Almost alone in Delhi with his five-year-old son Samba-ji, Siva-ji was too wily to precipitate matters by any display of annoyance; but he laid his plans. His first move was to beg leave for his small escort to leave Delhi, the climate of which he said was insalubrious. To this Aurungzebe gave glad consent; it seemed to leave Siva-ji still more at his mercy. The latter next took to his bed on plea of sickness. This afforded him an opportunity of, first, being able to use the Hindu physicians, who were allowed to attend him, as spies and go-betweens; second, of sending sweetmeats and other offerings to various _fakirs_, Hindu and Mahomedan, with a request for their prayers. And as he grew more and more sick, the hampers and baskets containing the offerings grew larger and larger, until one day--hey presto!--little Siva-ji and his little son occupied the place of the sweetmeats. It was hours before the guards discovered that the sick-bed was occupied by a dummy, and by that time Siva-ji was in Muttra amongst his disguised followers. He himself adopted that of a wandering _jogi_, and, smeared all over with ashes, arrived in due time quite jauntily in his old haunts. Aurungzebe took his defeat in good part. For the time he was occupied with Shâhjahân's death, and with embassies from Arabia and Abyssinia. Then Little Tibet had just been brought under his sway, and in Bengal the kingdom of Arrakan, which held the rich rice-fields of Chittagong, had been added to the crown. It was some years, therefore, before Aurungzebe pitted himself once more against the Mahratta. Then once again he found the impracticability of subduing an enemy which, at the first attack, reduced itself to a horde of units, each one animated by individual love of fight, love of plunder. It was guerilla war with a vengeance, so after a time the emperor was not sorry to have his attention drawn from it to the northwest frontier. On his return from this unsuccessful expedition, he settled down for a time to govern his kingdom, which he did in a way that irritated and exasperated both Hindus and Mahomedans. The former almost rose in revolt at the reimposition of the poll tax on infidels; the latter, especially in the court, objected to the prohibition of all amusements. Amongst other prohibitions was the curious one of forbidding history to be written, or court annals to be kept; the result being that no real record of the last forty years of this reign is extant. As time went on, he bore more and more hardly on the Hindus, until discontent spread on all sides, and in the Dekkan every one was at heart a partisan of Siva-ji.