to the forms of their foreign masters.”  Yet the atrocities of his twenty years’ reign, which was one of almost unbroken conquest and plunder, wellnigh surpass those of the Slave kings.  He had seized the throne by murdering his old uncle in the act of clasping his hand, and his own death was, it is said, hastened by poison administered to him by his favourite eunuch and trusted lieutenant, K[=a]fur, who had ministered to his most ignoble passions.  To the Khiljis succeeded the Tughluks, and the white marble dome of Tughluk Shah’s tomb still stands out conspicuous beyond the broken line of grim grey walls which were once Tughlukabad.  The Khiljis had been overthrown, but the curse of a Mahomedan saint, Sidi Dervish, whose fame has endured to the present day, still rested upon the Delhi in which they had dwelt.  So Mahomed Tughluk built unto himself a new and stronger city, but he did nothing else to avert the curse.  Indeed, he invented a form of man-hunt which for sheer devilish cruelty has been only once matched in the West by the cani del duca when the crazy Gian Maria ruled in Milan.  Well may his milder successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital.  Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and lavish charities.  The record he kept of them is not without a certain naive pathos: 

Under the guidance of the Almighty, I arranged that the heirs of those persons who had been slain in the reign of my late Lord and Patron, Sultan Mahomed Shah, and those who had been deprived of a limb, nose, eye, hand, or foot, should be reconciled to the late Sultan and appeased by gifts, so that they executed deeds declaring their satisfaction, duly attested by witnesses.  These deeds were put into a chest, which was placed at the head of the late Sultan’s grave in the hope that God in his great mercy would show his clemency to my late friend and patron and make those persons feel reconciled to him.

The curse fell upon Delhi in the reign of the next Tughluk, Sultan Mahmud.  Timur, with his Mongolian horsemen, swooped down through the northern passes upon Delhi, slaying Mahomedans and Hindus alike and plundering and burning on all sides as he came.  Opposite to the famous ridge, where four and a half centuries later England was to nail her flag to the mast, he forded the Jumna, having previously slain all captives with his army to the number of 100,000.  Mahmud’s army, with its 125 elephants, could not withstand the shock.  Timur entered Delhi, which for five whole days was given over to slaughter and pillage.  Then, having celebrated his victory by a great carouse, he proceeded to the marble mosque which Firuz Tughluk’s piety had erected in atonement of his grim predecessor’s sins, and solemnly offered up a “sincere and humble tribute of praise” to God.  Within a year he disappeared in the same whirl-wind of destruction through the northern passes into his native wilds of Central Asia, leaving desolation and chaos behind him.