Before Jalalabad, Burnes boarded a raft which would take him down the Kabul River to Peshawar. By this stage Vitkevitch was already well on his way to Kandahar. This was the next stage in his mission, where he was to negotiate a treaty with Dost Mohammad’s Barakzai half-brothers, who, having been rejected by Auckland, had now also agreed to join Dost Mohammad, the Persians and the Russians in the siege of Herat.
