The deserter and spy who discovered the lost city of Alexandria

In 326 BC, on the banks of the Hydaspes (the modern Jhelum River in Pakistan), Alexander the Great’s horse died, either from wounds or old age; as ever in ancient history, the stories vary. A tomb was built, and the Macedonian founded a city, Bucephala, named after his charger. In AD 1830, at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, one Charles Masson claimed that during his travels in India he had found the lost city, complete with gigantic equine burial mound. It was a barefaced lie – the site of Bucephala remains unknown – but many things about Charles Masson were a lie, including his own name. Yet in a strange way, Masson’s fiction prefigured fact. Later, he almost certainly did correctly locate another lost city of the conqueror: Alexandria in the Caucasus, on the plains of Bagram in Afghanistan.

Masson was one of the most extraordinary of many extraordinary Europeans roaming between Persia and India in the 19th century, playing (most unwillingly in Masson’s case) the Great Game between Britain and Russia. Born James Lewis, a working-class Londoner, Masson enlisted in the army of the British East India Company. After six years he deserted from camp at Agra on the subcontinent. Friends assumed he had committed suicide. Indeed, the options for avoiding re-capture were limited: not caring for the military life, Masson did not enlist, as did his companion in desertion, as a mercenary in the forces of a local ruler; the only other course was to get clean away.

“Masson”, as he now reinvented himself – usually penniless, sometimes starving, assuming various disguises and identities, including Islamic pilgrim, American and Frenchman, often in mortal danger – got as far as Persia. But then an obsession with Alexander the Great drew him back east. At Kabul, a series of mischances, straight from a spy novel, revealed his true identity to the East India Company. When it was suggested that he become their agent in Afghanistan, or suffer the consequences, again he had the opportunity to run. Again, the reason he remained seems to have been more his search for Alexander than the insidious blackmail.

Rather than just finding one lost city, Masson’s relentless hunt for Alexander opened a door onto a period of history completely forgotten by 19th-century European scholarship. The clue was a coin from Bagram. It had writing on both sides: Greek on one, symbols in an unknown script on the other. The Greek read: “King Menander the Saviour”. After years of frustration, Masson realised that the coin, and others like it, was bilingual. The unknown script said the same as the Greek. As Edmund Richardson nicely puts it, in Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City: “Each coin was a miniature Rosetta Stone.”

Looking at this coin of Menander I (c 150-130 BC), Masson had taken the first step in deciphering Kharoshthi, a script that no one had been able to read for a thousand years. It was the start of the rediscovery of the Hellenistic kingdoms in Bactria and India, which succeeded Alexander, lasted into the Christian era, and blended Greek culture with Buddhism. The Bimaran Casket, now in the British Museum, on which Buddha is depicted in Greek costume and pose, is perhaps the finest product of this cultural interaction. It, too, was discovered by Masson. Yet neither his scholarship nor his espionage brought him any reward. He lived out his later years in poverty in the London suburb of Edmonton, where he lies in an unmarked grave.

Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City is a brilliant and evocative biography, written with consummate scholarship, great style and wit. Through the study of one man, Richardson illuminates an entire world, and shows how history is written not only by “a professor sitting in a library”, but often by “someone like Masson: a strange and wonderful character fighting through the snows, chasing an impossible dream”. History, as Richardson argues, is made not just of facts but of stories. The lie Masson told at Bushehr quickly took on a life of its own. Ten years later, and more than a thousand miles away, local guides at Bagram, Masson’s Alexandria, pointed British officers to a low mound, and informed them it was the tomb of “Alexander the Great’s mighty steed, Bucephalus”.

Alexandria is published by Bloomsbury at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99 call 844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop