Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  Just as they entered the gorge [. . .] a sudden gust of wind brought on such a cloud of snow, as to conceal the Mullah and a little girl riding on a couple of yaks, from the mountaineer who attended them as their guide. The latter threw himself on the ground, that he might not be blown off his feet, and upon getting up when the blast had ceased, saw the yaks without their riders: they had been blown off their seats apparently, and were buried beneath the snow. After some delay the bodies were found: the girl recovered, but the old man was dead.

  Because the mullah was also a man of property, his companions had felt it necessary to carry his body for forty days to Yarkand, in order to satisfy the Chinese authorities that he had not been murdered for his possessions.

  On the rare occasions when Moorcroft and his companions ventured out of Leh into the hills, ‘we were advised to be on our guard against hyaenas, who sometimes descend from the mountains at night, and to whom our baggage asses would be an acceptable prey’. Far from finding thoroughbred horses on these expeditions, he only encountered the ‘kiang’ horses, which he described as ‘neither a horse nor an ass [. . .] his shape is as much like the one as the other’. The locals shot and trapped them and once he was presented with the head and feet and part of the skin of a kiang. His stud farm mission seemed a long way off and his absence from his post was once again becoming embarrassingly long.

  By the end of 1822, it was clear that the Chinese were never going to allow him to travel through Yarkand. According to Gary Alder’s scholarly and comprehensive life of Moorcroft, a wall painting had been erected there with a representation of a European (a virtually unknown species in those parts) and an invitation to seize the possessions and send the head of anyone looking like that to the Chinese authorities! Moorcroft finally had to consider his fall-back route to reach Bokhara. However much he had fallen out with Ranjit Singh, the latter’s formal permission for him to travel through Kashmir and the Punjab was still nominally valid. So he now decided that this was the way he must go, passing on through Peshawar and the Khyber Pass to Kabul and the Hindu Kush, across the Oxus, and on through Balkh to Bokhara. It was not only a very roundabout way, but it also involved travelling through the territory of the dreaded Murad Beg (whose capital was Kunduz) and some of the most hostile country in Central Asia.

  The first stage of the journey into Kashmir was not without its incidents. At one point, one of the horses carrying their equipment fell into a river and Moorcroft’s much-prized collapsible bed was washed away downstream, and his notebooks damaged by being soaked. More seriously, on the Dras river (between Leh and Srinagar) his horse fell from an icy track ‘and we both pitched sideways upon a large slab of jasper, from the polished surface of which we rolled rapidly down a steep slope covered with snow [. . .] a slight check in our progress enabled me to disengage my feet from the stirrups but one leg remained tightly girthed [. . .] and the horse continued to slide along the slope dragging me down after him’. They ended up within a few feet of the edge of a precipice overlooking the river, Moorcroft badly battered but still able to carry on. As if that were not enough for one day, when they reached the small town of Dras they found that a party of armed bandits, led by the Raja of Hasora, had swept down the previous night and pillaged the settlement, leaving many injured behind them. Predictably, it fell to Moorcroft to use his veterinarian and medical skills to patch up the wounded and organize the construction of a stockade in the snow, while his Tibetan wolfhounds ranged outside the stockade to scare off any potential repetition of the raid. For one reason and another, he was delayed for ten days at Dras – the very first leg of his formidable itinerary.

  He stayed much longer – over-wintering in fact – at Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. Here he had to replenish his provisions and re-equip himself and his party for the arduous crossing of Afghanistan. Fortunately, Ranjit Singh did not unduly interfere with his visitor’s plans. He undoubtedly would have done if he had known the extent of Moorcroft’s espionage activities, how he was reporting in detail on the viability of routes through Kashmir into India from the north, and how he was speculating that Ranjit Singh might himself hand over Kashmir to the Russians as part of a wider deal. Indeed, Moorcroft was at his most neurotic during his stay at Srinagar, even imagining that a group of Frenchmen, who were actually residing there to train the Kashmiri army, were themselves tsarist agents preparing for just such a Russian invasion. Moorcroft’s letters back to India about this would once again have put his life in danger had they been intercepted by Ranjit Singh’s people; but they were not, and nor did they seem to have any effect on their recipients in India, who were wearying of Moorcroft’s endless and rambling warnings.

