tirpated; but
great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the Emperor
himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold--the ropes were
one hundred and fifty cubits in length--and before he could reach the
bottom, this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timur crossed
the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attock, and successively traversed,
in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab, or five rivers, that fall
into the master stream. From Attock to Delhi the high road measures no
more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the
southeast; and the motive of Timur was to join his grandson, who had
achieved by his command the conquest of Multan. On the eastern bank of
the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and
wept; the Mongol entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batnir, and
stood in arms before the gates of Delhi, a great and flourishing city,
which had subsisted three centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan
kings.

The siege, more especially of the castle, might have been a work of
time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness, the Sultan Mahmud
and his wazir to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers,
forty thousand of his foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants,
whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers.
Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops,
he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire and a
ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught
the Mongols to smile at their own fears; and as soon as these unwieldy
animals were routed, the inferior species (the men of India) disappeared
from the field. Timur made his triumphal entry into the capital of
Hindustan, and admired, with a view to imitate, the architecture of the
stately mosque; but the order or license of a general pillage and
massacre polluted the festival of his victory. He resolved to purify his
soldiers in the blood of the idolaters, or Gentoos, who still surpass,
in the proportion of ten to one, the numbers of the Moslems. In this
pious design he advanced one hundred miles to the northeast of Delhi,
passed the Ganges, fought several battles by land and water, and
penetrated to the famous rock of Cupele, the statue of the cow,[58] that
_seems_ to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among
the mountains of Tibet. His return was al