Account of the conquest of Ma’bar and the capture of elephants, horses and jewels.* The kindness of the Creator has bestowed sharpness on the curved swords of the Muslim army, and they were now resharpened by Him. When the army reached this land of infidelity, it created its own arch with the strength of its arm and compelled infidel heads to stand up and fall down before it.* The contamination of infidelity, which the sea could not have washed off from this land, was washed away by the ‘drops’ of the sword. The rebels of that territory had never seen Muslim horsemen even in their dreams. The cowardly* Hindūs had designated their city Mardī (manliness); but manliness existed there not in reality, but only in name. The men of the city saw disconcerting dreams and remained lost in the Devil’s game. Finally, the Maliks reached the fort and carried their banners through the city with beating drums. There was bloodshed beyond all reckoning. The Imperial army bathed in its own perspiration and washed the land with rebel blood.

* On Thursday, the 5th Zil Qa’d, the Muslim troops, numerous as sand-grains, started from the river Kanaurī towards Bīrdhūl. They were thirsty for Ma’bar and for the ocean; and in case the Bīr fled towards the sea, they had determined to pursue him thither like thirsty men in quest of water. When the enthusiastic army approached Bīrdhūl, the beats of their drums resounded in the Bīr (well); and though Bīr on his part also raised a hue and cry, yet it was a weak voice coming out of a well. The Hindū community kept their Bīr (well) covered, so that no one could look into him. ‘An event is going to happen’, they told Bīr, ‘your head will be taken off and you will be left with your mouth open’. Bīr wished to sink into the earth like a well, but on further reflection, he felt afraid that they (the Mussalmāns) might throw a rope down his throat and take out all his water. He was in this perplexity when the army approached nearer and his fort began to shake. Bīr lost all self-control and desired to fly towards the sea; but first through sad and melancholy sighs he sent it a message. ‘I have sailed over thee so often. But now I, who am Bīr (well), suffer from a great scarcity of water owing to the enormous Turkish army. Give me a refuge in thine islands.’ When these melancholy sighs reached the sea, it instantly put on its armour and swelled up and roared its reply: ‘O Bīr, do not come this side, for in this fall of kingdoms, I will be only over­throwing myself along with you. I am not a dry pond, in which you can dig a well (bīr).* My title is “the sea” and God has given me the privilege of surrounding the seven climes. May be, a wave from the army of the king of land and sea—“and He it is who has made the sea subservient that you may eat fresh flesh from it”—will come fishing this side, and I shall be able to pay my respects to it: I am not devoid of shame and honour, and it is for such a contingency that I have preserved the valuables in my treasury. Very often people have sailed over me upon a handful of wood and straw; but now I will change my water into dust at the feet of the Imperial troops. You may consider me one of the meanest of Imperial servants. If I have a treasure of pearls, it is a present for the Maliks. If there are islands of earth in me, they are to be used for the letters of the Imperial Dīwān.* As for the ships which sail on the surface of the water, they cannot be concealed. The finest ships, arrayed like young damsels, are waiting for the Emperor’s orders; he can choose whichever he likes. Henceforth the solution of all difficulties concerning this region is in the hands of the King of kings. The property of the servant is the property of his master.’

When this reply came to Bīr’s ears, he also roared out from his empty heart, and in his excessive thirst and dryness, he felt like drinking up the whole ocean. For he was like an empty well, whose eyes have sunk to the bottom and whose interior is entirely devoid of moisture. The officers of Bīr also lost their self-confidence; and as these aquatic animals were beset with a great scarcity of water, they inevitably resolved to make Bīr (well) fly by way of land.