  When it came to leaving Kashmir, all Moorcroft’s earlier suspicions of Ranjit Singh surfaced again as one reason after another was put forward to prevent him and Trebeck from actually getting away. Even when the local chiefs stopped objecting to his departure, practical difficulties in the form of obstruction by the camel loaders and camel drivers cropped up in a sinisterly premeditated way. Just as before in Ladakh he had feared that he might be heading for an oubliette in Lahore, so now he feared that ‘a mine would spring up under our feet before our party could reach Peshawar’. And this was exactly what appeared to happen.

  Moorcroft and his party had crossed the Indus River near the fort at Attock and were nearing the outer extremity of Ranjit Singh’s sphere of influence at the village of Akora, which was known to be the haunt of Khatak tribal gangs with a reputation for attacking passing caravans. Moorcroft’s extensive party was likely to have attracted particular attention as unhelpful reports had been put around to the effect that the chests strapped on the camels (in reality holding medicines and ammunition) were stuffed with gold and rubies. Moorcroft’s memoirs (edited by Horace Wilson and published by John Murray in 1841) give a vivid account of what occurred:

  Upon loading our cattle the following morning, we saw a small body of horsemen assembled on the line of our route, and a message was sent to us from the Naib [the deputy leader of the Khataks] forbidding our advance, on pain of being immediately attacked. To this we determined to pay no regard; but before we moved the strength of the party had increased to about two hundred horse, and one hundred foot, whilst a mob of seven or eight hundred had issued behind us from the town. We nevertheless commenced our march, dividing our small party into two bodies, one in advance, and the other in the rear, with the camels and baggage in the centre. The road was intersected by a ravine, which about seventy or eighty of the Khatak infantry were detached to occupy; but the head of our party gained the edge of it at the same time, and threatening, if they opposed, to open fire upon the Khataks, from a small piece of ordnance with the advance, they retired with great precipitation upon a body of horsemen in their rear.

  At this stage the Naib, seeing Moorcroft was determined to proceed come what may, ordered his men off. But even then it was not the end of the affair, as some of the tribal horsemen turned up a couple of miles further down the track; but by the end of the day, Moorcroft was beyond their reach. And also – he concluded – beyond the reach of Ranjit Singh’s retribution. Often slightly paranoid about plots against him – be they Russian or Punjabi – Moorcroft may have imagined the hand of the unfriendly raja behind this final attack as he was leaving his territory for good; it may have been merely a greedy attempt to grab the caravan’s loot by the notoriously predatory Khataks. Be that as it may, the only fatal casualty his party had suffered in the Punjab was the death of one of his servants resulting from a snake bite, which Moorcroft – despite his promptly killing the snake and lancing the fatal incision – was unable to prevent.

  By the night of 7 December 1823 Moorcroft and his entire party were firmly in Afghanistan. While at Peshawar (at that time within Afghanistan) a letter caught up with him from the authorities in Calcutta. It was a clear letter of recall, stating that as he had little prospect now of completing his mission and as he was urgently required back at the stud, he
should ‘make preparation for returning to the British provinces as soon as practicable’. The letter went on to say that only if he had already reached Kabul ‘or the vicinity of that place’ could he be permitted to carry on his journey to Bokhara. This was a chance for Moorcroft to return honourably to India and his well-paid job if he wanted to do so. But he did not; he was still intent on reaching Bokhara, finding the long-sought Turkoman horses, opening up further trade routes, and assessing the military and commercial threat to Afghanistan and beyond from Russia. Apart from the horses, none of these objectives were shared by his masters in Calcutta. Moorcroft resolved to ignore – or at least misinterpret to his own convenience – his instructions: he decided that Peshawar, although more than two hundred miles across difficult country from Kabul, could be described as within the kingdom of Kabul and so he qualified as being ‘in the vicinity of that place’. He would ignore the letter of recall.

