To the present day almost all those cities--some of them now mere cities of the dead, such as Golconda and Gaur and Mandu, some, such as Bijapur and Bidar and Ahmednagar and Ahmedabad, still living and even flourishing--bear witness to the genius of their makers. From motives of political expediency, the Mahomedan rulers of those days, whether Bahmanis or Ahmed Shahis or Adil Shahis or whatever else they were called, were fain to reckon with their Hindu subjects. Wholesale conversions to the creed of the conquerors, whether spontaneous or compulsory, introduced new elements into the ruling race itself; for converted Hindus, even when they rose to high positions of trust, retained many of their own customs and traditions. Differences of religion ceased to be a complete bar to matrimonial and other alliances between Mahomedans and Hindus. Even in war Mahomedan mercenaries took service with Hindu chiefs, and Hindus under Mahomedan captains. There was thus, if not a fusion, a gradual mingling of the Mahomedan and Hindu populations which, in spite of many fierce conflicts, tended to promote a new _modus vivendi_ between them. It was a period of transition from the era of mere ruthless conquest, which Timur's tempestuous irruption brought practically to a close, to the era of constructive statesmanship, which it was reserved to Akbar, the greatest of the Moghul Emperors, to inaugurate. Each of these early Mahomedan states has a story and a character of its own, and each goes to illustrate the subtle ascendancy which the Hindu mind achieved over the conquering Mahomedan. I can only select a few typical examples. None is in its way more striking than Mandu, over whose desolation the jungle now spreads its kindly mantle. Within two years of Timur's raid into India the Afghan governors of Malwa proclaimed themselves independent, and Hushang Ghuri, from whom the new dynasty took its name, proceeded to build himself a new capital. The grey grim walls of Mandu still crown a lofty outpost of the Vindhya hills, some seventy miles south-east of Indore, the natural scarp falling away as steeply on the one side to the fertile plateau of Malwa as on the other to the broad valley of the sacred Nerbudda. The place had no Hindu associations, and in the stately palaces and mosques erected by Hushang and his immediate successors early in the fifteenth century scarcely a trace of Hindu influence can be detected, though some of them still stand almost intact amidst the luxuriant vegetation which has now swallowed up the less substantial remains of what was once a populous and wealthy city. The Ghuris came from Afghanistan, and the great mosque of Hushang Ghuri--in spite of inscriptions which say in one place that it has been modelled on the mosque of the Kaaba at Mecca, and in another place on the great mosque at Damascus--is perhaps the finest example of pure Pathan architecture in India, and one of the