Murder in the Hindu Kush: George Hayward and the Great Game by Tim Hannigan | eBook

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Murder in the Hindu Kush

George Hayward and the Great Game

By Tim Hannigan

The History Press

CHAPTER 1

Death in the Morning

The man had not slept all night. It was summer, but 9,000ft up in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush it had been cold during the hours of darkness. Now in the first blue-grey light before dawn, exhausted and hungry, he shivered. It was 18 July 1870.

He had arrived at this high campground the previous afternoon with his little party of servants and a group of surly local porters. For two days he had been moving slowly up this narrowing, steep-walled valley, with many a nervous backwards glance: he had leftYasin, the main village, on bad terms and these mountains were lawless and violent. He was far from any government or authority that could protect him, and he knew only too well that in this cold, rocky valley he was stripped of the privileges his nationality would afford him elsewhere. He was an Englishman – the first ever to reach this wild and stupendously remote spot, far beyond British territory, beyond even the troubled western frontier of Kashmir.

Only as he had moved further fromYasin the previous day had his mood lightened: the temperature had risen and a yellow haze softened the sharp edges of the vast peaks that towered over the valley. Though he was not moving at the scorching pace that he usually maintained, no one seemed to have followed him. No one had delayed his progress, and now, finally, he seemed on the brink of leaving all his recent troubles behind; tomorrow he would cross the high pass at the head of the valley and be gone from this troublesome territory. What was more, once he had passed that watershed he would at last be within striking distance of the very place he had been trying to reach for the previous two years: the High Pamirs; the Roof of the World; the unknown upland wilderness at the locked heart of Central Asia.

The valley was beautiful in a raw, almost violent way – this was a landscape of extremes. In the narrow bed there was green amongst the tumbled boulders, little terraces and patches of goat-cropped grass. The watercourses were lined with thickets of willow, in full leaf at this time of year, and there were ranks of slender poplar trees, bending and whispering in the running breeze. As the little party had pressed on upwards they passed occasional small villages of rough stone walls and flat roofs, stepped up the brown hillsides in uneven tiers. Sometimes the smell of wood smoke and pine sap or the sound of voices and the calls of goats drifted across the valley, and there were figures – broad-shouldered women in heavy skirts and bright skullcaps – at work in the little fields. Beyond that the land soared upwards, first through patches of threadbare pasture, and then into a vertical wasteland of fractured red-brown rock and scree. The great mountain walls towered higher and higher, into wind-scoured black buttresses and onwards into steep faces of permanent snow, glittering icy yellow and blue in the midday sunlight.

By late afternoon, when he pitched his rough canvas tent on a hillside below a stand of trees, the man had begun to relax. The day had passed without incident; he looked forward to the steep climb to the pass and anticipated the summit's great swelling view to the new country beyond. The local porters had downed their loads and wandered off bad-temperedly, but the man was unconcerned: he could find new men to carry his baggage in the morning. From here the journey would be physically tough but, he hoped, things would be less politically fraught.

Yet as the light lengthened down the valley, flaring the high peaks with gold and dropping slabs of blue shadow on to the lower slopes, one of his servants brought alarming news from the nearby hamlet of Darkot: he had been followed. A large group of armed men had trailed him all the way up the valley from Yasin. They had told the villagers that they had come to accompany the man over the pass, but they did not join his little camp nor even try to contact him. They were out of sight, hiding somewhere in the thick, scrubby forest, and the man was sure that they had sinister intentions.

The apprehension of the past days came rushing back, all the more intense now after the calm interlude. With a feeling of hollow nausea in the pit of his stomach the man realised the hopeless vulnerability of his position. There was no longer a chance for a quick about-turn back into less dangerous country.

Light fades very quickly after sunset in the high mountains, and in the heavy, blue stillness as the sky pales behind the ridges, sound carries a long way. Broken voices in the village; goats bleating as they were hurried down from the high pastures; and the noise of the stream, busy with meltwater from the curving glacier to the west, drifted up the valley to the lonely little campsite. Great smears of stars began to show in the rough-edged patch of sky. The man could hear his own heart beating.

He had no appetite and he declined his servants' offer of food. The five men who accompanied him – four servants and a munshi, or secretary – must have felt every bit as nervous, and all the more powerless, for they had simply followed him to this exposed place. Far from home, he had made their decisions. They were Kashmiris and Pashtuns, hard men from the lawless hills of the North-West Frontier, but this was not their country and they had good reason to be afraid. As the darkness came down, thick and heavy, the little group prepared for a miserable and lonely night, knowing that somewhere out of sight, somewhere on the hillsides or among the trees, men were watching them.

* * *

The man knew that he must not sleep. In the hours of darkness the rules change: awful things happen and men do deeds they would never do in the hard, judgemental glare of daylight. If evil was to befall him, the man was sure, it would do so before dawn. If all was well at sunrise, there would be hope. Anyone wishing to do him harm might hesitate then, and if he pressed quickly onwards with the same brash confidence with which he had left Yasin village perhaps it would carry him unscathed to the pass and beyond. What mattered now, more than anything, was that he must not sleep.