  It was already June 1824 when Moorcroft and his party traversed the Khyber Pass and entered what is now Afghanistan proper. The locals – then as almost ever since – had a bad reputation for laying ambushes, but he felt the escort that he was offered was of almost as dubious a character as the Khyber tribesmen themselves. The latter he described as ‘tall for mountaineers, and of a singularly Jewish cast of features’, and – as always having an eye for the ladies – he found ‘some of the young women had an arch, lively look, but we saw none that could be regarded as pretty’. He believed he was the first Englishman to travel through the pass, so he took more than usually careful notes of its potential as an invasion route or as a defensive feature. He refers, for instance, to the difficulty of getting cannon through the pass. There were mishaps – the demise of two of his dogs who succumbed to heatstroke: ‘the wind was as scorching as if it had been blown from a blacksmith’s forge’, he recorded. Nor were the precincts of the pass a region where he felt he could sleep safely in camp; being continually alert by night, he became unnaturally sleepy by day and often dozed off in the saddle. Despite these precautions, they were surreptitiously robbed of a number of items; one of the party had his pistol taken from his holster by the man holding his horse as he dismounted, and ‘due to the remissness of the sentries’ Trebeck had a pistol stolen from under his pillow as he slept.

  When Moorcroft reached Kabul itself, he found the city in its customary state of intrigue, plotting and counter-plotting. He and his party were to some extent a shuttlecock between the rival factions, being alternately the subject of excessive customs demands and special immunity from any customs payments. The confused political scene did not prevent Moorcroft appreciating the strategic importance of Afghanistan; he singled out Shah Shuja as a likely pro-British candidate for the Afghan throne – a view which was later to be shared by others with disastrous effects. Meanwhile matters moved from bad to worse, with open fighting breaking out in the streets of Kabul between rival factions. Taking advantage of a peaceful interval in this civil confusion, Moorcroft prepared his party to move on. But a number of locally engaged members of his team chose the moment to desert and make their own way back to India or elsewhere, including some of his hitherto-staunch Gurkha escorts. It was mid-August before he managed finally to get clear of Kabul and head off into the foothills of the Hindu Kush. He thought that leaving the kingdom of Kabul behind him meant he had weathered the most dangerous stage of his whole journey to Bokhara, but he had reckoned without Murad Beg at Kunduz.

  Moorcroft feared being caught up in a civil war, and his baggage with its imagined riches being seized as a source of pay-roll money by one side or the other. However, ‘man-stealing’ as it was then called – kidnapping for ransom as it would now be known – was to become the main risk as they approached Kunduz. In fact one of Moorcroft’s men, who had been straggling behind, was grabbed and carried off very early in their time in the Hindu Kush. While they were travelling through the mountains, they slept each night in caves and were not always able to check that the caves were free of robbers and wild animals before they dropped off to sleep.3

  When they reached Tashkurghan, a little market town in the territory of Kunduz, they were disconcerted to be told by the local governor that Moorcroft was required to go eighty miles out of his way to Kunduz to present himself to the much-feared Murad Beg. Heavy hints were dropped that he would be expected to bring suitably lavish gifts with him. He set off across the bandit-infested country between Tashkurghan and Kunduz in a fairly nervous state, and on one occasion mistook – much to his embarrassment – a herd of cows for a party of raiders. A more serious setback was a message from Murad Beg that the whole of Moorcroft’s party was to follow him to Kunduz, and they were all to be corralled under the authority of the notorious slave-dealer.

