Nothing could exceed the spirit and devotion of the troops. In the beautiful Jumma Mosque, where more than five thousand men assembled daily for prayer, the preaching of the Peer, and the other ecclesiastics of that noble edifice--which yet remains as perfect as it was at the period of this history--eloquently set forth the merits of the Jéhâd, or religious war, in the eyes of God and the Prophet; and the certainty of paradise and its houris, to all who, falling by sickness or in battle, would surely enjoy them. Nor was it in the Jumma Mosque only that this fervour existed. In the royal Palace precincts, the city mosques--at the tombs of the ancestors of the Kings--the beauteous Ibrahim Roza, and noble mausoleum of Sultan Mahmood, nothing was left undone by the preachers to make the war popular, and to blacken the character and motives of the rebels. Frequently, indeed, to such a pitch of excitement were men wrought, that it was difficult to restrain them from attacking Hindus indiscriminately in the streets, and, in the expressive language of the Peer, from "making a pyramid of a lakh of heads before the palace gates." But it was no part of the royal policy to allow such religious fury vent at the capital or by the way: suffice it that, at the end of a long and toilsome journey, which would be made light through religious fervour, there would be free licence to slay, and the raid of Afzool Khan would become memorable in the history of the kingdom. As the camps of the different leaders, too, formed without the walls, on that great plain which encompassed the city, bards and minstrels, in companies or singly, balled-singers, and, above all, troops of dancing women--thronged to them; and day and night, audiences were formed, sometimes in the tents, sometimes in the open air, where the feats of Sivaji and Maloosray were sung in the native Mahratta or Canarese, with verses added for the occasion, urging the faithful to destroy them. We may be sure that, if the old Khan and Fazil were active in the field, Lurlee and Zyna were no less so in the house. To Lurlee war was familiar. She had been long weary of a monotonous life in the city, varied only by an occasional day's excursion to the royal palaces at Toorweh, the Ibrahim Roza, or to the Khan's own garden, which was without the walls; and she remembered vividly the time when, for months together, the Khan's tent, or a temporary lodging in a village, were her only home, moving hastily or leisurely, as the service required, from place to place, in her palankeen or on horseback, as might be.