Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  But it turned out to have been worth it. When they reached Talikan, the spiritual guide – or Khaja as he was known – quickly agreed to receive Moorcroft, who takes up the tale in his memoirs:

  I passed through a low porch formed of mats, and entered a circular chamber, on one side of which, close to the door, the saint was seated. I made the customary salutation, which was received with courtesy. I stated I was in some embarrassment as to what I had to state, as it concerned a person with whom he was closely connected. The Khaja desired me to speak freely. I accordingly entered into a full detail of the vexatious detention and extortion to which I had been subjected by Murad Beg, after having been encouraged by him to enter his dominions, and threw myself on the equity and commiseration of the Khaja.

  To all this, the holy man listened attentively and then, after a few questions, assured Moorcroft that he could count on his good offices. The fact that Moorcroft ‘had thrown himself upon his protection and had become his guest’ made such help a moral obligation. He further demonstrated his difference from his greedy son-in-law by returning the rich gifts presented to him by Moorcroft.

  While he was awaiting developments, Moorcroft was approached by an emissary of Murad Beg, who tried to lure him out of the holy man’s house to ‘have some private conversation’. Moorcroft very sensibly declined to leave his sanctuary without the express protection of the holy man; by this precaution he was told ‘he had taken the only steps that could have saved us’ from being promptly abducted and taken back in custody to face the wrath and avarice of Murad Beg. Further attempts were made to lure Moorcroft out, ostensibly to show him some fine horses, but he remained adamant. Further envoys were also sent to prejudice the holy man against Moorcroft, including a man whose ‘countenance was sharp and intelligent, but strongly expressive of malevolence’ and who was accusing Moorcroft of various subterfuges. At this juncture, Moorcroft requested a second audience with the holy man in the presence of his accuser. The latter then maintained that Moorcroft was not a trader or a vet, but a general in the East India Company’s army, and that he had been travelling on espionage missions for the past eight years. Even the holy man – the least military-minded of men – could understand that a general did not act as a spy, and that neither did a general desert his command for eight years at a stretch. A furious debate ensued, with the malevolent envoy accusing Moorcroft of ‘taking the likenesses of mountains, rivers, towns and forts’ and making illustrations of these features to help an invading army. This Englishman, he declared, had subverted the whole of Tibet and Kashmir, had imposed a levy on the Punjab and had stirred up trouble in Afghanistan – quite an achievement for a single individual! Winding up his peroration, he ‘exclaimed at the top of his voice, and with a most satanic expression of countenance: ‘‘If you will not plunder and slay him, send him back to his own country!’’’. Moorcroft for his part admitted to taking notes, and to the fact that other British ‘government newsreaders’ did the same as ‘the necessity of counteracting the designs of the King of the French, who had declared his intention of marching to invade British India’ (it was still only a few years after Waterloo); he also reminded his listeners that a whole host of merchants from Kabul and elsewhere could testify to his commercial credentials. It was Moorcroft whose protestations carried the day; the holy man concluded: ‘The Englishman has spoken truth – thou falsehood – get thee hence!’

  After this verdict, Moorcroft’s accuser slunk away and rode back to Kunduz. Moorcroft himself retired to his apartment, where the holy man came to call on him shortly afterwards. The Khaja wasted no time in explaining to Moorcroft that – however pleased he might be to have won the argument – he should remember that he the Khaja ‘was only a Fakir, and that my enemy was a powerful chief’. Moorcroft did what he could to reassure the holy man of his moral influence and power, but the Khaja pointed out that ‘the exercise of that authority would dissolve the union which had hitherto subsisted between them [Murad Beg and his father-in-law], and would create him many enemies’. He therefore wanted to patch up an agreement which would leave Murad Beg with his dignity and cupidity at least to some extent gratified. A further payment was proposed as the answer. Advice was sought. After debate, an initial suggestion of a further six thousand rupees was reduced to two thousand, and a messenger was sent off to Kunduz with this offer as the price for Moorcroft and his party being allowed to leave peacefully for Bokhara. The messenger was forestalled by the unexpected arrival of Murad Beg himself in Talikan; the chief was at first disinclined to accept the proposed settlement and was demanding vast quantities of rubies, but his father-in-law (the holy man) eventually persuaded him to accept the earlier proposal with some modest modification. But even then the saga was not over; Murad Beg said that as he was about to set off on a military marauding excursion he could not allow Moorcroft to leave ‘lest his [Murad Beg’s] movements should be made known’.

