but our display made them draw up [and] they spread out upon the plain, apparently intending to surround our party.’ Harlan ordered Gul Khan to shout out that unless they halted where they were, the men would open fire.
Retreating just beyond rifle range, the riders now stared at the intruders with what seemed to Harlan more like curiosity than hostility. They were a fearsome-looking group. ‘Their filthy appearance and barbarous visages peering out from beneath long black and greasy locks of matted hair seemed to forbid the conclusion that they could be men entertained in the military service of a chief.’ This, however, is precisely what they proved to be. A series of shouted exchanges between Gul Khan and the leader of the other troop established that these were scouts of Bahawal Khan’s army who had heard of the approach of ‘an army of feringees accompanied by Shah Shujah’ and had come to reconnoitre.
While the local warriors watched from a distance, Harlan ordered the advance, collecting the sepoys around his horse with bayonets fixed. Still looking distinctly unfriendly, the hairy horsemen and camel-riders fell in some distance behind. The strange procession had gone less than a mile when a smartly dressed individual, flanked by two horsemen, rode up to Harlan and presented himself as ‘the attaché of Nadir Shah, commander of the Nawab’s forces’. With a low bow the envoy welcomed Harlan in the name of Bahawal Khan, and invited him to pitch camp at a village a little way ahead, where he promised that supplies of every kind could be found. In spite of the man’s polite manner, Harlan was deeply suspicious. The line moved off once more, with Bahawal Khan’s man leading the way, and an hour later they pitched camp outside a small, apparently deserted village.
As he had feared, Harlan was now effectively a prisoner. ‘Our camp was quickly surrounded by numerous irregular infantry of the Rohillah and Beloochee races, soldiers in the service of Nawab Bhawal Khan.’ These had been instructed to prevent the advance of the newcomers until orders arrived from Bahawal Khan himself. Harlan was furious. ‘I entertained a feeling of infinite contempt as a military force for the miserable guards surrounding us,’ he wrote. Summoning Gul Khan to his tent, he told his lieutenant that they would march the following day, and if the nawab’s troops tried to stop them, they would fight their way out. The Rohillah accepted this order with visible, and entirely justified apprehension. The nawab’s army might look a fright, but they were numerous, heavily armed and, if provoked, likely to prove murderous. But Harlan was not to be dissuaded. Not for the last time, he wondered quite how valiant his warlike commander would prove in a fight.
At sunrise the next morning, the bugle sounded, the camels were loaded and the men were preparing to march when Gul Khan, who had spent the previous hour ‘in earnest conversation’ with the leader of the native troops, approached Harlan, ashen-faced, and warned that the nawab’s men were ‘determined to prevent our baggage from leaving without orders from their chief’. The surrounding troops began to close in. Harlan’s solution to the impasse was simple and dramatic. ‘I called the captain of Bhawal Khan’s men into my presence and immediately placed him under a guard of fixed bayonets, holding him as a hostage with the threat of instant death in case of any turbulent movement on the part of his troops.’
Feeling exceedingly pleased with himself, Harlan now marched off with his new hostage in chains alongside him, the troops in fine regimental order, and a mob of Bahawal Khan’s soldiers trailing angrily behind. They had not marched two miles before, as Harlan put it, ‘the consequences of my headstrong efforts began to show themselves’. On the eastern horizon, he saw ‘a vast cloud of dust rising in the desert’. Minutes later, a troop of tribesmen mounted on camels appeared just out of range, and then vanished. They were followed by horsemen, galloping in circles, their cries carrying across the flat land, impossible to count due to the clouds of dust raised by their mounts. Through the gritty haze Harlan glimpsed footsoldiers stretched out across the desert, and finally, in the distance, ‘a train of heavy artillery drawn by oxen slowly lumbered upon carriages lazily creeping over the plain’. It was now that Gul Khan belatedly passed on a rather crucial piece of information: the man Harlan had taken hostage was none other than the brother of Nadir Shah, military commander of Bahawalpur, who had now mobilised the full force of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s army to get him back.
