The Dark Defile Read Online Free PDF Page B

Balkh—the ancient Bactria, homeland of Alexander’s wife, Roxane—where an Uzbek customs official tried unsuccessfully to seduce Mohan Lal, sending him lovelorn Persian verses. By then they had exchanged their horses for camels, on which they were carried in woven panniers four feet long and three feet wide, banging against the camels’ bony ribs. As they traveled over the arid desert toward the Oxus River, sand whipped their faces and their parched lips burned. After being towed in a boat by swimming horses over the Oxus, they found themselves among nomadic Turkoman tribesmen, whose chief livelihood was plundering caravans and who purchased their wives; the price of a girl was five camels, while a woman could cost up to a hundred since experience counted for more than beauty.
    Fearing that after their arduous journey they might be denied entry into Bokhara, Burnes dispatched a letter to the principal minister requesting the protection of the emir, whom he hailed as the “Commander of the Faithful.” It was granted, and on 27 June, they passed through the city gates. Exchanging their turbans for Bokharan sheepskin caps to avoid attracting attention, they stayed in the city nearly a month. The slave markets, where on Saturday mornings human flesh was trafficked, shocked them. They also witnessed how justice was dispensed when they came across Muslims being flogged for sleeping after sunrise and missing their morning prayers or for smoking. Anyone caught flying pigeons on a Friday was paraded on a camel with one of their birds dead around their neck.
    Yet they also found much to enjoy in this city intersected by canals, shaded by mulberry trees, bringing water from the Zerafshan River. 10 They lodged in a small house, one attraction of which was that “it presented an opportunity of seeing a Turkoman beauty, a handsome young lady, who promenaded one of the surrounding balconies.” Burnes went to the hamman to be “laid out at full length, rubbed with a hair brush, scrubbed, buffeted and kicked,” which was “very refreshing.” In Bokhara’s thriving bazaars they examined silks, spices, silver and tea, and Burnes discovered English chintz for sale, on which, so the merchants told him, they could make a 50 percent profit. They ate grape jelly with crushed ice and strolled in the Registan—the great square in front of the emir’s palace—where a stranger only had to seat himself on a bench to “converse with the natives of Persia, Turkey, Russia, Tartary, China, India and Kabul.”
    Burnes was disappointed to be refused an audience with Bokhara’s ruler, Emir Nasrullah, but observed him leaving the mosque, noting his pale gaunt face and small eyes. He was in fact a man of vicious habits already on the path to insanity, who had those who displeased him thrown into the zidane —a pit which he kept well stocked with flesh-biting insects, reptiles and rotting filth.
    Burnes left Bokhara in July 1832 convinced that, provided secure trade routes could be established along the Indus and through Afghanistan, English manufactured goods could compete on price as well as quality with those the Russians sent through their network of internal waterways. As Burnes and his party headed westward for the long trek across the feared Turkoman desert to Meshed in Persia, they passed lines of slaves trudging toward Bokhara. Mohal Lal saw a group “walking barefoot in the fiery desert. Their hands and necks were fastened together with an iron chain. They were completely exhausted with hunger, thirst and fatigue. They were crying and begging for something to eat and Burnes gave them a melon.” Before long, though, their own plight was nearly as bad. Both people and animals were dying of thirst, and Burnes watched desperate men opening the veins of their camels to drink their blood. By September 1832, however, they finally reached Meshed, and the group now divided. Mohan Lal, to whom Burnes gave a testimonial praising his great tact