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

Harlan studied Bahawal Khan closely: ‘He was a young man, apparently about twenty five years old, of middle stature and delicate form.’ The ‘unassuming deportment’ and ‘subdued bearing’ of the chief, who welcomed the visitor while ‘scarcely raising his eyes from the ground’, masked a man who was canny, ruthless and convinced that this tall stranger had come to depose or kill him.

      Harlan beckoned Amirullah forward and presented the prince with a pair of valuable English pistols. Bahawal Khan examined the gift with undisguised admiration, remarking on the craftsmanship. The ice broken, Harlan instructed Gul Khan to tell the prince that he had ‘a confidential communication for the Nawab’s private ear’. Reassured that he was not about to be assassinated, the nawab ordered his bodyguards to draw back, and Harlan broached the subject of his mission, asking what treatment Shah Shujah might expect when he passed through his jurisdiction. The nawab’s reply was cautious: his house had always been faithful to the ex-king, he said, but then pointedly added that his country was a poor one. The hint was clear: if Shah Shujah wanted to be restored, he would have to pay for it. As Harlan rose to depart, the nawab’s vizier moved forward, bearing in his arms an exquisite tribal outfit which included a turban of gold brocade. This was a ‘dress of honour’, the first of many that would be presented to him over the coming years, a formal gift that, as Harlan elegantly put it, formed part of a ‘system of diplomatic language throughout the east’. With elaborate expressions of mutual regard, the meeting ended and Harlan rode back to his encampment, convinced that his first diplomatic foray on behalf of the exiled king had been a resounding success.

      On 10 December Harlan and his troops marched out of Ahmadpur, leaving the Sutlej and heading west across country towards the river Indus. Harlan was in pensive mood, and with every step towards Afghanistan his past life seemed to grow more distant and irretrievable. ‘Heretofore I had not thoroughly divested myself of the familiar feeling one cherishes for the gradually receding associations of departing relations,’ he wrote, in an oblique reference to Eliza Swaim. The pain of that episode was slowly ebbing, for Harlan had little time for emotional reflection. ‘These scenes, a strange country, an unknown people and these objects in varied and diurnal recurrence filled up the tablets of observation.’ Finally, he was on the trail of Alexander the Great. ‘My mind was now full with the contemplation of the past,’ he wrote. ‘I was about to enter the country and become familiar with objects which have been made conspicuous to the world as the arena and subject of Alexander’s exploits.’

      In these deserts, in 325 BC, Alexander had battled the warlike Indian tribe of the Malloi. Besieging the fortress of Multan to the north, the great Macedonian general had led the charge, receiving an arrow in the chest that nearly killed him. While his troops slaughtered the inhabitants of Multan, the wounded Alexander was carried away on the shield of Achilles. An attendant quoted Homer: ‘The man of action is the debtor to suffering and pain.’ Harlan would have reason to recall the motto of Achilles.

      With Masson, whose classical knowledge was equal 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