The Dangerous Book of Heroes by Conn Iggulden Read Free Book Online Page B

last and left Oxford riding on a tandem-driven dog cart, blowing a coaching horn.
    Burton’s father was appalled and furious but, recognizing the inevitable, allowed both his sons to join the East India Company army. Edward was posted to Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, while Burton was posted to the subcontinent itself.
    Warned of the heat in India, Burton shaved his head and bought a wig as well as learning Hindustani. During the voyage, he boxed, fenced, and practiced his language skills. By the time he landed in India, he was almost completely fluent. He did not know it then, but he was about to begin a relationship with the subcontinent that would provide a driving force to his previously aimless life.
    It did not begin well. Burton fell ill with diarrhea and spent time in a sanatorium. He disliked the smell of curry and the lack of privacy in the company rooms. He began to learn Gujerati and Persian, ignoring the distressing presence of a crematorium next door, of whichhe said, “The smell of roast Hindu was most unpleasant.” He found the tiny society of five hundred Europeans stifling, though he enjoyed the brothels and bazaars. For almost two months he endured, then he was sent at last to his first posting, at Baroda. He took a horse, servants, a supply of port, and a bull terrier with him. He was slowly falling in love with India, in all its endless variety.
    Baroda was a baking-hot maze of alleys and exotic sights, with summer temperatures up to 120° F. The lives of the inhabitants were brutal, with appalling punishments for misdeeds, such as placing a criminal’s head beneath an elephant’s foot to be crushed. Burton loved it, from the strange smells of incense, hashish, and opium to the courtesans, shrines, alien flowers, and colorful mosques. Of the white officers, he said: “There was not a subaltern in the 18th Regiment who did not consider himself capable of governing a million Hindus.” He took a temporary native wife, whom he described as his “walking dictionary,” and found the courtesans more playful and less inhibited than their frosty counterparts in England. He threw himself into an exploration of sexual matters that would inform his writings many years later. Hunting and hawking kept him busy for a while, but he quickly lost the taste for it. He kept a company of monkeys, who ate at the table with him. He won the regimental horse race, learned the Indian style of wrestling, and taught his troops gymnastics to keep them agile.
    In 1843, Burton took government examinations in Hindustani and made first in his class. He so successfully immersed himself in a Hindu snake cult that he was given the janeo, the three-ply cotton cord that showed he was a Brahmin, the highest caste. This was a unique event, unheard of before or since. In all other cases, a Hindu had to be born into that religion and only attained the highest caste after millennia of reincarnation. This honor came despite the fact that he remained a meat eater and is the more astonishing for it. He went on to discover Tantrism, with its philosophy, as he wrote, “not to indulge shame or adversion to anything…but freely to enjoy all the pleasures of the senses.”
    He attended Catholic chapel, then later converted to Islam andthen Sikhism, in love with the mysticism of all faiths and throwing himself into one until he found himself drawn to the next. He was not a dilettante, however. In each case, he searched and learned all he could and completed every ritual with steadfast determination and belief, yet somehow his soul wandered as much as his feet and there were always new towns to see.
    In 1843, Burton became the regimental interpreter for the Eighteenth Bombay Native Infantry and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai), bound for Karachi to join General Charles Napier and the British forces fighting in Sindh. Napier recognized Burton’s abilities and used him in a variety of diplomatic missions