The points chiefly to note in this remarkable invasion are that the Arab soldiers first engaged were chiefly recruited from Syria; that, contrary to their usual custom, they brought none of their women with them; and that none of them probably ever returned to their country again. Elliott tells us of the message sent them by the savage Kalif Suliman: "Sow and sweat, for none of you will ever see Syria again." What, then, became of all these first Arab conquerors of Western India? They must have taken Persian-speaking wives of the stock of Makran and Baluchistan, and their children, speaking their mother-tongue, lost all knowledge of their fathers' language in the course of a few generations. There are many such instances of the rapid disappearance of a language in the East. For three centuries, then, whilst a people of Arab descent ruled in Sind, there existed through Makran one of the great highways of the world, a link between West and East such as has never existed elsewhere on the Indian border, save, perhaps, through the valley of the Kabul River and its affluents. Along this highway flowed the greater part of the mighty trade of India, a trade which has never failed to give commercial predominance to that country which held the golden key to it, whether that key has been in the hands of Arab, Turk, Venetian, Portuguese, or Englishman. And though there are traces of a rapid decline in the mediæval prosperity of Makran after the commencement of the eleventh century, yet its comparative remoteness in geographical position saved it subsequently from the ruthless destruction inflicted by Turk and Tartar in more accessible regions, and left to it cities worth despoiling even in the days of Portuguese supremacy.