Alexander had roamed the deserts of Turkestan, ridden round the world’s most fearsome knot of mountains and fought, as the first American in Afghanistan, ‘for the good cause of right against wrong’. From the Caspian to Tibet and from Kandahar to Kashgar, Gardner had seen it all. He witnessed the death throes of that Sikh empire at close quarters and, sparing no gruesome detail, recorded his own part in the bloodshed. Using much original material, including newly discovered papers by Gardner himself, this investigative biography by John Keay, takes the reader on a quest from the American West to the Asian East to unravel the greatest enigma in the history of travel.