Free The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk Page A

perceived there was no alternative,’ Pottinger relates, ‘so I simply went through the motions of prostration, keeping my eye fixed on the Sirdar, and muttering to myself.’ Amazingly, no one appears to have suspected him. The friendly Sirdar, who had suggested the new disguise, knew full well that he was not a holy man, but had no idea that he was a Christian and a British officer, assuming him to be a devout Muslim. Nor was this to be the last time that Pottinger’s disguise as a holy man would cause him intense anxiety. After riding all night they reached the village of Gull, where Pottinger was warmly welcomed by the mullah who invited him to breakfast. ‘I found four or five well-dressed and respectable men sitting on carpets spread under a shady tree, with bread and butter-milk in wooden dishes before them,’ Pottinger tells us. They rose to their feet to welcome him, and he found himself seated on the mullah’s right. After they had eaten, one of the men called upon Pottinger to say a prayer of thanksgiving. ‘This’, Pottinger recounts, ‘was as unexpected as it was unwelcome, and I was greatly perplexed for an instant.’ Fortunately, however, before leaving Bombay he had taken the trouble to learn a Muslim prayer or two from a servant, never dreaming that this would later save him from an unpleasant fate. He and Christie had intended to carry out their mission as horse-dealers, not as holy men, or he might have taken pains to learn these prayers more thoroughly. Desperately trying to remember one, Pottinger now stood up, uncomfortably aware that all eyes were fixed on him. ‘I assumed a very grave air,’ he recalled, ‘stroked down my beard with all imaginable significance, and muttered a few sentences.’ He was careful to pronounce – ‘rather distinctly’ – such words as Allah, Rusool (the Prophet) and Shookr (Thanks). These words were the most likely, he felt, to recur in a prayer of this kind. The risky subterfuge worked once again, for the unsuspecting mullah and his companions smiled benignly upon their pious visitor.
    Pottinger’s next close shave occurred the following day, in another village. He was buying a pair of shoes in the market (for one of his had been carried off by a jackal during the night) when an old man in the crowd which had gathered round him pointed to his feet. Pottinger, he declared, was clearly not a man accustomed to a life of toil or poverty. ‘I instantly went to my shoes and put them on,’ Pottinger recounts, ‘for notwithstanding I had persevered in exposing my feet to the sun, I could never get them to assume the weather-beaten colour of my hands and face.’ Wishing to avoid further interrogation, he returned to his camel, followed closely by the man, and left the village rather hastily.
    Two days later, Pottinger and his party entered the small, mud-walled village of Mughsee, where they had planned to halt for the night. But on discovering what was happening there, they decided not to linger. Only a few days earlier, they were told, a gang of armed brigands had murdered the Sirdar and his family and taken over the village. One of his sons had managed to escape, and at that very moment the brigands were laying siege to the house in which he was sheltering, and which was pointed out to Pottinger and his party. The unfortunate youth, whose father had refused to let the brigands cultivate land near the village, had been told that he might as well come out and be put to death like the rest of his family, for otherwise they would starve him out. None of the villagers attempted to go to his defence, and Pottinger’s small party was powerless to intercede. They had little choice but to continue on their way, leaving him to his fate.
    Three days later, Pottinger was to find himself wondering if his own last moment had not come. He had arrived at the village of Puhra bearing with him a letter of introduction from the Sirdar of a previous village. This he presented