It was a long night. The man had loaded his rifles, taken his pistol in his left hand and sat in the doorway of his tent, his finger greasy with sweat on the trigger despite the cold. But you cannot sit alert like that for long after a day of hard uphill walking in the high mountains, no matter how pressing the need. Soon tiredness began to claw its way into the edges of his vision, his head swaying on weary shoulders. But he must not sleep!

The man took pen and paper, and lit a candle. He began to write, sitting at his collapsible camp table, simply for something to concentrate on, something to keep him alert. His left hand still firmly clasped the pistol. The single, lonely light flickered in the high, blank darkness – and the night rolled on. Cold air crept down from the glacier and the snow peaks, and a chill breeze moved through the poplars. The man wrote, on and on, long past midnight.

No one knows what he scribbled in those grim, bleak hours, the pen scratching urgently in a spidery scrawl over the thin blue paper. When it came to making practical accounts of his previous journeys he had been a consummate professional, recording altitudes and route marches with military precision. In other moments he had proven himself capable of penning sharp passages of sarcastic humour, and also of impassioned and unrestrained indignation. Indeed, he had reason to suspect that it was an outburst of the latter that had led him to his precarious vigil on this very mountainside. But whatever it was that he was writing that night, it served its purpose: he did not sleep.

The tone of the darkness deepened; the wind dropped to nothing and the stars faded behind the peaks. Somewhere far to the east, beyond the serried ranks of hills, morning was creeping out of India. But the man had not stopped his writing, nor had he taken his hand away from the revolver. When the morning light reached him, the shapes of the valley formed like a photograph and were clear in the bloodless light before dawn. The high crags were grey and the branches of the trees hung limply in the cool air.

Finally, the man put down his pen and stepped out of the tent. Everything was very still, and where the evening air had carried sounds clearly and sharply, now the distant calls of sheep and goats seemed deadened and muffled. His legs, arms and back ached from sitting on the hard camp chair all night, and hunger gnawed deep in his belly. He shivered, hugging himself in the chill grey air as he glanced about the camp. There was no movement, no sound. No sinister shadows flickered in the trees, no ominous party of tribesmen loitered on the edge of the clearing. Perhaps the danger had passed, or perhaps there had never been any danger at all. The man wondered for a moment whether his long, sleepless vigil had been an outburst of absurd panic over nothing. After all, there had been other occasions when he had openly predicted his own imminent demise and been proved wrong. Whatever the case, it didn't matter; the night was over and he was exhausted.

Warming yellow sunshine began to seep over the eastern ridges. Squatting down and still shivering, he kindled a small fire and boiled water for tea. He drank it looking out over the valley. Goatherds were beginning to move up the slopes with their flocks, and the noise of the stream was reasserting itself after the false silence of first light. All seemed well, and now the burden of extreme tiredness was weighing ever more heavily; sleep was irresistible. He went back into the tent and lay down, intending to catch a brief rest before starting the day's journey. Unconsciousness came almost instantly, waves of fatigue sweeping over him as he stretched out, bearing him down into a leaden sleep.

He did not see the single figure creeping across the clearing, flinching expectantly, but growing more confident as no pistol shot came, edging forward, peering into the tent and hurrying away with the news that the Englishman was finally asleep. He did not see the party of armed men in loose, rough clothes hurrying through the trees on the steep slope above the camp, then making their way swiftly, silently, down towards the tent. He did not see one of the Pashtuns challenging the intruders, and so deep was his sleep that he did not wake at the noise of the servant being overpowered.

The first thing he became aware of was a rough hand as it grasped him by the throat. He was dragged upwards from his camp bed, gagging and staggering. Perhaps in those moments of confusion he struggled to remember where he was, and by the time he had come fully to his senses a length of rough rope had been noosed around his neck and his hands were tightly bound behind him. He was dragged outside, blinking and squinting in the hard morning sunlight – for it was already about eight o'clock by now.

They pulled him away across the clearing, stumbling and tripping, and he saw that his servants and munshi had also been captured and bound and dragged off in other directions. As they hauled him uphill to the east, into the dense thicket of trees, he understood the ominous nature of what was happening: they were taking him away from the village, away from witnesses. He had already proved himself a brave man, but this was no time for stoical dignity: he begged; he pleaded with them; he offered to bargain. The captors paid no attention, ducking beneath low branches and hurriedly dragging him deeper into the thicket. They were lean men with fair skin burnt and creased by the harsh mountain climate. They wore twists of coarse turban-cloth or flat, roll-edged felt caps on their heads.

He would pay them off, the man said; they could take everything he had, all the gifts and equipment in the boxes back at his camp. The men scoffed at him. Had he not noticed his current circumstances? All that property was already theirs to take as they pleased. Very well, he said; then he would make sure that a ransom, a huge sum more than they could dream of, would be sent from his own people, the English who ruled India. But the men were not stupid; they knew that this was an empty offer and they paid him no heed. Desperate now, he said that he would send back down the valley to the Kashmiri frontier post at Gilgit; the governor there would provide the money if only they would release him. They were making a terrible mistake. If they would just send for his munshi everything could be arranged.

