The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (8 page)

After Christie’s departure with his men on March 22, Pottinger remained in Nushki preparing his own small caravan. Malcolm had given him the task of exploring the great deserts which were thought to lie to the west, presenting a major obstacle, it was hoped, to an advancing army. But on March 23 he received alarming news. A message sent by friends whom he and Christie had made in Kelat, the Baluchi capital, warned him that men had arrived there from neighbouring Sind with orders to arrest the two of them. They had told the Khan of Kelat that Christie and Pottinger were no more horse-dealers than they were, and that they had adopted this guise to survey the country for military purposes, a move which threatened both their peoples.

The two Englishmen were to be seized and taken back to Hyderabad, the capital of Sind, where they would be severely dealt with. The armed Sindians, the message warned, were on their way to Nushki, a distance of only fifty miles across the desert. He and his companion, it advised, should leave while there was still time, as the Sindians made no secret of the fact that they were to be bastinadoed. Aware that this was the least of the fates he might expect in Hyderabad, Pottinger made plans to leave immediately. The following morning, with an armed escort of five Baluchis, he hastily set off westwards, profoundly grateful to their friends at Kelat who had endangered their own lives to protect his and Christie’s.

Meanwhile, oblivious to all this, Christie had encountered another hazard as he and his small party approached the Afghan frontier. Not long after leaving Nushki he had been warned by a friendly shepherd that thirty armed Afghans were planning to rob him, and were at that moment waiting in ambush in a gully some distance ahead. To add to Christie’s discomfort, the storm which had been brewing as he rode out of Nushki now broke with a vengeance, soaking everyone to the skin, as well as their possessions, and forcing them to seek what little shelter they could find in that barren landscape. It was hardly an encouraging start to an unimaginably lonely assignment. But by the following morning the storm had passed, and so too, it transpired, had their foes. Nonetheless the fear of raiders in this lawless realm was a perpetual trial to both Christie and Pottinger, as it would be to all subsequent players in the Great Game.

In the hope that it might offer him some protection against bandits, Christie decided to abandon his horse-dealer’s guise and adopt that of a pious hadji, or Muslim pilgrim returning from Mecca. In his account of his journey he does not go into details, but this transformation appears to have been conducted with the help of an Indian merchant to whom he bore a secret letter, and between the signing off of one escort and the acquisition of another. His new cover, however, was not without its own problems and dangers, and he soon found himself embarrassingly out of his depth when a mullah engaged him in a theological discussion. He managed to avoid exposure by explaining that he was a Sunni Muslim and not, like his interlocutor, a Shiite. Christie must have been an exceptionally resourceful individual for at one point he managed to obtain a forged
laissez-passer,
purportedly from the tyrannical local khan and bearing his genuine seal. With the aid of this he ensured himself a warm welcome from the khan of the neighbouring region who even entertained him in his palace.

By now Christie was within four days of his goal, the mysterious city of Herat which only one other living European had dared to visit. It lay on Afghanistan’s frontier with eastern Persia, astride the great network of trans-Asian caravan routes. Its bazaars displayed goods from Khokand and Kashgar, Bokhara and Samarkand, Khiva and Merv, while other roads led westwards to the ancient caravan cities of Persia – Meshed, Teheran, Kerman and Isfahan. But to the British in India, fearing invasion from the west, Herat possessed a more ominous significance. It stood on one of the traditional conqueror’s routes to India, along which a hostile force could reach either of its two great gateways, the Khyber and Bolan Passes. Worse, in a region of vast deserts and impenetrable mountain ranges, it stood in a rich and fertile valley which – or so it was believed in India – was capable of provisioning and watering an entire army. Christie’s task was to discover the truth of this.

On April 18, four months after he and Pottinger had sailed from Bombay, Christie rode through the principal gateway of the great walled city of Herat. He had abandoned his disguise as a holy man and had reverted to that of a horse-dealer, for he carried with him letters of introduction to a Hindu merchant living in the town. He was to remain there for a month, taking careful notes of all that caught his soldier’s eye, or ear. ‘The city of Heerat’, he observed, ‘is situated in a valley, surrounded by lofty mountains.’ The valley, running from east to west, was thirty miles long and fifteen wide. It was watered by a river which rose in the mountains and ran the length of the valley which was intensively cultivated, with villages and gardens stretching as far as the eye could see. The city itself covered an area of four square miles, and was surrounded by a massive wall and moat. At its northern end, raised up on a hill, was a citadel built of baked brick, with a tower at each corner. Surrounding this was a second moat, spanned by a drawbridge, and beyond this another high wall and a third moat, albeit dry. Spectacular as all this appeared to anyone approaching the city, it failed to impress Christie. ‘On the whole,’ he wrote, ‘it is very contemptible as a fortification.’

But if he was not struck by Herat’s capacity to defend itself against attack by an army supplied with modern artillery, like that of Napoleon or Tsar Alexander, Christie was much impressed by its obvious prosperity and fecundity, and capacity therefore to support and supply any invading army into whose hands it might fall. In the surrounding countryside there was excellent grazing, an ample supply of horses and camels, and an abundance of wheat, barley and fresh fruit of all kinds. The population of Herat and its suburbs Christie put at 100,000, including 600 Hindus, mainly wealthy merchants.

