As other travellers following in Moorcroft's footsteps at no great distance of time fell also into the hands of Murad Beg, and experienced very different treatment, it is useful just to note Moorcroft's description of him. He says: "I scarcely ever beheld a more forbidding countenance. His extremely high cheekbones gave the appearance to the skin of the face of its being unnaturally stretched, whilst the narrowness of the lower jaw left scarcely room for the teeth which were standing in all directions; he was extremely near-sighted." Not an attractive description! The spring had well advanced, and it was not till the middle of February 1825 that Moorcroft was able to resume his journey to the Oxus. He travelled from Kunduz to Tashkurghan and Mazar, and from the latter place he followed the most direct route to Bokhara _via_ the Khwaja Salar ferry across the Oxus, reaching Bokhara on February 25. Here his narrative ends, and we only know from Dr. Lord and Wood that he returned from Bokhara to Andkhui, and died there apparently of fever contracted in Kunduz. He was buried near Balkh. Trebeck died soon after, and was buried at Mazar-i-Sharif. Burnes visited and described the tombs of both travellers, but they have long since disappeared.
As a geographer there is much that is wanting in the methods of this most enterprising traveller, who at least pioneered the way to High Asia from British India but who never made geographical exploration a primary object of his labours. He was true to the last to his trade as a student of agriculture, and it is in this particular, rather than in the regions of geography or history, that the value of his studies chiefly lies. He was the first to point out the general character of that disastrous road to Kabul which has cost England so dear, and he is still, with Burnes and Lord and Wood, our chief authority for the general characteristics of Badakshan and of the Oxus valley east of Balkh. He did not, however, touch the Oxus east of Khwaja Salar, and consequently did not see or appreciate the great spread of splendid pastoral country which lies between the pestilential marsh lands of Kunduz and the river.
One would be apt to gather a pessimistic idea of lower Badakshan from the pages of Moorcroft's story, which are undoubtedly tinted strongly with the gloomy and grey colouring of his own unhappy experiences. Of Balkh he has very little to say; he noted no antiquities about Balkh, but he calls attention to the wide spaces covered with ruins which are to be found at intervals scattered over the plains between Balkh and the Oxus. It is a little difficult to follow his exact route across the Oxus plains by the light of modern maps, but his Feruckabad is probably our Feruk, and I gather that his Akbarabad is Akcha or Akchaabad. The condition of Balkh, of Akcha, and of the ruin-studded plains of the Oxus were evidently much the same in 1824 as they were in 1884. Khwaja Salar (where Moorcroft crossed the Oxus in ferry-boats drawn by horses) has since become historical. It was accepted in the Anglo-Russian protocols defining the Afghan boundary as an important point in the Russo-Afghan boundary delimitation, but it was not to be found. Moorcroft gives a very good reason for its disappearance, by stating that the place was razed to the ground just the day before he arrived there. Since then the ruins of the old village have been devoured by the shifting Oxus, and nothing but a ziarat at some distance from the river remains as a record of the distinguished saint who gave it its name.