It was nearly noon when he stood at last upon the plain. He had been a long time coming down; for he had been often obliged to pause and rest. He began to realize that he was shattered by the struggle of yesterday. Body and nerves played him false, and the result of his many years of austere living suddenly threw itself against him and broke his force. Nevertheless, he proceeded, walking feebly across the plain toward the river bank, wondering a little how, when he had reached the river, he was going to finish his journey. None seeing him would have believed that he could walk five miles more. Yet that was what he had set out to do. He wished to go to the river temple, to pray for the three that were buried there. His passage across the plain was strangely solitary. The rich fields, in which stood crops already a foot high, the young spears calling for water, were deserted. Here also was the trace of the invader. All the people of the lowland, quickly getting news of Mandu’s disaster, had driven together their herds of cattle and buffalo and retreated with them into the jungle:—a heedless, sheeplike retreat, that lost them their half-year’s crops, but could not make encounter with the soldiers of the Prophet less inevitable. An hour after noon, weary and faint, tottering, indeed, as he moved, Oman reached the bank of the bright-flowing Narmáda. Here he found that his providence had not deserted him. On the shore, close at hand, drawn a little up from the swift water, lay one of the broad, flat-bottomed boats used occasionally by peasants for ferrying the stream. The guiding-poles lay in it—a fact that told much. Those that had used the boat would not use it again, else they had taken the poles with them. Oman stared at it for a few moments, uncertainly. Then he waded into the water, and dragged it, with great effort, after him. When it was afloat, he threw himself upon it, took one of the poles, pointed his barge down-stream, and then, as the current took it with a rush, lay down supine, folded his arms across his breast, and shut his eyes. The afternoon of the first day of Mohammedan Mandu was growing late. Yellow shadows lengthened across the fields. To the south, the flat, alluvial plain stretched away, dotted now and then with a mud town, or fringed with the jungle into which, in the India of that day, all civilization sooner or later resolved itself. In the north, not very far distant, rose the great rock of Mandu, crowned with her circle of stone palaces; and back of that, a silent, threatening horde, stood the dark Vindhyas, barriers of the Dekkhan.