Now as in this Mahomedan age the new faith of the conquerors had much to say to the general trend of events, it may be as well to occupy this empty chapter by a brief exposition of what that faith is, and how it inspired those constant invasions of India which make the next few hundred years the record of an almost continuous campaign. Before doing this, however, let us take still briefer stock of this past Hindu age. It was an age of growth, of renaissance, of decadence. The natural vigour of the Vedas grew to the more complex, more artificial energy of the Epics, and out of this arose strangely the quietism of the Buddhist. War and Peace, Glory and Dishonour, Riches and Poverty, all faded away to nothingness before the hope of Nirvana--of escape from Desire. Thus Asôka becomes the dominating figure, and even after his death the names of Kanîshka and Hûshka and Harsha faintly echo his fame. But they failed to keep it alive. The Brahmans, rising to power, thrust out alike the simplicity of the Vedas and the nescience of Buddha. So came the Renaissance. An epoch marked, as such epochs generally are, by a curious cult of the emotions in all things. The Indians of the Gûpta empire were emphatically _fin de siècle_, so they did not survive. King Harsha, Mithraist, Buddhist, Hindu, worshipping his several deities by giving in alms even "his bright head-jewel," pictures the time. A time when the court panegyrist Bana, writing of his dying master, can so juggle with words as to describe his agony thus:-- "Helplessness had taken him in hand; pain had made him its province, wasting its domain, lassitude its lair ... broken in utterance, unhinged in mind, tortured in body, waning in life, babbling in speech, ceaseless in sighs." Of a truth, there is no wonder that the Indian world also had come to "the tip of death's tongue," to "the portal of the Long Sleep." It was becoming neurotic, hyper-æstheticised. It needed a rest and a rude awakening. Mahomedanism was to give it the latter, and the founder of this faith had been born at Mecca on the 10th November A.D. 570. By a curious coincidence, the date on which he began his teaching and that of King Harsha's coronation are very nearly synchronous. Mahomed was an Arab, but was in every way unlike his race. A posthumous son, he had "inherited from his mother a delicate and extremely impressionable constitution, and an exaggerated sensibility." He was melancholy, silent, fond of desert places, solitude, and dreamy meditations. Nature appealed to him. The sight of the setting sun inspired him with vague restlessness, and he would weep and sob like a child at slight provocation. His religious excitability was of the most acute character, and passed at times into attacks of epilepsy.