troops might
prepare for a long absence, since more than six months were employed in
the tranquil journey of a caravan from Samarkand to Peking. Neither age
nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timur; he
mounted on horseback, passed the Sihun on the ice, marched seventy-six
parasangs (three hundred miles) from his capital, and pitched his last
camp in the neighborhood of Otrar, where he was expected by the angel of
death. Fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water accelerated the
progress of his fever; and the conqueror of Asia expired in the
seventieth year of his age, 1405, thirty-five years after he had
ascended the throne of Zagatai. His designs were lost; his armies were
disbanded; China was saved; and, fourteen years after his decease, the
most powerful of his children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce
to the court of Peking.

The fame of Timur has pervaded the East and West; his posterity is still
invested with the imperial title; and the admiration of his subjects,
who revered him almost as a deity, may be justified in some degree by
the praise or confession of his bitterest enemies. Although he was lame
of a hand and foot, his form and stature were not unworthy of his rank;
and his vigorous health, so essential to himself and to the world, was
corroborated by temperance and exercise. In his familiar discourse he
was grave and modest; and if he was ignorant of the Arabic language, he
spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish idioms. It was
his delight to converse with the learned on topics of history and
science; and the amusement of his leisure hours was the game of chess,
which he improved or corrupted with new refinements.

In his religion he was a zealous, though not perhaps an orthodox,
Mussulman; but his sound understanding may tempt us to believe that a
superstitious reverence for omens and prophecies, for saints and
astrologers, was only affected as an instrument of policy. In the
government of a vast empire, he stood alone and absolute, without a
rebel to oppose his power, a favorite to seduce his affections, or a
minister to mislead his judgment.

Timur might boast that at his accession to the throne Asia was the prey
of anarchy and rapine, while under his prosperous monarchy a child,
fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold from the East to the
West. Such was his confidence of merit that from this reformation he
derived an excuse for his vic