* When the great Brahmans saw that the Rāī Rāyān was weaker than a leaf, they represented to him in coloured language that betels should be offered to the rāwats to induce them to sacrifice their lives. On a hint from the Rāī, betels were presented to Hindū horsemen and pāīks to induce them to shoot forth new leaves. They took the betels and their mouths were filled with blood in mourning at their own death. You would have said that the pale-faced and green-coloured Hindūs were like the betel-leaf, which is green above and yellow beneath.* For no blood was left in their arteries, and Death had opened its jaws to colour its teeth with their blood. They were not eat­ing betel but drinking blood; for every time they put it in their mouths, the leaf changed its colour under their black teeth, wept tears of blood and caused their lips to open in laughter. Along with them, the Bīr also ate betel and drank blood.* When the holy warriors reached the precincts of the city, their sword cast its rays on Bīrdhūl and made it clear to Bīr that the time of his decline was near. No water remained in him. From this time till sunset, the yellow-faced Rāī, along with other pale faces, kept falling into fits (safra); and their disease affected the sun, for it also grew pale and sank down in a fit. The Rāī saw that the day of his prosperity had changed into night and the world grew dark before his eyes. Along with his perplexed companions— ‘you may think them as one body and their hearts are disunited’— he retired towards the city, from where he took a quantity of cash and valuables, which brought some consolation to his palpitating heart, and also a number of men and horses. Thus equipped for the flight, he moved towards the city of Kandūr. But as the danger from the Imperial army was extremely great, he was unable to establish himself firmly even there and fled to the forest of elephants and tigers.

* A body of Mussalmāns had allied themselves to the broken crup­per of the Hindūs and had violated the law: ‘Do not make the infidels your friends as against the Mussalmāns’.* But now they saw the Rāī break his own stirrup and the Day of Reckoning covered them like a saddle-cloth. The world appeared to them contracted like the bow of a saddle; the wave of blood rose above the saddle and they had no place to dry their feet. So they turned away their bridles from their infidel allies, sought safety in submission to the Mussalmāns, and tried to strengthen themselves by hanging to the saddle-straps of the State. ‘Then surely the party of Allāh are they that shall be trium­phant.’ Though every one of them was the very worst of rebels and apos­tates, yet they were honoured by the Malik and liberated from their chains.* Their oath of affirmation testified to their claim of being Mussalmāns, and out of regard for this, the Muslim Malik ordered the V-shaped yoke to be removed from their necks. The forgiveness of the forgiving Emperor was extended to them; they were asked con­cerning the circumstances of the infidels and brought (to light) all they knew about those fire-worshippers. Led by these Mussalmāns, the Imperial troops resolved to chase the cowardly Bīr and all other cowards.

* But at this moment a black-faced cloud advanced from the direc­tion of the Ma’bari troops, and owing to its friendliness with the sea, strove hard for the Ma’baries. To the Mussalmāns also it gave some formal help. In fact it was very deceptive; sometimes it rained severely, at other times gently; on the one hand, it gave water to the stream of Shari’at, and on the other, it assisted those aquatic animals. At this double dealing the lightning laughed. But as Fate had ordained that the shower of Muslim arrows was not to reach the gabrs, the rain became more severe as the Mussalmāns strove to advance. You would have thought Destiny had drawn a curtain before the victorious army in order to protect the flying troops. For when the Imperialists advance like a deluge, Fate alone can save the drown­ing . So the army returned to Bīrdhūl. They found that Bīr (well) had fled and the drum (dhul) was empty. The infidel cloud, like a Hindū in sable clothes, drew its Hindī rainbow to the full length and sent down its rain-drops like sharp arrow-points. They passed through the armour and the breast-plate; and though the bronze bodies of the holy warriors remained unaffected, they were, nevertheless, hindered from discharging their arrows. The water rendered the bows ineffective and made the Hindī swords rusty;* it got in between the arrow and its (iron) point and separated them from one another; it also whispered something in the ‘ears’ of the bows and untwisted their strings.* But the clever and masterful (Imperial) archers were not afraid of the cloud of Bahman or of the rain-drops; their arrows flew like lightning, for they were of the nature of the wind. Some aquatic animals of that land crept like snakes into every hole and crevice, while the bodies of others were pierced by the sharp arrows even as water gets into a snake-hole. The Hindū rāwats came forth riding in troops but were laid low before the Turkish horse. A deluge of water and blood flowed forward to plead for mercy before the Caliph’s army. Or you might say, that owing to the extreme happiness of infidel souls, the beverage of blood was so delicious, that every time the cloud rained water over it, the ferocious earth drank it up with the greatest pleasure. In spite of the great intoxicating power of this wine the sāqī poured her clear liquid out of the flagon of the sky to increase its intoxication further. Out of this wine and beverage Death had distilled her first delicious draught. Next you saw bones on the earth.

