Read The Dark Defile for Free Online

and diplomacy, and Dr. Gerard set out back overland to India, while Burnes headed for the Caspian Sea and thence to Tehran.
    He was received by the elderly Persian shah, who greeted him with the strange question demanded by court etiquette, “ Dumagh i shooma chak ust ?” (Are your brains clear?) before interrogating him closely. He was interested to know whether Burnes had taken notes to which he truthfully replied, “Yes, I have measured the roads … and sounded the rivers.” The shah also inquired into such minutiae as whether the journey had been expensive and whether Burnes had sampled horseflesh while among Uzbeks. Having satisfied the shah’s curiosity, Burnes finally headed south to the Persian Gulf, where he took a ship for Bombay.
    Burnes’s reports on all he had seen—in particular on the potential for British trade as a source both of profit and of influence to counter Russian ambitions and on the potential for military advances by the Russians toward Kabul—so impressed the governor-general that he sent him to London to tell his story to the government in person. When he arrived there in October 1833, a gratified Burnes found himself lionized by every society hostess anxious to secure “Bokhara Burnes,” as he had become known, for her parties. He met the prime minister, was presented to the king and began preparing his journals for publication. However, if he expected promotion to some exalted position, he was mistaken; some, like Lord Ellenborough at the Board of Control, thought him cocksure and “immensely vain.” Though promoted to the rank of captain, the young man who had “beheld the scenes of Alexander’s wars, of the rude and savage inroads of Genghis and Timur” and “marched on the very line of route by which Alexander had pursued Darius,” after turning down a subordinate post in the British mission at Tehran, accepted a posting back to the relatively junior position he had occupied before his travels up the Indus as assistant to the company’s resident in Kutch. However, events would shortly thrust him forward again.

Chapter Twelve
It is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country.
—MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM ELPHINSTONE, NOVEMBER 1841
    As the insurrection entered its second week, the mood in the Kabul cantonments grew bleaker. Elphinstone’s precarious physical condition had been worsened by a bad fall from his horse, and he was no longer able to ride around the cantonments to inspect the defenses. On 9 November he reluctantly recalled his second-in-command, Brigadier Shelton, from the Balla Hissar to take charge of the cantonments. The Afghans made no attempt to oppose Shelton, who brought his men in safely, though there was some momentary alarm when Shelton, who had ridden ahead, spied in the distance what he thought was a group of jezail-toting Afghans. It turned out to be only a pack of pariah dogs.
    Many welcomed Shelton’s arrival, expecting “wonders from his prowess and military judgement,” as Lady Sale wrote. However, as she also observed, the new arrangement was not a happy one. Shelton was openly contemptuous of Elphinstone and “often refused to give any opinion when asked for it by the general.” He brought his bedroll to councils of war so that when he became bored he could simply curl up and go to sleep. Elphinstone, who found Shelton “ contumacious ” and “actuated by ill feelings” toward him, often interfered with or countermanded his orders, leaving more junior officers confused as to their instructions.
    The brigadier was not a man who bothered to hide his feelings. Having decided that the British could never survive the winter in Kabul, he told everyone so, further lowering the morale that his arrival in the cantonments had been expected to enhance. Shelton was also openly rude to Macnaghten. When Mackenzie took him to task about it, Shelton replied, “Damn it, Mackenzie, I will sneer at him, I like to sneer at him!” Lady