Part 12 (2/2)

So Mahmud, his army, and his vast loot, set out for the desert, set their faces for the last time away from the wealth and idolatry of India. Set them, as it turned out, very nearly away from all wealth, all faiths; for in the desert the whole army was misled for three days and three nights by a Hindu guide, ”so that many of the troops died raving mad from the intolerable heat and thirst.” A Hindu guide who, under torture, confessed exultantly that he was one of the priests of Som-nath, and so died, satisfied with his measure of revenge.

Mahmud, however, had only to prostrate himself once more, and lo! a guiding meteor, and after a long night-march, water! Water, even though it must have been the Great Salt Lake.

After this, time pa.s.sed in comparative uneventfulness, until on the 23rd of April A.D. 1030, in the sixty-third year of his age, ”this great conqueror gave up his body to death and his soul to immortality amid the tears of his people.”

One of his last recorded remarks was his exclamation when, in answer to his enquiry, the Lord High Treasurer told him that before becoming extinct, the last dynasty had acc.u.mulated seven pounds weight of precious stones. ”Thanks be to Thee, All-Powerful Being!” cried Mahmud, prostrating himself yet once more. ”Thou hast enabled me to collect more than a hundred pounds.”

What did he do with all the vast wealth which in the course of his missionary work he managed to annex? We know that he built a magnificent mosque at Ghuzni called ”The Celestial Bride”; but that could not have absorbed it all.

Indeed we know much of it was still in the treasury; for two days before his death he ordered all the gold and the caskets of precious stones to be brought before him, and ”having seen them, he wept with regret, ordering them to be carried back, without exhibiting his generosity at that time to anybody.”

Gold had evidently gripped at the heart and soul of this middle-aged, well-shaped, ugly man, who was strongly pitted with the smallpox. His was not a lovable personality in any way. Gifted with a touch of genius, gifted above all things with that marvellous vitality which is always as magic to the Indian, he was just, curiously callous, and absolutely sceptical.

He openly doubted if he was really the son of his father, and scoffed at the idea of a future state. Certainly annihilation would be a kinder fate than the one which the poet Sa'adi gives to him in the Gulistan, and which may be paraphrased thus:--

”The King of Khurasan saw in a dream Mahmud the son of Subaktigeen, Dead for this hundred years or more, His head and his heart, his arms and his thighs Dissolved to dust, and only his eyes Moved in their sockets and saw His gold, his empire, everything He loved in the hands of another King.”

CAMPAIGNS OF THE CRESCENT

A.D. 1001 TO A.D. 1200

Part II

The Great Raider Mahmud being now put past, the Campaigns of the Crescent continued in feebler fas.h.i.+on. In truth, for a few years Mahomed and Masud, the dead king's twin sons, were occupied in settling the succession. Mahomed, the elder by some hours, mild, tractable, was his father's nominee and on the spot; Masud, on the other hand, was a great warrior, bold, independent, and promptly claimed as his right those provinces which he had won by his sword. So they came to blows.

At the outset Mahomed's piety failed him; for having decorously halted his host during the whole of the Month of Fasting--Ramzan--Masud thereinafter fell upon him, armed at all points, defeated him, and put out his eyes after he had reigned a short five months.

Masud, the new king, appears to have been a man of considerable character and grim humour, for one of the first acts of his reign was in cold blood to hang an unfortunate gentleman who once, long years before, when the question of succession was the subject of conversation, had been heard to say crudely that if Masud ever came to the throne he would suffer himself to be hanged.

So he suffered.

But in truth, as we read the story of this Ghuznevide dynasty, and of the Ghori dynasty which followed it, we rub our eyes and wonder how many centuries we have gone back. For these big, bold, burly men are fairly savages in comparison with the cultured Hindu whom they harried. And Masud, though by repute an affable gentleman, generous even to prodigality, and of uncommon personal strength and courage, was as turbulent as a king as he had been as a prince.

His favourite maxim was, ”Dominion follows the longest sword.” His was not only long, but heavy. No other man of his court could wield it, and an arrow from his bow would pierce the hide of a mailed elephant.

During the ten years of his reign he entered India with an army three times. But the first of these raids was followed, A.D. 1033, by a terrible famine, a still more terrible outbreak of plague, from which in one month, more than forty thousand people died in Isphahan alone.

This was in its turn followed by a severe defeat of the Ghuznevide arms by the Turkomans on the north-east frontier; for it must not be forgotten that though these dynasties of which we are treating are counted as of India, they have in reality but little to do with it.

They were but t.i.tular suzerains, and very often not that, of the more northerly provinces of Hindustan.

Apparently as a salve to resentment and shame at this defeat, Masud began to build a fine palace at Ghuzni, over which he must have spent some of his father's treasures, for a golden chain and a golden crown of incredible weight appears as a canopy in the Hall of Audience.

It must have been this depletion of the royal treasures which led to his last and most successful campaign against the kingdom of Sivalak, where he is said to have found enormous wealth; and so on to Sonput, ancient Hindu shrine and city to the north of Delhi, whence he made a Mahmud-like return laden with loot.

A quaint old city is Sonput, and a curious authenticity of its h.o.a.r antiquity turned up not long ago, when some cultivators were digging a well. This was a small clay image of the Sun-G.o.d, a deity to which there is now in India but one single shrine.

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