Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  Until that came about, or until a message summoning him to Meshed was received from the British minister in Tehran, he tried to pass the time by writing up his notes – the notes that were to be the foundation of his two-volume, thousand-page account of his adventures. But not even this was easy. Although he was no longer suspected of espionage whenever he wrote anything down, the constant stream of curious visitors never left him alone for a moment, and his supplies of ink and paper soon ran out. The final straw was when he found one of his servants using his last steel pen nib to remove a thorn from his foot. What entries he did manage to make in his notebook were ever more vitriolic about the manners and practices of the Mervli (the people of Merv).

  Some time in June 1881 (exact dates were beyond the calculation of the Mervli) when O’Donovan had already been some six months at Merv, the long-awaited reply from the British minister at Tehran was received and delivered with much ceremony by the other two khans to his redoubt. It was along the lines O’Donovan had requested. While stating that he was not ‘an emissary of the British government, but an agent of the British public’ it went on to say firmly that ‘it is now both desirable and expedient that you should send Mr O’Donovan at once to this country in order that he may personally communicate to me such information as may have been furnished to him during his stay at Merv’. Baba Khan declared he was at liberty to go when he pleased, but then added in the same breath that there would have to be a council of elders called first. This would cause another week or two’s delay at least, during all of which time he felt more like a hostage than an envoy. Finally, in exasperation, O’Donovan declared he was going to leave in three days’ time, and if stopped would ‘haul down my flag as a declaration of war’. He was helped by the fact that rumours had reached the oasis of Cossack patrols surveying the road eastwards across the desert; this looked like the precursor of more trouble. O’Donovan seized on the reports and announced that the reason why he had to reach Meshed so quickly was because a meeting of European ambassadors had been convened to decide the new frontier and frustrate the Russian plans. It was essential he was there. No one else could both speak English and convey the concerns of Merv. Even then, it was a close run thing: he had to distribute a final delivery of silver coins to his fellow khans as a sweetener, and he had to disregard an impassioned plea to the effect that the ladies of Merv would lament his departure.

  The council of elders, to which O’Donovan was summoned to make his case for the last time, lasted six hours. He thought that among the elements urging his release were a few covert Russian sympathizers; they did not want a British agent continuing to haunt the oasis. Be that as it may, the verdict was in his favour. Even after this decision, there were endless prevarications and delays. If he left now would he be intercepted by Cossack patrols? Should he not postpone his departure till more farewell presents were ready? (In the end he was given eight magnificent Tekke Turkoman carpets, on which he had to pay duty when he arrived in Persia.) A last-minute gift was a suit of chain armour and ‘a huge steel helmet like a dish cover’. Considerations of practicality before a long desert ride do not seem to have occurred to his hosts. He for his part gave away the small menagerie he had assembled during his six-month stay: a tame antelope, a ger-falcon, a jackal and some wolf cubs.

  When eventually they mounted and rode away from the oasis he had an armed escort of some fifty warriors, who reduced themselves to thirty before the end of the journey. The escort slowed down the pace of the journey so much that at times he feared they were deliberately marking time in the expectation of being overtaken by a messenger demanding his return to Merv for some spurious reason. There were however a couple of days when he was quite glad of the gentler pace, because he had been stung by a scorpion and developed a mild fever. There were also the periodical alarms which were a part of any journey across Central Asian deserts and tamarisk jungles: ‘in the midst of the thicket we heard the tramp of many hoofs, and all prepared their arms’. This particular scare turned out to be caused by an innocent group of donkey men who had been equally scared by O’Donovan’s party. In another encounter with some caravan camel-drivers it was revealed that they were much alarmed by the current Cossack movements in the region, and thought it was wholly irresponsible of O’Donovan to be leaving Merv at such a moment: ‘had it not been for my formidable array of Tekke horsemen, these caravan people would have seized upon me bodily and brought me back [to Merv]’. Another caravan they encountered had a package of letters for O’Donovan, bringing the dreaded news that the British were indeed withdrawing from Kandahar; this made him doubly glad he was well quit of Merv before the unwelcome news reached the khans there. But there were happier aspects of the journey too: the banks of the Tejend river were alive with pheasants which provided much-welcome game for the pot; the reeds along the riverside provided comfortable bedding; and there was enough wood to light big fires at night designed to keep away the mosquitoes by the smoke, and by the flames to deter the attentions of the leopards and tigers that were known to frequent the more jungly regions. Their final problem was being mistaken for a bunch of desert marauders by the sentries at the outskirts of the Persian city of Meshed. This overcome, they had arrived. O’Donovan was once more a free man.

  After a short period of recuperation, he went on from Meshed to Tehran and then returned via Odessa and Constantinople to England. Although he received various communications from the khans of Merv before he left Meshed, informing him of approaches by Russian agents and reminding him that ‘the tribes of Merv firmly grasped the skirt of submission to the Queen of England’, he neither wrote back with advice nor contemplated returning to Merv. For him, this chapter was closed.