On May 18, satisfied that he had nothing more of value to discover, Christie announced that before returning to India with the horses he proposed to buy for his employer he would make a brief pilgrimage to the holy city of Meshed, 200 miles to the north-west, in Persia. He was thus able to leave Herat without having to buy the horses which his cover story demanded. The following day, with considerable relief, he crossed into eastern Persia. After months of lying and subterfuge, he at last felt reasonably safe. Even if it was discovered that he was an East India Company officer in disguise, Britain’s now good relations with Persia would ensure that no serious harm befell him. Nine days later he turned off the old pilgrim road to Meshed, striking south-westwards across the desert to Isfahan, which he calculated Lieutenant Pottinger should by now have reached.

During the two months since they had parted company at Nushki, much had happened to his brother officer. Without a map to guide him (none then existed), the 20-year-old subaltern had set off on a 900-mile journey across Baluchistan and Persia. He chose a route which for a further century no other European was to attempt, though earlier invaders had passed that way. The journey was to last three months and take him across two hazardous deserts, with only local guides to steer him between wells and the bands of murderous brigands.

Despite sickness and other hardships, he maintained a surreptitious but detailed day-to-day record of all he saw and heard which could be of value to an invading army. He noted down wells and rivers, crops and other vegetation, rainfall and climate. He pinpointed the best defensive positions, described the fortifications of villages along the route, and detailed the idiosyncrasies and alliances of the local khans. He even recorded the ruins and monuments he passed, although not being an antiquarian he had to rely on the dubious stories of the locals as to their age and history. In addition, he secretly charted his route on a sketch map, which later was turned into the first military map of the approaches to India from the west. Just how he managed to do this without detection he did not disclose in his otherwise detailed account of the journey, perhaps wishing to retain his secret for subsequent use.

On March 31, after skirting the south-eastern corner of the mighty Helmund desert, whose existence and approximate location were thus confirmed, Pottinger and his five-man party struck into the first of the two deserts they were now forced to cross. The presence of such vast natural obstacles astride an invader’s path, Pottinger knew, would be extremely welcome news to those responsible for the defence of India. He was soon to discover for himself why these deserts enjoyed so ill a reputation among the Baluchis, for within a few miles they ran into a succession of near-vertical dunes of fine red sand, some of them twenty feet high. ‘Most of these’, he recounts, ‘rise perpendicularly on the opposite side to that from which the prevailing wind blows . . . and might readily be fancied, at a distance, to resemble a new brick wall.’ The windward side, however, sloped gently to the base of the succeeding dune, leaving a pathway between them. ‘I kept as much in these paths as the direction I had to travel in would admit of,’ he added, ‘but had nevertheless exceeding difficulty and fatigue in urging the camels over the waves when it was requisite to do so, and more particularly where we had to clamber up the leeward face of them, in which attempt we were many times defeated.’ The next day conditions got worse. Their continuing battle with the sand dunes was, in Pottinger’s words, ‘trifling compared with the distress suffered, not only by myself and people, but even the camels, from the floating particles of sand.’ For a layer of abrasive red dust hovered over the desert, getting into their eyes, noses and mouths, and causing extreme discomfort, not to mention thirst, which was aggravated by the intense heat of the sun.

Before long they reached the dry bed of a river, 500 yards wide, with a recently abandoned village beside it, its inhabitants driven out by the drought. Here they halted, and after much digging managed to obtain two skins of water. The nature of the desert now changed from sand to hard black gravel. Not long afterwards the air began to feel sultry and dust-devils or whirlwinds sprang up, followed shortly by a violent storm. ‘The rain fell in the largest drops I ever remember to have seen,’ Pottinger recounts. ‘The air was so completely darkened that I was absolutely unable to discern anything at the distance of even five yards.’ Yet this storm was mild, his guide told him, compared with those which sometimes struck the desert at the height of summer, when it was considered impassable to travellers. The furnace-hot wind which accompanied these storms was known to the Baluchis as the ‘flame’ or the ‘pestilence’. Not only could it kill camels with its violence, but it could flay alive an unprotected human being. According to Pottinger’s men, who claimed to have witnessed its effects, ‘the muscles of the unhappy sufferer become rigid, the skin shrivels, an agonising sensation, as if the flesh was on fire, pervades the whole frame . . .’ The victim’s skin, they assured him, cracked ‘into deep gashes, producing haemorrhage that quickly ends this misery’, although sometimes the sufferer might survive in agony for hours if not days. (That this was clearly a wild exaggeration may be obvious today, but in Pottinger’s time little was known about desert travel, and anything must have seemed possible in previously unexplored regions such as this.)

Since the desert was without landmarks of any kind, the guide plotted their course by means of a distant range of mountains. Once, however, when Pottinger decided to leave at midnight to avoid the terrible heat of the day, they quickly found themselves lost, not knowing in which direction to proceed. Concealed on him, Pottinger carried a compass. Unknown to his men, he surreptitiously produced this, and after forcing the glass from it, he managed to feel the needle with his thumb, thus establishing the direction they should be heading in. When at daylight this proved to be accurate, his men were astonished, and for days spoke of it ‘as wonderful proof of my wisdom’. Normally Pottinger only used his compass in secrecy to take bearings for his sketch map, but once or twice he was unable to prevent it from being seen. He would explain that it was a
Kiblah nooma,
or Mecca-pointer, which showed him the direction in which the Kiblah, or Muhammad’s tomb, lay so that he could prostrate himself towards it when praying.