And yet he was, in his way, a good king. Had he been less of a bigot, he would have been a better one; but this bigotry was necessary to his peace of mind. He could not have borne the sting of conscience without some anodyne of hard-and-fast religious rectitude. It was after the murder of his brother Dâra, who, caught on the confines of Sinde, almost unattended (for he had sent his most trusted adherents back to Lahôre with the dead body of his wife, who had died of fatigue), was given a mock trial for heresy and done to death, that Aurungzebe built the celebrated Blood-money Mosque at Lahôre, in which no Mahomedan prayed for long years, feeling it to be defiled indeed. But Aurungzebe was for ever hedging between this world and the next, so we must take him as we find him--an absolutely contemptible creature, who yet did good work. Needless to say, however, "Akbar's Dream" vanished into thin air from the moment he set his foot upon the throne. The first five years of his reign were practically spent in ridding himself of relations. The whole family of Shujah suffered death, and even his own son was immured as a state prisoner in consequence of a trivial act of independence. Then--and small wonder!--he was seized with a mysterious illness, which left him speechless. Nothing but his marvellous determination could have averted the chaos which must have followed in a state but half broken in to his murderous methods. But he sent for his great seal and his sister Roshanâra, and keeping them both by his sick-bed, held order by sheer insistency until he recovered. So, after a brief holiday in Kashmir--that happy hunting-ground of all the Moghul kings, who seem to have inherited the love of beautiful scenery from their great ancestor, Babar--he came back to face the greatest foe to the Moghul power which had arisen since the combined Râjput resistance was finally broken by Mahomed-Shahâb-ud-din-Ghori. This foe was the Mahratta race, which had been gradually growing to power in the Western Ghâts, that natural stronghold of mountains which rises in many places like a wall between the Western Sea and the high table-land of Central India. No more fitting birthplace for warlike tribes could be imagined. Towards the sea, breaks of rich rice-fields, tongued by spurred rocks and outlying strips of almost impenetrable forest. Then the bare, broken ridges, 3,000 or 4,000 feet high, ending often in a scarp of sheer precipice, and giving on wide, thicket-set woods, through which, after a while, ravines break into valleys to the eastward. A land of rain--clouds from the south-west monsoon, of roaring torrents and drifting mists; full of wild beasts fleeing fearfully from the small, sturdy huntsmen of the hills. These were the Mahrattas. Not a very interesting race when all was said and done. Brave, dogged, determined, but, by reason, doubtless, of their Sudra extraction, lacking the nobility of the Râjput and the Râjput nicety in honour.