The emirs earned their real notoriety down a sidestreet
to the left of the gatehouse, in the Zindan, or city gaol. Minor miscreants
lived in its less noxious cells and were allowed out in their chains on
Fridays, the Muslim sabbath, to beg for food on which they lived for the
week. But particular unfavourites of the emir shared the bottom of a 6-m-deep
underground brick cylinder with rats, scorpions, lice, cockroaches and
sheep ticks. The Sia Chat (Black Well) or Bug Pit admitted no light except
through a small opening high above the prisoners' heads. It was 'truly
the inspiration of an evil mind'.
The most famous victims of the Bug Pit, those depicted
by the curators' dummies, were British. In the winter of 1839 Lieutenant-Colonel
Charles Stoddart arrived in Bukhara to  forge
an alliance with Emir Nasrullah on behalf of Whitehall and Calcutta before
the Russians did. But he rode where he m should have walked, walked where
he should have crawled and presented a letter not from Queen Victoria but
from the Governor General of India. Nasrullah did not like him. Stoddart
spent six months in the Bug Pit, then faced the executioner's knife if
he did not convert to Islam. He converted, and got clean clothes, clean
quarters, freedom of the city and circumcision into the bargain. More than
two years later a fellow Briton, Captain Arthur Conolly of the Bengal Light
Infantry, arrived to rescue Stoddart. But soon afterwards the East India
Company's army was routed in Afghanistan and Nasrullah, out of a mixture
of spite and glee, threw both his British captives back in the Bug Pit.
On 17 June 1842 Conolly was offered mercy if he too converted to Islam.
He refused to do so and both men were executed in front of the Ark, where
one British expert believes their bodies still lie.
Their fate was not known in London for certain until an
ageing and eccentric Church of England missionary called Reverend Joseph
Wolff entered Bukhara 'in full canonicals' in 1845 and recovered the increasingly
desperate journal Conolly had kept during his last months in the Bug Pit.
Wolff avoided the same fate by making the emir laugh. He refused to accept
Islam but prostrated himself, stroked his beard and cried 'Allah Akbar',
thirty times over. The audience ended with a rendering of 'God Save The
Queen' from the nagorakhana orchestra.
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