  Moorcroft sensibly declined a suggestion that he should return to Kunduz to await the chief’s return from campaign, and opted instead to extend his sojourn with the Khaja at Talikan. Prolonging his visit had one unforeseen consequence: he became disillusioned about the nature of the holy man. It transpired that ‘notwithstanding his saintly character, he was a dealer in merchandise and especially in slaves, of whom a portion taken in his forays were usually presented to [him] by Murad Beg [. . .] I saw a number of Badakhshani boys and girls detained until an opportunity offered of sending them for sale at Yarkand’. The slaves were sold in exchange for such commodities as tea, china, satin and porcelain. Another – though to most people less serious – fault which Moorcroft now found with the holy man was that he occasionally served up horse flesh at dinner – not an acceptable dish for an English stud manager.4

  Moorcroft also spent part of his time staying at Talikan doing exactly the type of military surveying – ‘espionage’ would not have been a misleading description – which he had so hotly denied being involved with earlier (after all, he knew that Napoleon was no longer a threat to India even if his hosts did not): he noted that the local fort was ‘a quadrangular building, with conical towers at the angles, and is of no importance [. . .] on the right bank of the Farkham river is a fort similar to that at Talikan’ and so on.

  When finally permission arrived for Moorcroft to move on, the holy man insisted on his staying an extra day till the omens were propitious for his journey; he then embraced Moorcroft – ‘a mark of favour I had never seen him confer on anyone before’ – and gave him his blessing. Moorcroft records he was sincerely grateful to him ‘for an interposition which alone could have preserved us from destruction, and which had been exercised throughout the whole affair in a manner uniformly kind, benevolent and, though gentle, yet resolute’. It had been a brilliant idea of Moorcroft’s to seek support in this quarter, and his scheme had worked better than he had any reasonable expectation would be the case.

  Now his last hurdle was to pass through Kunduz one final time and pay his departing respects to Murad Beg if need be. When the latter heard that Moorcroft had arrived, he promptly summoned him and – in marked contrast to his more unworldly father-in-law – immediately asked ‘what had I got for him?’. Moorcroft replied by asking what he wanted, and on being told that his personal collapsible chair had taken the chief’s fancy, told him that if he would send a man for it, it should be his. Murad Beg then went on to help himself to some medicines which Moorcroft had prescribed for someone else. But all in all, he was lucky to get away with his party intact: the chief had requested that Dr Guthrie be left behind – a suggestion which Moorcroft naturally refused.

  Having finally shaken the dust of Kunduz off their camels’ feet, Moorcroft and his party pressed on towards Bokhara, passing through Mizar-i-Sharif, Balkh and various smaller forts and settlements. When they came to cross the Oxus river some hundred miles south of Bokhara, they found it ‘about as broad as the Thames opposite the Temple gardens’; they shot across it for target practice and fou
nd that a carbine bullet reached the other side without difficulty.

  The only significant halt between the Oxus and their destination was the fortified town of Karshi; this was presided over by a sixteen-year-old prince-governor, who was the son of the Emir of Bokhara ‘by a bondmaid’; the lad received them with all due pomp, ceremony and beard-stroking; throughout their journey from Kunduz they had found that the local rulers, almost without exception, deplored the bad manners and hostile behaviour of Murad Beg. This made them more confident about the prospects of being well received at Bokhara. Little did they know that the friendly and apparently innocent sixteen-year-old was a few years later – having murdered his brother and seized control of Bokhara in the interval – to become the evil emir who imprisoned and later executed Arthur Conolly (the subject of a later chapter in this book).

