'The beautiful Ayashur, on her camel, was separated from the party; she arrived at the serai (inn, or halting-place) several hours after they had encamped, and declared that her delay was occasioned by the loss of a silver bangle from her ankle, which after some trouble she had discovered, and which she produced in a bruised state in testimony of her assertion. Mahumud was displeased, and her father enraged beyond measure at his daughter's exposing herself to the censure of the public, by allowing any thing to detach her from the party.' Mahumud assuaged Omir's anger by a command then first issued, 'That all females, belonging to the faithful, should be compelled to wear a close veil over their face and figure whenever they went abroad.' In Arabia and Persia the females are allowed to walk or ride out with a sort of hooded cloak, which falls over the face, and has two eye-holes for the purpose of seeing their way.[11] They are to be met with in the streets of those countries without a suspicion of impropriety when thus habited. The habit of strict seclusion, however, originated in Hindoostaun with Tamerlane the conqueror of India. When Tamerlane[12] with his powerful army entered India, he issued a proclamation to all his followers to the following purport, 'As they were now in the land of idolatry and amongst a strange people, the females of their families should be strictly concealed from the view of strangers'; and Tamerlane himself invented the several covered conveyances which are to the present period of the Mussulmaun history in use, suited to each grade of female rank in society. And the better to secure them from all possibility of contamination by their new neighbours, he commanded that they should be confined to their own apartments and behind the purdah, disallowing any intercourse with males of their own persuasion even, who were not related by the nearest ties, and making it a crime in any female who should willingly suffer her person to be seen by men out of the prescribed limits of consanguinity. Tamerlane, it may be presumed, was then ignorant of the religious principles of the Hindoos. They are strictly forbidden to have intercourse or intermarry with females who are not strictly of their own caste or tribe, under the severe penalty of losing that caste which they value as their life. To this may be attributed, in a great degree, the safety with which female foreigners travel daak[13] (post) in their palankeens, from one point of the Indian continent to another, without the knowledge of five words of the Hindoostaunie tongue, and with no other servant or guardian but the daak-bearers, who carry them at the rate of four miles an hour, travelling day and night successively.