The Dark Defile Read online

  From Lahore, Burnes traveled eastward to Ludhiana, where he met the deposed Afghan brothers Zaman Shah and Shah Shuja, living there in exile. Zaman Shah complained to Burnes of the inflammation in his eyes that he had suffered ever since being blinded and begged him piteously to intercede with the governor-general to put his brother back on his throne. Shah Shuja himself, dressed in pink gauze and wearing a green velvet cap, also received Burnes, who thought him corpulent and melancholy but affable. The Afghan spoke of his hopes of soon retrieving his fortunes, adding, “Had I but my kingdom, how glad should I be to see an Englishman at Kabul and to open the road between Europe and India!” Burnes was unimpressed, writing farsightedly: “From what I learn, I do not believe the Shah possesses sufficient energy to seat himself on the throne of Kabul, and that if he did regain it, he has not the tact to discharge the duties of so difficult a situation.”

  Burnes traveled on a further hundred miles to the Himalayan hill station of Simla, where the governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, and his staff were escaping the hot weather of Calcutta and the plains. Bentinck congratulated him on his success in investigating the geography of the Indus and promised that his maps and reports would be brought to the attention of the authorities in England without delay. Burnes thought it a good moment to seek approval for a plan that had been forming in his mind of a journey to Kabul—one of Central Asia’s greatest trading entrepôts—and on through the Hindu Kush to the kingdom of Bokhara and the Caspian Sea.

  Burnes’s timing was good, though not for the reasons he might have expected. While he had been sailing up the Indus, Arthur Conolly, the quiet, religious young officer generally credited with giving the Great Game its name, had been returning overland to India after a period of sick leave in England. From St. Petersburg he had gone to Tehran, then continued eastward through Persia and some of the small Central Asian states into Afghanistan. In 1831 he had arrived in India convinced by what he had seen that the Russians might—if they succeeded in taking the strategically placed walled city of Khiva, ruled over by a mentally unstable king kept rich by slaving—be able to advance through Persia and Afghanistan down into India unless the rulers of Afghanistan could be persuaded to resist them. A powerful and united Afghanistan was, he argued, India’s best defense. The governor-general wanted to send someone quietly and unobtrusively to find out more about Afghanistan and the lands beyond. Once again, Burnes seemed an ideal candidate. He wrote jubilantly to his sister, “The Home Government have got frightened at the designs of Russia, and desired that some intelligent officer should be sent to acquire information in the countries bordering on the Oxus … and I, knowing nothing of all this, come forward and volunteer precisely for what they want.”

  In December 1831 Burnes set out from Delhi on the new mission that would shape the remainder of his life. This time his travel companions were the Indian surveyor who had accompanied him to Lahore, the army surgeon James Gerard, who had traveled extensively in the Himalayas, and an Indian servant to cook for them. He also took with him as his munshi, or secretary, a gifted young man whose life would become closely interlinked with his own: Mohan Lal, a young Hindu Brahmin from Kashmir whose father had been Elphinstone’s munshi on his mission to Shah Shuja and who was one of the first Indians to receive an English-language education. At Burnes’s request, Mohan Lal kept a diary of their journey.

  To avoid attention Burnes traveled simply, with the minimum of baggage. Pausing in Lahore, he was again lavishly entertained by Ranjit Singh, who invited him tiger hunting and to wild drinking parties at which tipsy dancing girls “tore and fought with each other.” The Sikh ruler was openly curious about the purpose of Burnes’s new journey, but, knowing his loathing for the Afghans, Burnes merely said that he was making a leisurely journey home to Britain and was vague about his intended route. A month later, Burnes and his companions were on the road again, having shaved their heads and donned turbans, long, flowing robes and sandals, and each taking only one saddlebag. At Attock they crossed the Indus and three miles farther on entered Afghan territory.