  It was therefore with high spirits that Moorcroft reported ‘with no slender satisfaction that on the morning of the 25th of February 1825 we found ourselves at the end of our protracted pilgrimage, at the gates of that city which had for five years been the object of our wanderings, privations and perils’. They had reached the holy city of Bokhara, where, according to legend, the light shone not down from heaven, but up to heaven from the domes and minarets of that sacred place.

  The emir received Moorcroft in audience, who presented him with substantial gifts, including a cannon – the ‘small piece of ordinance’ which had proved so useful when they had been ambushed in leaving Ranjit Singh’s domains at Akora. Not only was he friendly, but he also gave Moorcroft a licence to buy horses and sell his own trade goods. And Moorcroft soon observed some very fine horses indeed, mostly owned by courtiers around the citadel, but it turned out that such promising bloodstock was in short supply because so many of the best horses had been killed, wounded or worn out in the almost continual round of forays and military campaigns with which the emir indulged his ambitions. Indeed Moorcroft had hardly had time to identify and make offers for some of the best horses before they were whisked away by their owners on another such punitive expedition in the direction of Samarkand. Almost equally discouraging was the fact that the trade goods, which Moorcroft had so assiduously transported all this way, turned out to be unappealing to the local markets, which had grown accustomed to – arguably inferior – Russian goods. This was bad news for Moorcroft, because he was dependent on the cash generated by selling his own trade goods to have the funds to buy the horses that were the object of his journey. However, always alert to make the best of the situation and to pursue his personal agenda of opening up trading routes, he managed to buy some Russian goods to take back to India as an indication of what the markets of Bokhara were expecting.

  And it was not only Russian commercial activities that occupied Moorcroft’s attention. He was convinced they were intent on political and ultimately military domination of Bokhara, as of other regions of Central Asia. While the suspicious and paranoid emir was away on his campaign, Moorcroft was freer not only to make his own observations, but to set up a network of agents who could continue to report on the situation after he and his party had left.

  Moorcroft now thought he had achieved all he could in Bokhara and asked for permission to leave. He was told he could not, until he had joined the emir at his campaign camp near Samarkand. He did not want to get involved in a military campaign, but had no option but to go as bidden. Once there, his medical skills were fully deployed tending to the wounded among the emir’s followers, and he took advantage of the goodwill generated by this activity to seek leave to buy a few more stallions. But when he refused to take an active part – organizing the artillery – in the siege in which the emir was involved, the permission to buy horses was quickly withdrawn and he had to leave behind the best of those he had hoped to take with him. Even Moorcroft’s disinclination to follow the rules did not allow him to engage East India Company personnel in a war that was nothing to do with him or his followers. He retraced his steps to Bokhara and then set out for home in July 1825.

  But he had one further prospect in mind. When at Balkh he had heard rumours of wonderful Turkoman horses in the deserts or on the steppes some hundred miles to the west of that place, and he thought he could leave the main body of his party there and set off alone with just two or three companions – grooms and servants rather than armed escorts – to make a detour to locate and purchase these elusive steeds. The first stage was to return to Balkh, and the whole party set off with much less baggage; nonetheless, they still numbered some sixty men and horses with a few camels in support. He decided to leave the question of his ultimate return route until he had finished his private excursion from Balkh, but – whichever way he went – he was determined to avoid the clutches of Murad Beg. One way or another, he was anxious to cross the Hindu Kush before the winter snows made that impossible.

  Having reached Balkh, Moorcroft left his party there and set off westwards, expecting to be away only some two or three weeks – longer than that, and he would put at risk his crossing of the Hindu Kush. It was at some stage before he left Trebeck and the others that Moorcroft received a letter from India (which was miraculously traced by Gary Alder when researching his life of Moorcroft) addressed simply to ‘W. Moorcroft Esq, Samarkand or Elsewhere’; clearly the busy little vet, medic, horse-trader, entrepreneur and explorer had left his mark across a great swathe of Central Asia and was someone whose movements were known to many. But once he had set out from Balkh this last time, far from being widely known, his movements and everything else take on a strangely mysterious element.