  But as if his adventures had not been enough, the intrepid war correspondent then signed up to go for the Daily News to the Sudan, where the Mahdi had recently emerged as both an extremist Islamic leader and a threat to British and Egyptian interests. So it came about that he was with the Egyptian expeditionary force sent up the Nile under command of Hicks Pasha when they were massacred in November 1883. At his death O’Donovan was just thirty-nine years old.

  O’Donovan had broken all the rules in his Central Asian escapade. He had put himself in a position where his capture by the Russian army of General Skobeloff would have been an embarrassment to his own government. He had allowed himself, despite protestations to the contrary, to be unjustifiably hailed as a representative of the British government and of the Queen of England and Empress of India. He had been seen as an earnest of his government’s intention to intervene in Central Asia to protect the independence of a Turkoman khanate (Merv), whereas in reality Lord Granville, the British foreign secretary of the day, had no wish to risk a confrontation with a major European power such as tsarist Russia. He had been the sort of war correspondent that, in the eyes of generals and politicians, cause more trouble than they are worth. But even if his sudden and unexpected appearance in Merv had not – as the other khans of Merv liked to believe – stopped the Russian advance dead in its tracks, his presence there for more than six months had at least temporarily stiffened resistance to further Russian incursions. He had been a brake on the Cossack troika careering across the steppes. In short, he had earned a place in the pantheon of players in the Great Game.

  1. The tendency of Asians to seek closer physical proximity than Westerners are comfortable with is an enduring trait. Asian delegates frequently approach their Western counterparts to within inches of their faces when speaking to them in the delegates’ lounge at the United Nations in New York, with the consequence that the Westerners tend to step backwards. When a film-maker recorded this process a few years ago, and showed his film in fast time, it appeared that the entire Western diplomatic corps was in rapid retreat in front of advancing oriental colleagues.

  2. For details of that expedition, see the author’s book Shooting Leave (2009).

  Chapter 11

  Ney Elias: The Odd Man Out

  ‘We shall not ce
ase from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.’

  – T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

  When two travellers, carrying a considerable sum of money, were murdered outside the eastern Persian city of Meshed in 1892, the local authorities accused three Turkomans working for the British consul-general of committing the crime and set about trying to arrest and charge them. It transpired that all three Turkomans had watertight alibis, but that the Russian consul-general had instigated the charges, claiming that the accused were Russian citizens working as spies for his rival for power and influence – the British consul-general. It was a deep laid plot which was only unravelled by the assiduous work and ingenuity of the British consul-general himself, who was convinced by evidence he had that the money the murdered travellers had been carrying was intended to finance the sending of a tsarist secret agent into Herat in Afghanistan. The British official also discovered that his correspondence with the Persian government was being intercepted and read by his Russian rival. The whole affair was deeply sinister and called for action on a much more sensitive and sophisticated level than was usual with the conduct of consular affairs. This was espionage and intrigue on an international scale.

  The British consul-general concerned had the strange name of Ney Elias. He was an unusual figure to be a British consul, and he was also very different on a number of grounds from his fellow protagonists in this book. He was modest and self-effacing to the degree that – unlike most of the other explorers and adventurers of his day – he did not write any popular accounts of his travels and exploits. There were no two-volume best-sellers to tell the world of his achievements, only a series of official (and usually confidential) reports to the Foreign Office in London or the viceroy’s office in India, or else scholarly articles (frequently anonymous) in the journals of the Royal Geographical Society and other learned bodies.

  At first sight he might appear scarcely eligible to join the ranks of British adventurers who confronted tsarist Russia and who acted in defiance or disregard of their official instructions. But on closer inspection he was eligible on all grounds. Despite his name, British he was; his parents were both from well-established Jewish families and he was born in Bristol in 1844; when he was still a young child, both his parents renounced their Jewish faith and became Christians and Ney himself, in later life, was to resent being labelled as Jewish (which he inevitably was in Victorian England on account of his origins and name). That he was an adventurer is also beyond dispute, as even the briefest study of his exploits throughout Central Asia will confirm. That he confronted tsarist Russia will emerge clearly, particularly when one considers the later part of his career as an agent of the Indian government and a British consul in such posts as Leh and Meshed, where his entire raison d’être was to attempt to contain and undo the aggressive and often nefarious activities of his Russian opposite numbers. Less easy to establish is, perhaps, his character as a maverick operator who acted independently of official guidance and authority; but there are clear instances when he was to do this, trusting his own judgement rather than that of his superiors.

  Elias had the advantage of a very cosmopolitan education: he went to school in London, Paris and Dresden, and was soon adding oriental languages to his grasp of European ones. After starting his professional life working in the family business in Shanghai, he concluded early on that, despite his ancestry, commerce was not for him. Taking advantage of his foothold in the Far East, he turned his mind to exploration. It was known that the Yellow River had changed its course, but it was not until Elias made a number of exploratory trips into the region that the new course was mapped and identified. He was already a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and he received the congratulations of the Society on this achievement.

