re four and a half centuries later England was to nail her
flag to the mast, he forded the Jumna, having previously slain all
captives with his army to the number of 100,000. Mahmud's army, with its
125 elephants, could not withstand the shock. Timur entered Delhi, which
for five whole days was given over to slaughter and pillage. Then,
having celebrated his victory by a great carouse, he proceeded to the
marble mosque which Firuz Tughluk's piety had erected in atonement of
his grim predecessor's sins, and solemnly offered up a "sincere and
humble tribute of praise" to God. Within a year he disappeared in the
same whirl-wind of destruction through the northern passes into his
native wilds of Central Asia, leaving desolation and chaos behind him.

From so terrific a blow Delhi was slow to recover. A group of
picturesque domes marks the resting-place of some of the Seyyid and Lodi
kings who in turn ruled or misruled the shrunken dominions which still
owned allegiance to Delhi. The achievement of a centralised Mahomedan
empire was delayed for nearly two centuries. But the aggressive vitality
of Islam had not been arrested, and out of the anarchy which followed
Timur's meteoric raid Mahomedan soldiers of fortune built up for
themselves independent kingdoms and principalities and founded dynasties
which each had their own brief moment of power and magnificence. In all
these states, which spread right across Middle India from the Arabian
Sea to the Gulf of Bengal, Islam remained the dominant power; but, even
whilst trampling upon Hinduism, it did not escape altogether the
inevitable results of increasing contact with an older and more refined
civilisation. Amidst rapine and bloodshed and the constant clash of
arms, it was a period of intense artistic activity which, as usual in
the countries conquered by Islam, expressed itself chiefly in terms of
stone and marble, and though Hinduism never triumphed as classical
paganism, for instance, triumphed for a time in Papal Rome, the steady
and all-pervading revival of its influence can be traced from capital to
capital, wherever these Mahomedan _podestas_ established their seat of
government during that Indian _Cinque Cento_, which corresponds in time
with, and recalls in many ways, though at best distantly, the Italian
_Cinque Cento_, with its strange blend of refined luxury and cruelty, of
high artistic achievement and moral depravity.

To the present day almost all those cities--