An angular, wiry and witty man of five foot nine, “spare and thin,” Burnes was ambitious and determined, and had a cool head in an emergency. His friends admired his imagination and his intellectual agility: one wrote that he was “sharp, quick and rapidly decisive, expressive and penetrating.” On this journey, he had ample opportunity to deploy both his intelligence and his wit, not least when he crossed the frontier to the Punjab and his lumbering carthorses caused a sensation among Ranjit Singh’s officials.
