wonderful epos of the
Mahabharata. Only a couple of miles south of the modern city, the walls
of the Purana Kilat, the fortress built by Humayun, cover the site but
have not obliterated the ancient name of Indraprasthra, or Indrapat, the
city founded by the Pandavas themselves, when Yudhisthira celebrated
their final victory by performing on the banks of the Jumna, in token of
the Pandava claim to Empire, the _Asvamedha_, or great Horse Sacrifice,
originated by Brahma himself. There too, on a mound beyond Indrapat,
stands the granite shaft of one of Asoka's pillars, on which, with a
fine faith that the world has never yet justified, the great Buddhist
Apostle-Emperor of India inscribed over 2000 years ago his edicts
prohibiting the taking of life. At the very foot of the Kutub Minar the
famous Iron Pillar commemorates the victories of the "Sun of Power," the
Hindu Emperor of the Gupta dynasty with whose name, under the more
popular form of Raja Bikram, Indian legend associates the vague memories
of a golden age of Hindu civilisation in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Pillar was brought there by one of the Rajput princes who founded in
the middle of the eleventh century the first city really known to
history as Delhi. There Prithvi Raja reigned, who still lives in Indian
minstrelsy as the embodiment of Hindu chivalry, equally gallant and
daring in love and in war--the last to make a stand in northern India
against the successive waves of Mahomedan conquest which Central Asia
had begun to pour in upon India in 1001, with the first of Mahmud
Ghazni's seventeen raids. In the next century an Afghan wave swept down
on the top of the original Turki wave, and Kutub-ed-Din, having
proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi in 1206, built the great Mosque of
_Kuwwet-el-Islam_, "The Power of Islam," and the lofty minaret, still
known by his name, from which for six centuries the Moslem call to
prayer went forth to proclaim Mahomedan domination over India.

With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped
in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The
annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently
to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was
shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the wild spaces
of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again like a
devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed the
lon