y Bunder, three
days journey nearer the mouth of the river. There is a good road without
the river's mouth, said to be free from worms; which, about Surat
especially, and in other parts of India, are in such abundance, that
after three or four months riding, were it not for the sheathing, ships
would be rendered incapable of going to sea. The ports and roads of
Sinde are said to be free. From Tatta they go in two months by water to
Lahore, and return down the river in one. The commodities there are
_baffatys_, stuffs, _lawns_ [muslins], coarse indigo, not so good as
that of Biana. Goods, may be carried from Agra on camels in twenty days
to _Bucker_ on the river Indus, and thence in fifteen or sixteen days
aboard the ships at the mouth of the Indus. One may travel as soon from
Agra to Sinde as to Surat, but there is more thieving on the Sinde road,
in spite of every effort of the Mogul government to prevent it.

The inhabitants of Sinde consist mostly of Rajputs, Banians, and
Baloches, the governors of the cities and large towns being Moguls. The
country people are rude; going naked from the waist upwards, and wear
turbans quite different from the fashion of the Moguls. Their arms are
swords, bucklers, and lances; their bucklers being large and shaped like
bee-hives, in which they are in use to give their camels drink, and
their horses provender. Their horses are good, strong, and swift, and
though unshod, they ride them furiously, backing them at a year old. The
Rajputs eat no beef or buffalo flesh, even worshipping them; and the
Moguls say that the Rajputs know how to die as well as any in the world.
The Banians kill nothing, and are said to be divided into more than
thirty different casts, that differ somewhat among them in matters of
religion, and may not eat with each other. All burn their dead; and when
the husband dies, the widow shaves her head, and wears her jewels no
more, continuing this state of mourning as long as she lives.

When a Rajput dies, his wife accompanies his body to the funeral pile in
her best array, attended by all her friends and kindred, and by music.
When the funeral pile is set on fire, she walks round it two or three
times, bewailing the death of her husband, and then rejoicing that she
is now to live with him again: After which, embracing her friends, she
sits down on the top of the pile among dry wood, taking her husband's
head on her lap, and orders fire to be put to the pile; which don