"Alexandria: The Quest of the Lost City" by Edmund Richardson

 This is a wonderful story about a private in the East India Company in India in 1827 who deserts and reinvents himself as explorer Charles Masson. He has multiple adventures before becoming besotted with the idea that Bagram, near Kabul in Afghanistan, is the site of Alexandria-Under-the-Mountains, one of the many lost cities founded by Alexander the Great (he had previously stumbled across the site of the Harappan civilisation, but doesn't seem to have been impressed). His journeys included the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and the man-made caves behind them, Gholghola, the City of Screams (made by the wind passing through its pinnacles) which was destroyed by Genghis Khan, and a 'dead dragon'. His researches include the translation of an unknown Indian script and the discovery of "the very earliest dateable image of the Buddha which has ever been found" (Ch 6), a work of art with clear Greek influences. When his past caught up with him he was blackmailed into spying for the East India Company on his friends, the rulers of Kabul; he later became involved in the loot-fuelled British invasion of that country, then, suspected as a double agent, a British prisoner, until finally he escaped from India just as the British hubris caught up with them and they were slaughtered while retreating from Kabul in the winter of 1841 - 1842.

It is an incredibly romantic story, full of action, and would make a superb film. As well as the exotic location and the multiple story of survival despite incredible hardships, it is people with larger-than-life characters:

• James Lewis/ Charles Masson himself. He repeatedly reinvented his own story.
• Josiah Harlan, an American fantasist, traveller, and spy, who claimed to have been created Prince of Ghor (Ch 14)
• Joseph Wolff, a fanatical preacher. "He was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind. He had spent years wandering ... preaching all the way. Every day, he had become grumpier and more dogmatic." After annoying one party of Afghans they stripped him so he had to walk into Kabul naked. "Even when fully clothed, Wolff was a remarkable sight. ... Naked, he quite baffled the thesaurus."  (Ch 4)
• Henry Pottinger, the East Indian Company's resident in Bhuj: "Think back to the most easily irritated person you have ever met. Double their sensitivity. You might now be coming close to Pottinger. If you left him alone in a room for a few minutes, he would probably be nursing a lifelong grudge against the sofa and two of the floorboards by the time you returned." (Ch 6)
• "treasure-hunting Transylvanian Johann Martin Honigberger ... liked quoting Cicero, practising homeopathy, and smashing things." (Ch 6)
• Dost Mohammed, a ruler of Kabul, spent years "drinking his courtiers under the table" before becoming abstemious and banning alcohol. He has a proverbial reputation as a just ruler. (Ch 6)

It is also a chronicle of the shame of colonialism. Some incidents recounted are even more sickening than the comprehensive condemnation in The Anarchy by Willaim Dalrymple:

• "East India House was loot made manifest." (Ch 12)
• "'One or two little bits of smashery took place,' laughed one officer. 'It is perfectly annoying to see a lot of those fellows come screeching after you that they have been looted. This generally happens during the first or second day you enter a place'." (Ch 15)
• Loveday, a political officer, enslaved Indians to work on building his palace, one of whom displeased him and was savaged by Loveday's bulldogs, later dying  of his injuries. "He was proud of 'blowing from a gun' one local chief ... Loveday slid up the greasy pole like a man born to the art ... Loveday proved to be a world-class looter." (Ch 15)
• It's not just British imperialism that was evil. Alexander the Great massacred all the men of military age and enslaved all other inhabitants at both Tyre and Gaza. He looted and burned Persepolis. (Ch 20)

Selected quotes:

• "When Lewis was a teenager, the British economy was teetering on the brink of collapse. London's streets filled up with the newly homeless. ... The government responded with a sympathy which has marked British attitudes to the poor for centuries: they announced a plan to execute the protesters." (Ch 1)
• "When you walk into a room full of strangers, there's a precious moment when you can become whoever you want to be." (Ch 2)
• "The Pashtuns say that when God created the world he had a heap of rocks left over, out of which he made Afghanistan." (Ch 3) This reminded me of a similar quote about the founding of Montenegro, as found in The Venetian Empire by Jan Morris.
• "Alexander [the Great] travelled far. But stories about him have travelled even further. There is an Icelandic Alexander Saga and an Armenian epic, a Balinese poem and a French romance." (Ch 7)
• "Then the assassins came for Masson. One night, a sudden noise pulled him from sleep. He blinked awake and stumbled to the door. Men with knives were running up the stairs." (Ch 9)
• "The people of Malana are proud of their ancestor, Alexander the Great. The family business is no longer world conquest, but the cultivation of some of the most potent marijuana on earth." (Ch 11)
• "He was still convinced ... that the East India Company cared; that a thoroughly amoral, capitalist empire could also be kind." (Ch 12)
• "When it rained, the lower town flooded, and the poor waded through the shit of the rich." (Ch 15)
• "The Parsis had arrived in India from Persia over a thousand years earlier. They brought with them stories about Alexander: fearful tales, legends of a violent, ruthless king, who brought nothing but death and destruction in his wake." (Ch 20)
• "Heinrich Schliemann loved a tall tale even more than Charles Masson did. Today, schollars are divided between those who think he was a liar, and those who think he was a 'pathological liar'." (Ch 21)
• "Evans is another of history's great archaeological stars ... It is rarely mentioned that many of his craftsmen worked two shifts: the first, restoring Minoan antiquities, and the second, faking Minoan antiquities." (Ch 21)

This is an absolutely brilliant book. The hero is incredible, his adventures page-turning, and the cast of characters beautifully drawn. In addition, it is very well written. 

September 2022; 261 pages

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God