at Wuddagudem recorded that he was “shot in the late Rampa Rebellion” (H. Le Fanu, List of European Tombs in the Godaveri District with Inscriptions Thereon, Cocanada 1895). Dr. George Lemon Walker, Surgeon to D and G Companies, Madras Sappers and Miners, during the Rampa Rebellion, was indeed born in Kingston, Canada, and received his medical training at Queen’s University in Belfast. From 1884 his superior in medical charge of the Madras Sappers was Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross-later Sir Ronald Ross, famous for identifying the Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of the malaria parasite, and whose patients would have included sapper veterans of Rampa suffering from the dreaded “jungle fever.”
Of the Madras Sappers, the fictional Sergeant O’Connell is inspired by Sergeant John Brown, who embarked for India in 1860, served in the 1875-6 Perak campaign in Malaysia and was pensioned as a quartermaster sergeant in 1881. Sapper Narrainsamy served in Burma and the Chin Lushai expeditions in the late 1880s. Of the subalterns, Robert Ewen Hamilton died in 1885 from cholera, “his health shattered by continued attacks of malarial fever” during the Afghan war and the Rampa Rebellion. The fictional Lieutenant Wauchope is based on Robert Alexander Wahab (who later used the spelling Wauhope for his Irish name); he was indeed from an Irish family with American connections. His health was also eventually broken by malaria, causing his early retirement in 1905, though by then he was a colonel with a distinguished record in almost all of the northwest frontier military expeditions of the period.
The fictional Lieutenant Howard is based on Lieutenant Walter Andrew Gale, my great-great-grandfather, the longest-serving of all the Madras Sapper officers in the Rampa Field Force. He had been detailed for the second phase of the Afghan war in late 1879, but remained in Rampa as the deployment there dragged on through 1880. His son Edward died in Bangalore in April that year, aged one year and five months. After leaving the Madras Sappers in 1881 both he and Wahab became specialists in survey, developing skills honed in the Rampa jungle. Gale returned with his young family to England in 1885 and became an instructor in Survey at the School of Military Engineering, Chatham, where he edited the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers. As Secretary of the R.E. Institute he was fully involved in the academic life of the Royal Engineers, and would have attended lectures on subjects ranging beyond purely military matters-including archaeology, which had developed in India as an offshoot of survey. The topic of Howard’s fictional lecture at the Royal United Service Institution in London would have been in keeping with the remarkable range of interests pursued by engineer officers at this period. The Institution housed the only known collection of artifacts from the Rampa Rebellion-two matchlock muskets, two swords and a scabbard, two bamboo arrows, a bird arrow, a shield and four arrowheads-donated by a fellow Madras Sapper officer and Rampa veteran, Lieutenant A. C. Macdonnell, R.E. in 1882 (Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, xxv, p. xxxi); the museum was closed in 1962, when any of these artifacts still in the collection would have been dispersed.
Gale and Wahab were together again in 1889, when Wahab returned to Chatham for courses of training. The final disappearance of the two retired colonels into Afghanistan is fictional. However, both men were intensely familiar with the Afghan frontier region, and would have been poised for such an adventure. Wahab spent almost twenty years with the Survey of India demarking the boundary with Afghanistan, from Baluchistan to the Khyber Pass and beyond. He was famous as a mountaineer, and his boundary markers still survive on the frontier today. Gale returned to India and became Commanding Royal Engineer of the Quetta Division of the Indian army and Supervising Engineer in Baluchistan, responsible for the entire province including the volatile frontier region. One of his colleagues in the Baluchistan administration was Aurel Stein, the famous Silk Route explorer, then employed as archaeological surveyor by the government; his and Colonel Gale’s reports appear together in the Administration Report of the Baluchistan Agency for 1904-1905. Stein was also a personal friend of Robert Wahab, who shared his passion for classical history and was responsible for the most likely identification of Aornos, the mountain spur that Alexander the Great famously captured; Wauhope (as he became) is acknowledged warmly in Stein’s classic On Alexander’s Track to the Indus (1929). Twenty years before that book was published, there were still parts of Afghanistan so remote that hardly any Europeans had ever visited them, including the fabled lapis lazuli mines described in Lieutenant John Wood’s A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus (1841), quoted here in chapters 13, 15 (including the Pashtun verse), 18 and 19. At different times in their careers, and possibly together, Gale and Wahab must have stood before the Bolan Pass on the route to Afghanistan, gazing at the awesome cleft in the mountains that had lured so many soldiers and adventurers to the land beyond, in search of glory and treasure but so often ending in death.