  Their next destination was Peshawar, held by Sultan Mohammed Khan, rival and half brother of Dost Mohammed, who acknowledged Ranjit Singh as his overlord. Knowing they risked being robbed by bandits, Burnes secreted his few valuables, tying a bag of coins around his waist, fastening his passport to his right arm and disguising a letter of credit to look like an amulet which he wore on his left arm. However, they reached Peshawar unmolested. Sultan Mohammed Khan proved a good host, ordering his Kashmiri cook to make them sumptuous pulaos. Burnes thought him “an educated, well-bred gentleman, whose open and affable manner made the most lasting impression … his seraglio has about thirty inmates, and he has already had a family of sixty children. He could not tell me the exact number of survivors when I asked him!” Hearing where he was bound, Sultan Mohammed Khan urged Burnes to abandon his journey, warning that if he traveled to Bokhara “nothing could save [him] from the ferocious and man-selling Uzbeks: the country, the people, everything was bad.” Burnes was not dissuaded but took Sultan Mohammed Khan’s advice to dress yet more simply. In the bazaar the party bought the cheapest clothes they could find. Burnes dyed his beard black and henceforth called himself “Sekundur,” Persian for Alexander, and claimed to be an Armenian. The Hindu Mohan Lal took the Muslim name Hassan Jan.

  In mid-April the party set out for Kabul. Warned to avoid the Khyber Pass because of the wild Khyberee tribesmen infesting it, Burnes and his companions followed another route along the swift-flowing Khyber River, crossing it twice, once on “a frail and unsafe” raft which bore them a mile downstream before they were able to gain the opposite bank while their horses and pack animals swam across. After a week’s hard journeying they found themselves plodding across the bone-dry, stony plain toward the town of Jalalabad. Burnes was told that in the summer months a hot wind known as the simoom scoured the land, driving men and animals insane and putrefying their living bodies. The only remedy was water poured violently down the victim’s throat or a mixture of sugar and dried Bokhara plums. Burnes was skeptical but thought the plain a fearsome place best avoided in the summer heat.

  From Jalalabad, which Burnes thought one of the dirtiest places he had ever seen, they moved on to Gandamack, where, according to the Afghans, the cooler climes began. Passing shepherds driving their flocks up to the summer pasturelands, they reached Kabul on 1 May 1832, to be welcomed by another of Dost Mohammed’s half brothers, Nawab Jubbar Khan—a man of great influence over the Barakzai clan and known as a good friend to Europeans. He installed Burnes and his party in a wing of his mansion—not a moment too soon for Dr. Gerard, who was suffering badly from dysentery.

  Almost immediately, Burnes learned of a European being detained in a nearby village and sent help. The man who arrived next day at Nawab Jubbar Khan’s house was the disputatious Joseph Wolff. Though now a British citizen and Anglican clergyman married to an English noblewoman, he had begun life as the son of a German rabbi but, as intellectually curious as he was physically restless, he had converted first to Lutherism, then to Catholicism. When his endless questions in Rome proved too much for the Papal Curia, he was bundled into a coach and deported. Arriving in England, he found that Anglicanism suited him and decided to become a missionary. His tales of travels through Central Asia, during which he had been kidnapped, robbed, shipwrecked, threatened with being burned alive and stripped of all he possessed, and especially his account of the kingdom of Bokhara, fascinated Burnes.

  Leaving Gerard to recover, Burnes and his new friend accepted an invitation to call on Dost Mohammed in the great gray fortress, the ancient Balla Hissar, overlooking the city. The Afghan leader, now in his midforties, was often described as resembling an Old Testament prophet. He had an aquiline nose, hazel-gray eyes and every Thursday had his thick beard dyed black ready for the Friday Muslim Sabbath. Seating his guests close by him, he showed a lively curiosity, questioning them about everything from how Europe’s kings coexi
sted without destroying one another, the extent of Britain’s wealth (which, he asserted, “must come from India”), whether the British had designs on Kabul, the uses of steam engines and what the Chinese were like. He then asked the purpose of Burnes’s journey and why he was dressed as he was. Burnes replied that he had a great desire to travel and was returning to Europe by way of Bokhara. He had changed his clothing for safety and comfort but had no intention of trying to conceal from Dost Mohammed that he “was an Englishman.”

