It has been shown that in the autumn of 1840, Arthur Conolly had started from Caubul, ostensibly on a mission to Khiva and Kokund. He had subsequently, on the invitation of the Ameer, and with the implied permission, if not under the direct instructions of the Caubul envoy, proceeded to Bokhara, where Colonel Stoddart was still detained, but outwardly in a more honourable and less painful state of captivity than that which he had been condemned to endure during a part of the preceding years.[198] It was in the summer of 1841[199] that this invitation was forwarded to Conolly, then at Kokund; but that state was then at war with Bokhara, and its rulers hesitated to allow the departure of her Christian guest. After some delay, however, Conolly received his passports, and, proceeding by a circuitous route, reached Bokhara in the month of November. The crisis was an unfortunate one. Conolly was from the first regarded with suspicion. The Ameer believed, or affected to believe, that he had instigated the states of Kokund and Khiva to war against him. But other circumstances of a still more inauspicious character were gathering around the ill-fated Englishmen. It was in the middle of the month of December, 1841, that intelligence reached Bokhara to the effect that all Caubul and the surrounding country had risen against Shah Soojah and his Feringhee allies, that Sir Alexander Burnes had been killed, and the British troops beaten in battle. A few days before, an answer had been received to a letter addressed by the Ameer to the Queen of England. The answer was written by the Foreign Secretary, and it referred the King to the Government of India. This indignity—for so he regarded it—was still rankling in his mind, when tidings of the Caubul outbreak reached Bokhara. The Ameer now sent for the English officers; asked them many questions; said that he would release Colonel Stoddart, but detain Captain Conolly; and finally, after pondering the matter for a few days, condemned them both to imprisonment in the house of the Topshee-Bashee, or chief artilleryman of Bokhara.[200] Here their condition became every day more deplorable. They were not allowed a change of raiment, and the clothes rotted on their backs. Nauseous vermin preyed upon their bodies, and they tore the irritated flesh with their nails. They were not denied either a sufficiency of food or firing; but water leaked through the roof of the miserable room in which they were confined. Ague and fever racked them grievously; but they comforted one another with Christian consolation, and they prayed together to the Christians’ God.