From Bīrdhūl the army advanced in search of Bīr across a path so completely covered by water that you could not distinguish the road from a well. Torrents of rain fell from above. But the horsemen guided their horses as pilots guide their ships, and sailing through the storm like Noah’s ark, they reached a village where the Hindū army lay encamped like bubbles on the surface of water. But as soon as a breeze from the majestic sword of the Turks blew towards them, they broke and dispersed and seemed to sink into the ground, even as a rain drop disappears in sandy soil.* At midnight, when the moon and the stars had been hidden by the clouds and the morning was still far off, some swift-footed scouts reported that the Rāī, having lost all consciousness of head and foot, had fled to the city of Kandūr. The victorious army hurried after him and soon reached the place. The Hindūs, who relying on the strength of their ‘head’, had lost their ‘feet’ before this time, now lost their ‘head’ also. They ran about ‘headless’, searching for their lost ‘head’; and in this search they also lost the heads they had. The ‘head-throwing’ Turks found no traces of the lost man anywhere, though they cut off a number of heads under the suspicion that they were his, and again and again drew circles round the places where they expected him to be. Finally, the Hindū-faced night withdrew and the morning dawned.* When the elephantine cloud had disappeared, one hundred and twenty* cloud-like elephants were captured at the place and on the backs of the elephants were treasures, such as do not drop from the backs of the clouds and are not to be found in the bowels of the hills. The spoils were entrusted to the officers of the Treasury. Many elephant-bodied rāwats, who like the tusks of elephants had never withdrawn from the battle-field, now crept into their houses like the elephant’s eye from fear of the terrific Turkish storm; but they were, nevertheless, dragged out of their corners and thrown under the feet of the elephants. It seemed that, smeared with the blood of those ‘possessors of the elephants’, the elephants of that land became like ‘birds in flocks’ and carried to the elephantine clouds the words of thankfulness to the Lord of Ka’ba.*

* Though a deluge of blood was made to flow in the Kharābābād of Kandūr with the Hindī sword, that could have cut a boat into two, yet no trace of the desired fish was found. The Mussalmāns thought he had gone towards Jāt Kūta. ‘We will go and throw out our fishing line there’, they determined, ‘May be he will fall into our hands!’ So without waiting to rest or recuperate, they started quicker than the rain that falls from above. But it was discovered for certain from people coming from that direction that Bīr had not been anywhere near that bīrāna. He had washed his hands off the sea as well, for the sea, in spite of its stability, had fled from that flowing river and dived to the bottom of the earth. * The forest to which Bīr had fled was so thick, that there was no place in it for an ant to put its feet; and if imagination had entered it, it would have lost its way and never found it out again. As it was ascertained that the Rāī had penetrated into the forest even as a needle pierces through silk, that his companions had gone with him like the thread following the needle, and that the end of the thread was not now to be found, the Malik, who, if he heard of so much as the picture of an elephant on silk cloth, would have run his sharp scissors towards it in the darkest night, did not consider it worth while wasting his arrows against the hillside for such a matter of detail as capturing the small party of the Rāī. It was impossible to find them. The Mussalmāns drew away their skirts from the thorny forest and returned to Kandūr, so that with their staffs they may explore the hills of that region in search of more elephants.