But they only jeered, enjoying his frantic attempts to bargain.

They were deep in the forest now, a mile from the village, and abruptly they came to a halt. The man stumbled to his knees on the rough ground and one of the captors reached out behind him and tore the ring from the finger of his bound hands. This, quite clearly, was it; the man understood that. And maybe too, in one sharp instant, he understood that he had been moving irresistibly towards this moment for many years, perhaps all his life. He began, desperately, to pray.

They hacked off his head with a sword.

The murderers half-buried the body under a pile of loose rocks, leaving the pale, limp hands sticking out into the mountain air. Then they went back to the clearing, killed the servants and looted the camp.

* * *

In the middle years of the nineteenth century it could take a long time for news to seep out of the high mountains west of Gilgit. It was almost a fortnight before word of the death reached the first Kashmiri garrison and began to make its way eastwards towards India, picking up stray threads of conjecture and bazaar gossip in the mountain villages along the way. By the end of August, Kashmir and the towns where the rich Punjabi plains meet the foothills of the Himalayas were rife with rumours that an Englishman had been murdered somewhere in the Hindu Kush. For the British authorities then governing India, this was the worst possible news. Travelling Englishmen were not a common phenomenon in the high mountains beyond the frontier; if the rumour was true then the victim could only be one man – a controversial figure already well known to the government. And if he really had come to grief then his death would prove highly and politically inconvenient, having occurred on the fringes of the territory of the Maharaja of Kashmir.

Of the independent kingdoms (recognising ultimate British suzerainty) that made up much of the British Raj, Kashmir, with its ill-defined and contentious western border, was one of the largest. It was also by far the most strategically important. The maharaja was a difficult man who had to be handled with the most delicate of diplomatic skill. For some years there had been grumblings about his misrule – from both his own subjects and from visiting British citizens – and there had been a good deal of recent controversy about the actions of his troops in the more remote parts of the mountain kingdom. If the rumours of murder proved true they would cause a severe diplomatic headache.

* * *

In 1870 the British Raj was approaching its zenith. The 'Mutiny' – a bloody uprising by native Indian soldiers in 1857 – had brought to an end the old haphazard empire of the Honourable East India Company. India was now under the rule of the British crown, which covered the patchwork of acquiescent native kingdoms and directly administered territories spanning a huge swathe from the Afghan border to the Bay of Bengal. On the map of the world India was entirely red. There would be no more great wars of conquest in the subcontinent, only border skirmishes and punitive raids.

The British, finding in Indian caste an echo of their own rigid Victorian class system, had established themselves at the very pinnacle of south Asian society. Nowhere, it was said, was an Englishman's life more sacred than in the subcontinent. In the unthinkable event of a white man's death at the hands of 'the natives', vengeance was essential, a duty in fact, to maintain respect if nothing else. But avenging the lonely death of a footloose Englishman in some wild and inhospitable upland valley beyond the River Indus would prove extremely difficult, no matter how necessary. And if, as the sizzling gossip was now beginning to suggest, the Maharaja of Kashmir himself was implicated in the death, then the connotations could prove catastrophic.

At first the authorities did their best to keep the rumours quiet. The identity of the dead man, obvious as it was, had not been confirmed, and conflicting reports about who was behind the murder were now pouring out of the mountains like spring meltwater. But by the beginning of September the news was so widespread in bazaars and teashops across north-west India that it could no longer be suppressed. On 9 September the viceroy, Lord Mayo, the supreme British authority in India, telegraphed the home government in London telling them of the rumour. The story quickly reached the Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, for their vice-president, Sir Henry Rawlinson, was also a member of the government's India Council. As word spread among the venerable old geographers in the oak-panelled chambers of the society's London headquarters, there would have been a sense of bitter disappointment; they too would quickly have realised who the dead man must be. By the end of the month it was confirmed.

The victim's identity might now have been known, but little else about the murder was clear. Rumours continued to emerge from the mountains, new twists, assertions and allegations making their way down on to the plains on an almost daily basis. 'There are some very queer stories afloat,' wrote the viceroy in a confidential memo. Untangling the threads of misinformation would prove a troublesome task, not least given the remote and evidently hazardous nature of the crime scene. Indeed, the viceroy wondered, if the truth had the potential to prove so politically explosive, might it not be best if the waters remained muddy?

Still, on 3 October, two and a half months after the event, the news was finally made public in the British press: the 'distinguished traveller' Mr George Hayward, aged 32, Central Asian explorer par excellence and honoured holder of the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, was dead, assassinated on his journey to explore the Pamir Steppe.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Murder in the Hindu Kush by Tim Hannigan. Copyright © 2011 Tim Hannigan,. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Murder in the Hindu Kush: George Hayward and the Great Game

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Murder in the Hindu Kush: George Hayward and the Great Game

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Murder in the Hindu Kush

George Hayward and the Great Game

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