was conducted to Harlan’s tent. There he ceremoniously handed over a letter, written on the finest paper, embellished with gold leaf and tucked into a bag of gold brocade with a pair of the nawab’s oval seals attached, each three inches in diameter. The letter, in Persian, was addressed to: ‘His Highness the Saheban of exalted dignity’. Saheban is the plural of the honorific Sahib – ‘a term’, as Harlan observed, ‘applied to the Christians governing India’. The nawab had concluded that Harlan must be a British official, albeit a most eccentric one, and his letter ‘set forth in florid terms the Nawab’s regard and was profuse in the profession of friendship’. The chief of Bahawalpur looked forward to a meeting when Harlan reached Ahmadpur, his capital south of the Sutlej on the edge of the Cholistan desert, but in the meantime ‘the country, himself and his possessions were at my service’. Finally the nawab’s envoy handed over a gift that made Harlan’s hungry eyes light up. ‘A large quantity of the fresh fruits of Kabul were presented, such as delicious grapes packed in boxes upon layers of cotton, apples and pears of Samercand, cantaloupes, dried apricots, raisins and watermelons of the country.’ Harlan adored fresh fruit, and the crops of Kabul were fabled throughout Central Asia. This was the first time he had tasted them; in time, they would become an obsession.
The evidence of the nawab’s friendly intentions was a relief to all, not least the guide who had so nearly been decapitated. Harlan sent him on his way with a handful of rupees, ‘as a reward, and to solace his feelings for the cavalier regard bestowed upon him’. After days of wondering whether he and his men would be massacred, Harlan was thoroughly enjoying his new incarnation as the honoured guest of the nawab, who had given orders that the newcomers should be provided with every necessity. Another march of three days brought them to the town of Bahawalpur, which had been the province’s capital before Bahawal Khan had moved his court to Ahmadpur, thirty miles to the south. Bahawalpur was a substantial town ‘about four miles in circumference, with gardens of mangoe trees within the walls [and] houses of unburnt bricks’. Here Harlan received another gold-leafed missive from the nawab, even more polite than the last, ‘conveying his impatience to be exalted by an interview’. Harlan declined to be rushed, calculating that the longer he took to get to Ahmadpur, the keener Bahawal Khan would be to pay his respects to the haughty feringhee chief. A terse message was sent back, declaring that Harlan was suffering from ‘a phlegmon’, a skin inflammation, and would not reach Ahmadpur for at least ten days.
While encamped at Bahawalpur, Harlan made a point of staying inside his tent, thus ensuring the cultivation of his own mystery. ‘A crowd assembled daily from the town to get a view of the stranger,’ and wild rumours about the tall, bearded foreigner spread rapidly. It was even claimed that he was none other than ‘the ex-king Shujah Ul Moolk travelling under the incognito of a Saheb from Ludhiana’. The story, put about by Gul Khan, that Harlan was ‘merely an amateur traveller’ met with blank incredulity from Bahawal Khan’s envoys: ‘What could have attracted an amateur traveller to an insignificant, worthless, poverty-stricken country like this region of Bhawulpore that yielded nothing but sand and thorns?’ they demanded. ‘An amateur traveller would have passed on with the rapidity of a flowing stream.’
The locals seemed more inquisitive than threatening; which was just as well, Harlan reflected, since he was now several hundred miles from the nearest English outpost. If relations turned nasty, there was nowhere to flee. Only one Westerner had come this way before and lived to record the fact. ‘The Honourable Mount Stewart Elphinstone passed through Bhawulpore about twenty years before my transit on an embassy to the king of Cabul,’ Harlan recorded proudly, ‘but with this exception no Christian of note had been known to appear in the territory.’ He was therefore astonished, and a little piqued, to learn from an excited Gul Khan just hours before leaving Bahawalpur that he was not the only feringhee in the vicinity. A few weeks earlier, the locals reported, two ragged white men had staggered into Ahmadpur, claiming to be European soldiers and offering their military services to the nawab. Both were said to be stricken by chronic fever. Harlan now recalled that before he left Ludhiana Wade had shown him a message from Calcutta, warning that two deserters from the Company artillery, named James Lewis and Richard Potter, might be heading west and should be apprehended if possible. ‘I concluded these men were probably the individuals alluded to in that document,’ wrote Harlan.
