the Rohillah officer at Talc he was ready to order the mutiny, but only if Harlan would send his regular soldiers and force Sirwa Khan to pay their arrears. Harlan exploded. ‘Traitors and cowards! I offered to enlist them! Do you see those mountains before us? Can such wretches, who are unable to seize an empty fortress, scale those heights and force the fortresses in possession of savage robbers? They have proved themselves women in the affairs of men. Such retainers I need not. I know their value.’ He gave the order to march within the hour: he would storm Tak himself.

Still spitting with rage, Harlan had buckled on his sword and was loading his pistols when loyal Drigpal, the jemadar in command of the sepoys, appeared at the tent door, out of uniform and visibly distraught. The Hindu officer ‘touched his forehead with the back of his hand and then assuming an attitude of respect with his hands closed before his breast and downcast eyes’ delivered the worst possible news. The entire force of regular soldiers had deserted.

‘What? All?’ demanded Harlan incredulously.

‘With the exception of four men who are my friends and Your Highness’s slaves.’

Reeling, Harlan ordered Gul Khan to find out the extent of this desertion, then slumped into a chair, declaring: ‘Let everyone retire, and leave me to myself.’ Gul Khan returned a few moments later. The sepoys had indeed vanished, he said, defecting en masse to the nawab of Dera Ismail Khan, who had secretly sent agents to recruit them. ‘The fears of these people were excited by the dangerous nature of our enterprise,’ wrote Harlan bitterly, ‘and they accepted the Nawab’s offer of service, deserting in a cowardly and traitorous manner at the moment of active necessity.’

The Rohillahs were still at their posts, but Harlan perceived that ‘an air of despondency prevailed amongst the remaining soldiers, who consisted now principally of lawless adventurers of the worst class’. To make matters worse, he suspected that his one-handed lieutenant was double-dealing. ‘The conduct and management of Gool Khan appeared incompetent, selfish and suspicious,’ particularly as he had refused to lead the mutineers in an assault on Tak. Surrounded by heavily armed and probably mutinous mercenaries, reliant on a man whose loyalty was seriously in doubt, hundreds of miles from British India and with the local chief conspiring against him, Harlan found even his granite optimism beginning to crumble. ‘My affairs,’ he wrote with splendid understatement, ‘began to assume a dangerous and gloomy aspect, [which] induced me to contemplate a retreat.’

The next morning the situation became even darker, when Gul Khan reported that the Englishman Charles Masson had also vanished, decamping surreptitiously before daybreak. This new desertion, Harlan decided, was also the work of the nawab’s agents. Certainly Masson later recorded that he had spent several weeks in Dera Ismail Khan, where he was handsomely entertained, but it is equally possible that the eccentric Englishman had merely wandered off alone. Either way, Harlan was furious, and deeply hurt by what he regarded as Masson’s rank treachery. The two men would meet again. Having briefly been friends, they would henceforth be the most bitter enemies.

John Brown, solid and dependable, remained at Harlan’s side, but Masson’s disloyalty had convinced the American that the time had come to take ‘measures that should allay the storm rising around me, threatening to involve in its turmoil the personal security of our party’. Once more he wondered whether to lead an attack on Tak with his remaining forces, but that, he reflected, would be a huge and unnecessary gamble. ‘I was restrained from doing so only by the extravagance and desperation of the enterprise. My resources were numerous and my prospects sufficiently encouraging to forbid placing all my aspirations upon the result of a forlorn hope. Had I been desperate, the affair of Tak would have been a final determination, and must have decided my fortunes either to sink or swim, but there remained many other ways of accomplishing my designs more feasible, if not less dangerous.’ The idea of retreat was anathema. He would push on, whatever the danger. ‘From the latter it will appear I never shrank,’ he later wrote. ‘Indeed, incidents of that nature accrued during my intrigues at Kabul in 1828 surpassing all my previous conceptions.’