So great had been the destruction that little treasure was found by the conquerors within the fortress. They who perished by a voluntary decease had taken care previously to consume or destroy everything of value which they possessed. Even the treasures of the temples had been disposed of, so that the conquerors entered a depopulated town, rendered a scene of utter desolation, a fit abode only for the reptile and beast of prey. That portion of the garrison which had last sallied from the gates to die fighting for their country and its shrines perished in a cause which they imagined would end in their transportation to higher scenes of enjoyment in new states of being. They first purified themselves with water, offered adoration to the Divinity, made benefactions to the poor, placed a branch of the toolsi in their casques, and the saligram round their necks, emblems of death and the grave; and having cased themselves in armour, and put on the saffron robe, they bound the mor, a funeral coronet, round their heads, embraced each other for the last time, and rushed forth to perish in the fierce conflict of arms. As the king walked through the now desolate streets he was deeply affected. Disfigured bodies, black and putrid, and exhaling the horrible odours of decay, lay before him in all their revolting deformity. The corpses of those who fell by their own hands had been just put under the surface of the ground, and were seen protruding through the earth from their superficial graves, filling the air with the seeds of pestilence. Women and children were still among the dead and dying, at the last extremity, imploring piteously for a cup of water to slake the raging thirst that was consuming them, and adding intolerable torment to their expiring agonies. All the corpses were ordered to be collected together and consumed upon one vast pile, and fires were kept burning for days to purify the air and cleanse the polluted town. Such were the frightful circumstances under which the Mogul emperor became master of Chittore. It is, in truth, melancholy to contemplate the horrors which frequently follow on the heels of human ambition. It seems to look upon the sanguinary devastations of war as a sort of legalised licence to destruction, and they therefore fail to excite our sympathies; but if we consider what an awful amount of human beings have been cut off by the sword, or by those scourges so often the frightful handmaids of war, pestilence and famine, we should be startled at the prodigious total. Animals destroy each other singly, and in obedience to an irresistible instinct to support their own lives, which, to them, is the greatest boon of heaven, because they have no prospects beyond, but the rational portion of God’s creatures destroy each other by large masses and in mighty sums merely to substantiate the sordid calculations of interest, to appease their base passions, or to realize the aims of a bloated ambition.