Each of these early Mahomedan states has a story and a character of its own, and each goes to illustrate the subtle ascendancy which the Hindu mind achieved over the conquering Mahomedan.  I can only select a few typical examples.  None is in its way more striking than Mandu, over whose desolation the jungle now spreads its kindly mantle.  Within two years of Timur’s raid into India the Afghan governors of Malwa proclaimed themselves independent, and Hushang Ghuri, from whom the new dynasty took its name, proceeded to build himself a new capital.  The grey grim walls of Mandu still crown a lofty outpost of the Vindhya hills, some seventy miles south-east of Indore, the natural scarp falling away as steeply on the one side to the fertile plateau of Malwa as on the other to the broad valley of the sacred Nerbudda.  The place had no Hindu associations, and in the stately palaces and mosques erected by Hushang and his immediate successors early in the fifteenth century scarcely a trace of Hindu influence can be detected, though some of them still stand almost intact amidst the luxuriant vegetation which has now swallowed up the less substantial remains of what was once a populous and wealthy city.  The Ghuris came from Afghanistan, and the great mosque of Hushang Ghuri—­in spite of inscriptions which say in one place that it has been modelled on the mosque of the Kaaba at Mecca, and in another place on the great mosque at Damascus—­is perhaps the finest example of pure Pathan architecture in India, and one of the half-dozen noblest shrines devoted to Mahomedan worship in the whole world; a mighty structure of red sandstone and white marble, stern and simple, and as perfect in the proportions of its long avenues of pointed arches as in the breadth of its spacious design.  Behind it, under a great dome of white marble, Hushang himself sleeps.  Unique in its way, too, is the lofty hall of the Hindola Mahal, with its steeply sloping buttresses—­a hall which has not been inaptly compared to the great dining-hall of some Oxford or Cambridge College—­and alongside of it, the more delicate beauty, perhaps already suggestive of Hindu collaboration, of the Jahaz Mahal, another palace with hanging balconies and latticed windows of carved stone overlooking on either side an artificial lake covered with pink lotus blossoms.  Mandu was at first an essentially Mahomedan city, and under Mahmud Khilji, who wrested the throne from Hushang’s effete successor, its fame as a centre of Islamic learning attracted embassies even from Egypt and Bokhara.  But its greatness was short-lived.  Mahmud’s son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for many years his father’s right hand, both in council and in the field.  But no sooner did he come to the throne in 1469 than he discharged all the affairs of the state on to his own son and retired into the seraglio, where 15,000 women formed his court and provided him even with a bodyguard.  Five hundred beautiful young Turki women, armed with bows and arrows, stood, we are told, on his right