Ellenborough went to India in order "to restore peace to Asia," but the whole term of his office was occupied in war. On his arrival there the news that greeted him was that of the massacre of Kabul, and the sieges of Ghazni and Jalalabad, while the sepoys of Madras were on the verge of open mutiny. In his proclamation of the 15th of March 1842, as in his memorandum for the queen dated the 18th, he stated with characteristic clearness and eloquence the duty of first inflicting some signal and decisive blow on the Afghans, and then leaving them to govern themselves under the sovereign of their own choice. Unhappily, when he left his council for upper India, and learned the trifling failure of General England, he instructed Pollock and Nott, who were advancing triumphantly with their avenging columns to rescue the British captives, to fall back. The army proved true to the governor-general's earlier proclamation rather than to his later fears; the hostages were rescued, the scene of Sir Alexander Burnes's murder in the heart of Kabul was burned down. Dost Mahommed was quietly dismissed from a prison in Calcutta to the throne in the Bala Hissar, and Ellenborough presided over the painting of the elephants for an unprecedented military spectacle at Ferozepur, on the south bank of the Sutlej. But this was not the only piece of theatrical display which capped with ridicule the horrors and the follies of these four years in Afghanistan. When Sultan Mahmud, in 1024, sacked the Hindu temple of Somnath on the north-west coast of India, he carried off, with the treasures, the richly studded sandal-wood gates of the fane, and set them up in his capital of Ghazni. The Mahommedan puppet of the English, Shah Shuja, had been asked, when ruler of Afghanistan, to restore them to India; and what he had failed to do the Christian ruler of opposing Mahommedans and Hindus resolved to effect in the most solemn and public manner. In vain had Major (afterwards Sir Henry) Rawlinson proved that they were only reproductions of the original gates, to which the Ghazni moulvies clung merely as a source of offerings from the faithful who visited the old conqueror's tomb. In vain did the Hindu sepoys show the most chilling indifference to the belauded restoration. Ellenborough could not resist the temptation to copy Napoleon's magniloquent proclamation under the pyramids. The fraudulent folding doors were conveyed on a triumphal car to the fort of Agra, where they were found to be made not of sandalwood but of deal. That Somnath proclamation (immortalized in a speech by Macaulay) was the first step towards its author's recall.