The King's Shadow
Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The King's Shadow: The Extraordinary Tale of Charles Masson's Epic Search for the Lost City of Alexandria in the Wild East
In the age of empires, kings, and spies, Charles Masson embarked on a wild journey that would change the world. The King's Shadow by Edmund Richardson is an impeccably researched tale of adventure, espionage, and discovery in nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan.
Masson, a deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, and spy, became one of the most respected scholars in Asia and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers. He would take tea with kings, travel with holy men, master a hundred disguises, and even be offered his own kingdom. In 1833, he discovered the lost city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains, a meeting point of East and West that had vanished for centuries.
Set during the Great Game, when imperial powers confronted each other in these staggeringly beautiful lands, Masson's story is one of extreme violence, both personal and military, and boundless hope. He would discover tens of thousands of pieces of Afghan history, including the 2,000-year-old Bimaran golden casket, which bears the earliest known face of the Buddha.
Richardson's storytelling immerses readers in a world of dreamers, opportunists, and ne'er-do-wells at the edge of empire, amid the deserts and the mountains. The King's Shadow is the extraordinary untold story of an obsession passed down the centuries, a journey through the wild east that evokes both the exploits of Indiana Jones and the epic adventures of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Durham University classics professor Richardson (Classical Victorians) recounts in this intriguing history 19th-century British explorer John Lewis's campaign to uncover a lost city in Afghanistan. Sent to India as a soldier for the East India Company in 1821, Lewis walked away from his regiment and eventually settled in Afghanistan. Adopting the pseudonym Charles Masson, he explored the plains of Bagram, collecting thousands of ancient coins, and developing a theory of ancient history that portrayed Alexander the Great and the Greeks as seeking to learn from other cultures rather than destroy them, a view that was in direct conflict with ideas of British imperialism. Masson eventually ran afoul of the British government and the East India Company, and he was imprisoned in 1840 as a traitor and a spy. His hopes of proving that Bagram was the site of the lost city known as Alexandria beneath the Mountains began to fade, and in 1842 he returned to England destitute and ailing. Though Richardson occasionally veers into extraneous minutiae, he spins a colorful tale of adventure and intrigue. This well-researched account restores an explorer to his rightful place in history.