* When in the morning the elephantine clouds had gathered round that golden idol, the sun, news was brought that in the city of Barmat­pur there was a golden temple, and that the Rāī’s elephants had collected round it even as clouds collect round the sun. The army started like a storm to move those clouds and arrived there at midnight. Two hundred and fifty elephants, who roared like thunder, were cap­tured before dawn by the fleet-footed horsemen, just as the waves of the sea are raised in a continuous succession by the wind.* Next, the Muslim Sah-kash came with a body of holy warriors to destroy the golden temple in which the idols were kept. They saw a building, old and strong as the infidelity of Satan, and enchanting like the allurements of worldly life. You might say that it was the Paradise of Shaddād, which after being lost, those hellites had found, or that it was the golden Lankā of Rām, that Rāī having collected the golden heads of the idols and left them till the time of Solomon came, or else, that they had been left for Bīr, but Bīr (well) having become dry, these idols fell down.* In truth, the towering edifice testified to the fact that the earth is the infidel’s paradise. It rose from the earth, a structure of gold scratching the eyes of the stars and piercing the people of the sun. Its summit reached the claws of the Lion; its golden foundations went deep into the earth; you would have thought the Twelve Fish had been consolidated into one. Its roofs and walls were inlaid with sparkling rubies and emeralds, and after gazing at them, red and yellow spots came before the spectator’s eye.* The sight of gold was cooling to the sight. The green colour of the emerald would have given prestige to a kingly crown; for it looked like a young parrot flown from its egg in the moon. The jewelled figure of the idol looked like a bubble on the surface of the sun, and gazing at it would have weakened the eye. God be praised that all these gems have been brought to the Treasury of the ‘Shadow of God’!

* The foundations of this golden temple, which was the holy place of the Hindūs, were dug up with the greatest care. The ‘Glorifiers of God’ broke the infidel building, so that ‘spiritual birds’ came down like pigeons from the air. The ‘ears’ of the wall were opened by the sound of the spade. At its call the sword also raised its ‘head’ from the scabbard; and the ‘heads’ of the Brahmans and idol-wor­shippers came dancing from their necks to their feet at the flashes of the sword. * The golden bricks rolled down and brought with them the plaster of sandal-wood; the yellow gold became red with blood, and the white sandal turned scarlet. The sword flashed where jewels had once been sparkling; where mire used to be created by rose-water and musk, there was now a mud of blood and dirt; the stench of blood was emitted by ground once fragrant with musk; the saffron-coloured doors and walls assumed the colour of bronze. And by this smell the men of Faith were intoxicated and the men of Infidelity ruined. * The stone idols, called ‘Ling-i-Mahādeo,’ which had been for a long time established at that place—quibus, mulieres infidelium pudenda sua affricant,*—these, up to this time, the kick of the horse of Islām had not attempted to break.* The Mussalmāns destroyed all the lingas. Deo Narāīn fell down, and the other gods, who had fixed their seats there, raised their feet and jumped so high, that at one leap they reached the fort of Lankā; and in that affright the lingas themselves would have fled, had they any legs to stand on. And long-lived Satan, who in that temple had induced the sons of Adam to bow down before the lingas of the Deos, fled to Sarandīp in such despair that he reached Adam’s Foot (qadam-i-Adam) and lowered his head before it.* See how far Islām has succeeded, when even Satan bows his head before Adam.* The foundations of the temple, which were mines of gold, were dug up, and its jewelled walls, which were mines of precious stones, pulled down. The spades and shovels were sharpened at the heart of the rubies; the pick-axe, shaped like the key, opened the door of victory over the build­ing; and the mattock went into the inlaid wall and brought out the pearls. Wherever there was any treasure in that desolated building, the ground was sifted in a sieve and the treasure discovered. No part of gold remained with the gabrs except its dust, no jewels except the ‘principle’ of fire. When the gold and jewels had been entrusted to the Imperial officers, the successful army moved back to the (central) camp, with its treasures and elephants.