  An even more remarkable journey was to follow, which confirmed his standing as an explorer. He set off for 2,500 miles through Mongolia and across the Gobi desert into Russia, and then a further 2,000 miles across Russia to Nijni Novgorod (later named Gorky) which was the terminus of the railway from Moscow and St Petersburg. In fact, he was traversing the famous Silk Route from east to west, most previous European travellers having gone in the opposite direction. His objectives were to try to find the ruins of Karakoram (the capital of Genghis Khan’s son) and, more importantly, to visit Ili, a Chinese settlement on the Silk Route which had been overrun by Russian forces, and to find out what was going on there. Was it a sinister new probe by the Cossacks?

  From the outset, the Chinese were very suspicious of his intentions. Was he charting a route for an invasion force? The only available maps were very inaccurate Russian ones, and Elias found that he could not be seen correcting these or drawing his own maps without risking being stopped in his tracks. He had to do all his cartography at night by candlelight. He was a conspicuous stranger: declining to wear local dress, refusing to pose as a holy man or missionary, not speaking any Mongolian, and not even having the rudimentary medical skills that often helped ensure a safe passage for Westerners. In all this he was unlike most of his fellow-countrymen players of the Great Game; he was indeed an odd man out.

  His main problem however was that he was entering a war zone. The Moslem population was in open revolt against the Chinese and were moving round the Gobi in large rebel gangs intent on plunder and disruption. And his was a vulnerably small party, consisting of just four men, six camels and two ponies. To make matters worse, he was only able to start later than was sensible, in September, when harsh winter conditions were sure to set in while they were still in the Gobi desert. Although they encountered large flocks of wild sheep and herds of wild horses and gazelle, by the time they reached the all-important wells, which were often not much more than muddy pools, these were often dried out or drunk dry by the passing flocks and herds. The camels managed to survive on minimal sustenance, but the men and horses were in dire straits. The temperature fell below the lowest point that their thermometer could register.

  Despite all these hazards and difficulties, Elias kept meticulous records of the heights of the hills, the bearings of the tracks, and the boiling point of his kettles. He was collecting just the sort of geographical information that his Chinese hosts had feared he would. The guide he had recruited proved useless, ‘more or less an imposter’, and relied for any sense of direction on the camel driver, who could not be expected to know the route. But worse was to come: the useless guide (who was also supposed to be an interpreter) slipped away in the night, taking with him a large share of the remaining provisions. Now there was no one who could explain to whoever they encountered – be it Mongol settlers, rebel bands or Chinese garrisons – who they were, what they were doing, or why they should not be arrested or taken hostage. As three hungry and scruffy travellers, they must have looked like vagabonds or people on the run. Elias recorded that ‘it was only by a constant parade of arms and the most careful vigilance by day and night that a collision [disastrous encounter] was avoided’. Indeed, the fact that he survived at all was attributed by the Chinese garrisons to his having some sort of ‘improper understanding’ with the Moslem rebels to protect him: if he was safe, he was suspect.

  But he had one stroke of extraordinary good luck. When he reached the Mongol settlement of Kobdo on the edge of the Altai mountains which formed the western fringe of the Gobi desert, he found it had been attacked by two hundred Moslem rebels just three days before. They had scared the garrison into thinking they were a much larger force, by driving a thousand camels ahead of them. Although the garrison consisted of nearly two thousand Chinese infantry and cavalry, this body of not very gallant men had retreated into their fortress and watched while the rebels pillaged the settlement and slaughtered the merchants and other Mongol inhabitants. If Elias and his tiny party had been there any earlier they would undoubtedly have been among the unrecorded victims.

  As it was, the
frightened survivors and garrison of Kobdo refused to allow Elias entry to their settlement, and he camped outside without food or firewood until an old Mongol woman appeared and offered to act as a go-between. Once admitted within the walls, Elias and his party were fortunate not to have been dubbed as agents of the rebels and summarily executed – as had happened to most visitors who could not give a proper account of themselves. They were provided with a minimum of food, water and firewood and dispatched on their way with all haste: even if they were not enemy agents, such a dubious little party heading for Russia was an embarrassment as well as a drain on resources.

  When eventually they reached the Russian frontier, after eighty days of marching in all, they were still not out of danger. The border region was infested with Kazak sheep stealers and horse and cattle rustlers. The prudent Elias had already taken the precaution of obtaining a Russian visa, so once inside that country he was able to join up with other caravans and even make use of the troika-driven sleighs which acted as the official mail carriers. He had another two thousand miles to go, mostly round the southern edge of Siberia, and still in winter, before he reached Nijni Novgorod, the longed-for railhead. He had not managed to discover the extent of the Russian military activity at Ili, but he had acquired a vast compendium of knowledge of potential strategic value. It was little wonder that for the completion of such a journey, even if his designated objectives had not been formally achieved, he was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the RGS.