Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King. Ben Macintyre

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