s 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