Royal Engineers officers were exhorted to be “soldiers first and engineers afterwards” in an instructional paper edited by Captain W. A. Gale in the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers for 1889 (Colonel E. Wood, C.B., R.E., “The duties of Royal Engineers in the Field,” vol xv, 69-96), and were fully trained to act as infantry. In India, officers not on campaign spent a great deal of time hunting, so were closely familiar with firearms and were often expert marksmen. In this novel, the 1851 Colt revolver with Upper Canada markings is a genuine piece that I have fired, as are the Snider-Enfield and Lee-Enfield rifles. Colt revolvers were used extensively by British officers during the 1857-8 Indian Mutiny, and cap-and-ball revolvers were still favored decades later by adventurers such as Sir Richard Burton in areas where cartridge ammunition was not readily available. The Madras Sappers were armed in 1879 with the Snider-Enfield rifle, though the British army had converted to the Martini- Henry several years earlier. Many old service rifles found their way to the north-west frontier and Afghanistan, where British rifles still used today include Lee-Enfields made at Long Branch in Canada. Scoped Lee-Enfields and Mosin-Nagants made highly effective sniper rifles during the Second World War. The Mosin-Nagant was used by the Soviet female snipers called zaichata, “little hares,” after their mentor, Vasiliy Zaitsev; one of them, Lyudmila Pavli- chenko, had more than 300 kills, and is the basis for the sniper in this novel.
The quotes from the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea are my translations of the original Greek, based on the text in Frisk, H., Le Periple de la mer Erythree (Goteborgs Hogskolas Arsskrif -, 33, 1927); these are extracts from Frisk, chapter 63-6 for the front quote, and chapters 41 and 63 in chapter 3. The second front quote is from Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (Columbia University Press, 1993, trans. Burton Watson), Shi ji 6; this is also the source of the verse on the virtue of the emperor in chapter 4-a version of a stone inscription raised by Shihuangdi on Mount Langye-and the quote in chapter 15. In chapter 3, the quote from Cosmas on Sri Lanka is from J. W McCrindle, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (Hakluyt Society series 1, vol. 97, 1987), 365-8. In chapter 4, the extract from Lieutenant Howard’s fictional diary on the problems of survey is from Captain W A. Gale’s preface to volume XIV (1888) of the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers, a comment undoubtedly influenced by his Rampa experience; the quote following that is from the report of the Hon. David F. Carmichael, who was deputed to tour the Rampa tract after the rebellion and make recommendations (Madras Judicial Proceedings, 14 December 1881, 1027-53).
One of the artifacts brought back by Colonel Gale from India was the brass pata gauntlet sword described in this novel. A similar brass pata is on display in the British Museum (OA 1878. 12-30, 818). The history of these rare weapons may date as far back as the Mongol invasions of India, or even earlier. One of few images of a pata in use is a battle scene of the seventeenth century showing the Maratha prince Shivaji wielding a great pata (from a miniature reproduced in Monuments Anciens et Modernes de l’Hindoustan, L. Langles, 1821); the composition of the scene is reminiscent of the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii, the inspiration for the cave carving in this novel. My grandfather had been told that the pata came from a “rebellion,” but nothing more is known about it with certainty. Images of this artifact, as well as the camphor-wood officer’s chest, the telescope, the old books, the ancient coins and the weapons in this novel, can be seen at www.davidgibbins.com.