  The accepted version of the story is that he and his servants reached the village he was aiming for and there he fell ill with a fever and died three days later on 27 August 1825. His body – or at least a body – was brought back to Balkh where Trebeck (who did not identify the corpse, which would have been a grisly job after so many days in the extreme heat) arranged to have it buried in a Christian manner. These were for many years the undisputed facts regarding the end of a remarkable but largely unacknowledged career.

  It was only some twenty years later that two priests (from the French mission to Peking) when visiting Lhasa were told that a man who had lived there from 1826 for twelve years, and who had then been murdered on his way to Ladakh, had left behind maps and papers revealing that he was not – as had been supposed – a Kashmiri but in fact an Englishman named Moorcroft, who had assiduously recorded all he had seen and learnt about the country where he had for so long been accepted as a resident. Someone then came forward who claimed to have been his servant during those years, and who had never realized he was not a Kashmiri as he spoke fluent Persian and behaved like a Moslem. Could this indeed have been Moorcroft?

  The timing fitted with his departure from the scene; he was known to have an ongoing interest in Tibet and a desire eventually to retire in the Himalayas; he might have felt that his bloodstock mission had failed and his reputation with the stud in India had collapsed; nobody could be found who had actually witnessed his death or identified his body.

  On the other hand, for Moorcroft to have deserted his companions (they had a terrible series of disasters – robberies, detention and fatal illness – after he left them) and abandoned any idea of pressing his case for opening up trade with Central Asia, and of warning the authorities in India of the Russian threat as he so vividly perceived it, all seem completely out of character. So much so, that his biographer Garry Alder was firmly convinced that – even granted that Moorcroft’s papers and maps may have turned up in Tibet – Moorcroft himself had behaved honourably to the end and lay buried where Trebeck had laid him.

  The East India Company did little note, nor long remember, what Moorcroft – their recalcitrant stud farm manager – had done for them or for the wider concept of the British Raj in India. He had failed to produce the bloodstock for which they and he had hoped, and he had strayed far beyond the remit of his instructions, overstaying his leave of absence, embarking on trade agreements for which
he had no authority, and involving himself and his masters in political controversy.

  But future generations were to recognize aspects of his life and work to which his contemporaries seemed impervious, or by which they were less impressed. His geographical achievements alone were outstanding: he had been the first English-man to reach Bokhara for over two centuries, and possibly the first ever to cross the Oxus and make himself familiar with the lands along its banks. And as a forecaster of the Russian threat to the khanates and emirates of Central Asia, time was to prove how solidly based his forecasts and fears were, as the Russian troops rolled over one after another of the territories he had explored.

  He was not the first player of the Great Game, but he was the first who identified the threat correctly. Nor was it he who coined the phrase Great Game; that was to be done by Arthur Conolly (the subject of the next chapter). But however much Christie, Conolly and others might exceed or ignore their instructions, it was the little vet from Lancashire who tore up his employers’ rule book more assiduously than anyone: this was an independent spirit who was to be a guiding light to many subsequent adventurers.

  1. When the author first visited the British Embassy in Kabul in the late 1950s, wolves were so frequently encountered on Legation Hill, behind the embassy compound, that it was usual to take a supply of fireworks with one when out for a walk, and to disperse the wolves by throwing these at them. New recruits to the embassy were regularly asked to bring out a supply of such fireworks (rather than the customary marmalade or Marmite) from England on first appointment.

  2. The author himself got stuck in snow and ice while trying to cross the Kunjarab Pass over the Karakoram range in early October 1996. Moorcroft had thought of making a dash for it alone, without his extended party, in October 1820 but was probably wise not to try.