being, desolated by the army of this Tartar chief, they passed into Egypt and Bulgaria, whence they spread over all other countries.  Scattered over the face of these countries, they found small parties of vagrants who were from the same regions as themselves, who spoke the same language, and who had in all probability been drawn away by the same means of armies returning from the invasion of India.  Chingiz Khan invaded India two centuries before; his descendant, Tarmah Shirin, invaded India in 1303, and must have taken back with him multitudes of captives.  The unhappy prisoners of Timur the Lame gathered round these nuclei as the only people who could understand or sympathize with them.  From his sixth expedition into India Mahmud is said to have carried back with him to Ghazni two hundred thousand Hindoo captives in a state of slavery, A.D. 1011.  From his seventh expedition in 1017, his army of one hundred and forty thousand fighting men returned ’laden with Hindoo captives, who became so cheap, that a Hindoo slave was valued at less than two rupees’.  Mahmud made several expeditions to the west immediately after his return from India, in the same manner as Timur did after him, and he may in the same manner have scattered his Indian captives.  They adopted the habits of their new friends, which are indeed those of all the vagrant tribes of India, and they have continued to preserve them to the present day.  I have compared their vocabularies with those of India, and find so many of the words the same that I think a native of India would, even in the present day, be able without much difficulty to make himself understood by a gang of gipsies in any part of Europe.[56]

A good Christian may not be able exactly to understand the nature of the merit which Tamerlane expected to acquire from sending so many unoffending Chinese to the abyss of hell.  According to the Muhammadan creed, God has vowed ‘to fill hell chock full of men and genii’.  Hence his reasons for hardening their hearts against that faith in the Koran which might send them to heaven, and which would, they think, necessarily follow an impartial examination of the evidence of its divinity and certainty.  Timur thought, no doubt, that it would be very meritorious on his part to assist God in this his labour of filling the great abyss by throwing into it all the existing population of China:  while he spread over their land in pastoral tribes the goodly seed of Muhammadanism, which would give him a rich supply of recruits for paradise.

The following dialogue took place one day between me and the ‘mufti’, or head Muhammadan law officer, of one of our regulation courts.[57]

’Does it not seem to you strange, Mufti Sahib, that your prophet, who, according to your notions, must have been so well acquainted with the universe and the laws that govern it, should not have revealed to his followers some great truths hitherto unknown regarding these laws, which might have commanded their belief, and that of all future generations, in his divine mission?’