Eager to see if his hunch was right, Harlan hastened to Ahmadpur. After a two-day march the troop pitched camp on the outskirts of the town, where Harlan was welcomed by ‘a person of grave deportment’ who turned out to be the nawab’s vizier, Yacoob Ally Khan. The vizier explained that his master would be returning shortly from a hunting trip, and after numerous ‘messages of congratulations, tinged with inflated protestations of service’ he handed over a large, dead antelope which he explained had been killed by the nawab himself. It was agreed that an interview would take place in five days’ time. Harlan wondered whether the nawab was really away hunting, or merely stalling. Taking advantage of the delay, he despatched a messenger to the two sickly Europeans lodged in the town, inviting them to his camp and offering to provide them with medical treatment.
The two white men were indeed the deserters Lewis and Potter, who had changed their names respectively to Charles Masson and, somewhat unimaginatively, John Brown – names by which they would be known for the rest of their lives. Masson was no ordinary soldier. An educated and cultured man, a fluent French speaker and classicist with a passion for archaeology and chronic wanderlust, over the next thirteen years he would excavate early Buddhist sites and amass a vast collection of ancient coins in Baluchistan, the Punjab and Afghanistan, in a solitary quest as impressive as it was eccentric. This nomadic scholar would eventually become one of the foremost antiquarians of Central Asia; but at the time he encountered Harlan he was merely a deserter, an outcast who faced the death penalty if caught by the British.
The path which had led Masson to a desert on the edge of India was as circuitous as that of Harlan himself. Indeed, their past histories and present passions were oddly similar. In 1822, at the age of twenty-one, London-born Masson, then James Lewis, had enlisted in the Company’s army and sailed for Bengal, looking for adventure. But after five years’ service in the artillery, when his regiment was stationed near Agra, he and a comrade, Richard Potter, decided they had had enough of soldiering. Unlike Harlan, they did not wait for permission to quit the ranks or purchase their discharges, but simply set off on foot, heading west. Masson’s biographer speculates that ‘as it is certain that he had already studied with some thoroughness the routes of Alexander the Great on his Persian and Indian campaigns, he may have had at the back of his mind a desire to explore Afghanistan’. Potter’s aspirations were less elevated, and his past far hazier. He appears to have deserted with the intention of entering the service of one or other of the native princes offering better pay and the possibility of swift advancement.
The two former artillerymen were very different characters. Masson was highly intelligent, and became capable of enduring astonishing hardships as he trudged, often barefoot and in rags, from one corner of Central Asia to the other. But he could also be quixotic and ill-tempered, dismissive of those he considered inferiors, overly free with his criticisms and often petulant. He made close friendships with Afghans, Sikhs and Persians, but some of his fellow Europeans found him priggish, cold and impenetrable. Potter, or Brown as he became, was by contrast steady and unimaginative, a gentle soul with neither Masson’s arrogance nor his resilience.
In his memoirs, written when he had acquired respectability and an official pardon, Masson makes no reference to his desertion, noting merely that ‘having traversed the Rajput States of Shekhawati, and the Kingdom of Bikanir, I entered the desert frontiers of the Khan of Bahwalpur’. The journey, and the illnesses they picked up en route, had almost killed them both. The nawab had provided sustenance but showed no eagerness to employ these two diseased and disreputable-looking Europeans, and the deserters were facing a grim choice between pushing on into the unknown or returning to face the rough justice of British India, when Harlan came to their aid.
Two days after Harlan’s arrival in Ahmadpur, a man appeared at the door of his tent, clad ‘in the dress of a native with