  Murad Beg received Moorcroft in audience soon after his arrival at Kunduz, and from his close and unfriendly questioning it was clear that he thought his visitor was engaged in espionage and also in possession of a vast treasure trove. Having dismissed Moorcroft, he subsequently questioned his Persian secretary in even greater detail: ‘With regard to myself [Moorcroft recorded later] the chief remarked that he had been informed it was the practice of Europeans to send spies and secret emissaries into foreign countries, preparatory to their subjugation, and that he had been informed such was my real character’. However, Moorcroft was allowed to return to Tashkurghan, but not to leave the country until he paid extortionate customs levies on his whole caravan; days were spent at Tashkurghan trying to reach an agreed figure which would allow them to move on.

  Just when everything seemed in place and Moorcroft was about to set off on the final leg of his mission to Bokhara, Murad Beg summoned him back to Kunduz ostensibly because he wanted medical help for some wounded soldiers. He also claimed that he would be ensuring the safety of the caravan and their goods while he made enquiries into the validity of Moorcroft’s claims to be a horse-dealer and merchant rather than a spy. On arrival at Kunduz, no accommodation had been arranged for them, and Moorcroft and his party had to sleep on the floor of flea-infested quarters. As this point Moorcroft became convinced that Murad Beg’s real intention was to seize all his trading goods, animals and alleged treasure and then to prevent any word of his fate getting back to India. It was a terrifying prospect. It seemed it was here rather than in Lahore that he would disappear without trace. He could not help recalling that Murad Beg’s reputation included the murder of his uncle and his own brother, the handing over of his sister and daughter to the lustful purposes of a robber chief, and the selling into slavery of discarded concubines from his own harem. Consideration could hardly be expected from such a host, particularly once his greed had been awakened.

  After so much enforced detention in Tashkurghan and Kunduz, Moorcroft and Trebeck thought seriously about trying to ‘divide our party into two bodies, and fall upon the Uzbeks in the night, disperse them, seize their horses, and make a forced march out of the territory’, fighting their way out. One drawback to this scheme was that a third European member of their party – Dr Guthrie – was not with them and would have been sacrificed to their escape. This was unacceptable to Moorcroft. He resolved instead ‘to try a different scheme; to leave my tents privately during the night, and repair to Kasdim Jan [. . .] the spiritual guide and father-in-law of Murad Beg, and implore his intercession’. This spiritual guide, on whose goodwill and influence they decided to place all their trust, lived at Talikan – a considerable ride away. So Moorcroft surreptitiously stationed three horses in a hidden spot, managed to recruit two guides, and left his tent in the night, ‘throwing an Uzbek silk dress over my own, with a sheep-skin cap upon my head, enfolded at bottom by a large turban, one end of which hung loose and the other was brought across my mouth and chin so as to conceal my face and want of beard’. Thus disguised, and ‘concealing myself as much as possible by descending into ravines and hollows’ he reached the rendezvous and set off with his guides to Talikan: ‘we mounted and galloped until we reached the foot of the mountain’ and w
ent on skirting round the edge of Kunduz at night. They passed close to a fort without being observed, and at one point his guides nearly gave the game away by lighting up their pipes.

  Eventually the terrain became too difficult for night riding, and they sheltered at the bottom of a ravine until they ‘discovered a path by which we crossed the mountain as the day was beginning to dawn’. It turned out that it was just as well they had not tried to go over the mountains at night, because at the foot of the pass they found the remains of the fire made by a party of bandits who had obviously camped there overnight. They rode on all the following day, fording rivers at the right place by waiting to see where others forded them. When they had to enter a settlement to get food for the horses, Moorcroft ‘lay down on a felt, and the guide who remained with me replied to those who inquired that I was his fellow traveller and very ill with fever’. This relieved him from the need to speak or show himself in any other way that might reveal him as a European. Once again they had to halt overnight because the guides had lost the way, and even when they re-found it they were obliged to travel through mud often up to the horses’ knees. Moorcroft’s horse was unable to manage any pace faster than a walk, because of ‘being galled by my English saddle’. All in all, dodging both the authorities and random bandits, and coping with bad weather and rough terrain, it had not been an easy two days’ ride to Talikan.