As Harlan was wondering what to do next, a horseman appeared through the dust and respectfully invited the visitor to pitch camp at the next village where his master, Nadir Shah, ‘desired the honour of an interview’. Harlan reluctantly complied. ‘We found ourselves in the same situation as we were at sunrise,’ he remarked. The only difference being that they were now surrounded by an entire army, ‘encamped a short distance from us, out of view, secluded within the vast jungle of high reed grass which grew in tufts tall enough to hide a mounted spearman [for] many miles in all directions’. Any attempt to force their way out would be suicide. Releasing his hostage, Harlan now adopted a different, but equally brazen tactic: he would treat this Nadir Shah with complete contempt. ‘I refused to see him,’ he wrote, ‘replying to his earnest solicitude with the cool and phlegmatic indifference of a superior.’ Whenever Nadir’s mirza or envoy politely tried to arrange a meeting, the American replied, with feigned petulance: ‘I’m not in the vein.’ Nadir Shah was a man to be reckoned with in Bahawalpur, and Harlan’s lofty manner sent the envoy, despite being surrounded by thousands of hostile warriors, into a paroxysm of toadying. ‘With reverential respect and servile attitude, he said that his master was a great man, a very great man, no less a person than the dignified commander in chief of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s invincible army, the unconquered and exalted chief of chiefs, the cream of his contemporaries and the pillar of empire etc, etc.,’ wrote Harlan, who resolutely declined to be impressed and sent the mirza back with the message that he intended to march the next day. ‘I gave him to understand I acknowledged no superior and that my sword was my passport.’
Apparently bowing to the inevitable, Nadir Shah sent a guide, a senior member of his entourage, to show the strangers the way, but no sooner had the army set off again than it became clear the man was deliberately trying to buy time by leading Harlan on ‘a devious line, sometimes to the right and at others to the left, like a ship in a headwind’. Once again, Harlan’s riposte was to place the guide in chains.
Gul Khan made no secret of his belief that by chaining up the locals at every turn Harlan was inviting disaster, and contravening all the rules of Oriental diplomacy. ‘The old blear-eyed Rohillah rolled up his eyes in astonishment, exclaiming: “May God bring good in the future.”’ Nettled by his lieutenant’s negativity, Harlan demanded: ‘Wherefore is Gool Khan afraid of these ragged mendicants?’, and then immediately regretted it, for the question prompted a torrent of oratory from the one-armed soldier on the subject of his own bravery and the corresponding villainy of the local people. Exhausted by the tense march, and Gul Khan’s loquacity, Harlan ordered a halt near a small village. As soon as the tents were pitched he released the guide and sent him to collect supplies, and retired to rest. ‘The whole camp excepting a single sentry soon fell into a deep sleep solicited by unusual fatigue,’ he wrote, but less than an hour later Harlan awoke to find yet another crisis brewing. Outside his tent stood Gul Khan, looking more than usually glum. ‘It’ll be later before we get the forage, unless Your Highness is disposed to become responsible for the unoffending blood of our guide,’ he said gloomily.
While Harlan had been asleep, the luckless guide had requested food at the nearby fortress, where he had promptly been taken prisoner. The commander of the fort, Gul Khan explained, was not only refusing to provide food and forage but threatening to cut off the guide’s head if the troops helped themselves. Harlan faced a dilemma. Seizing what he needed by force could lead to the death of an innocent man, and that, he reflected, would be ‘ungenerous and unbecoming a man of high sentiments’. A little of Shah Shujah’s money would surely bring the commander round. Sure enough, after some bargaining by Gul Khan, the guide was released and supplies provided. Grateful that the unpredictable feringhee had seen fit to prevent him being beheaded, the guide was now as helpful as he had previously been obstructive. Instead of pushing on quickly, it was agreed that the force would proceed slowly towards Bahawalpur and await a decision by the nawab.