  Burnes was soon enamored of populous, bustling Kabul, writing to his mother that “truly, this is a paradise.” Together with Mohan Lal he wandered the narrow winding streets of baked-mud brick houses and admired the bazaars piled with the city’s fabled fruit: grapes, pears, apples, apricots, quinces, melons and rhubarb. However, he was most interested in the people, sauntering about in sheepskin cloaks that made them look huge. Mohan Lal thought the Kabul women promiscuous despite their head-to-toe coverings and in his journal inscribed the proverb: “The flour of Peshawar is not without the mixture of barley; and the women of Kabul are not without lovers.”

  The two men visited the Armenian quarter, whose inhabitants complained that because of the prohibition on alcohol by Dost Mohammed—“a reformed drunkard”—they had lost their main means of support, though Burnes noted that wine could still be found and that it tasted like Madeira. They also explored the area in the shadow of the Balla Hissar inhabited by the Kizzilbashis, descendants of the soldiers left behind by the Persian Nadir Shah, of whom Dost Mohammed’s mother was one. However, Burnes could not linger. He had hoped to join one of the great caravans traveling north from Kabul but learned that the northern passes were still snowbound and he would have to wait. Instead, he decided to form his own small caravan and hired “a hale old man who had grown grey in crossing the Hindu Kush” as their personal cafila-bashee, or “conductor.” Nawab Jubbar Khan, who was convinced Burnes and his companions would all be slain or taken as slaves, pressed him to take with him his steward’s brother and provided Burnes with letters of introduction to the emir of Bokhara.

  At Burnes’s final meeting with Dost Mohammed, the Afghan ruler laid bare his political difficulties, including his difficult relations with his half brothers in Peshawar and Kandahar. He was especially virulent about Ranjit Singh and asked Burnes whether the British would accept his help to destroy the maharaja—a question that would bedevil Dost Mohammed’s relations with Britain and to which Burnes could only reply that the maharaja was a “friend” of the British. Changing tack, Dost Mohammed startled Burnes by offering him the command of his army, an honor he courteously declined. Before Burnes left, Dost Mohammed ordered a slave boy brought before them because he thought Burnes would want to see a member of the Kaffir tribe from the mountains north of Kabul, reputedly descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Though the boy was pale and had bluish eyes, Burnes was unconvinced he had Macedonian ancestry.

  Departing Kabul in mid-May, Burnes carried away with him an impression of Dost Mohammed as “the most rising man in Kabul”—an able man and a strong leader, far superior to Shah Shuja. He was convinced that “unless it be propped up by foreign aid,” the old Sadozai regime with its exiled figurehead Shah Shuja languishing at British expense in Ludhiana had passed away “in favour of the more vigorous Barakzais whose supremacy seemed acceptable to the people.” Events would prove him absolutely correct. However, his view of the Afghans in general was misjudged. He thought them “a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs … their ruling vice is envy … No people are more incapable of managing intrigue.”

  As Burnes and his companions trudged north through hilly country, where the snows still lay five feet deep, toward the Hindu Kush, Burnes suffered agonies of snowblindness—the burning of the cornea—from the glaring reflection of the sun on the white landscape. However, reaching the valley of Bamiyan with its two Buddhist statues, a male figure 120 feet high and a female one 70 feet tall carved into the mountainside, he was sufficiently recovered to sketch them.9 Soon they had passed from Afghan territory into lands controlled by slave-taking Uzbek tribes, fanatical in their observance of Sunni Islam. Burnes and his party had to be very careful not to cause offense. After being warned that they should never sleep with their feet toward Mecca, “which would be evincing [their] contempt for that holy place,” Burnes took the precaution of consulting his compass indoors as well as out. He also trimmed the central part of his mustache to avoid being taken for a Shia Muslim.

  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 t
hat “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.