Ibn Batūta now crossed the Indus, and found himself in Hindostan, where,
immediately upon his arrival, he met, in a city which he denominates
Janai, one of the three brothers of Borhaneddin, the Egyptian saint,
whose prediction, strengthening his natural bent of mind, had made a
great traveller of him. Traversing the desert of Sivastān, where the
Egyptian thorn was the only tree to be seen, and then descending along
the banks of the Sinde, or Indus, he arrived at the city of Lahari, on
the seashore, in the vicinity of which were the ruins of an ancient
city, abounding with the sculptured figures of men and animals, which
the superstitious natives supposed to be the real forms of the ancient
inhabitants transformed by the Almighty into stone for their wickedness.
At Uja, a large city on the Indus, our traveller contracted a friendship
with the Emīr Jelaleddin, then governor of the place, a brave and
generous prince, whom he afterward met at Delhi. In journeying eastward
from this place, Batūta proceeded through a desert lying between two
ridges of mountains, inhabited by Hindoos, whom the traveller terms
infidel and rebellious, because they adhered to the faith of their
ancestors, and refused submission to the power of the Mohammedan
conquerors of their country. Ibn Batūta’s party, consisting of twenty-two
men, was here attacked by a large body of natives, which they succeeded
in repulsing, after they had killed thirteen of their number. In the
course of this journey he witnessed the performance of a suttee,
and remarks upon the occasion, that these human sacrifices were not
absolutely required either by the laws or the religion of Hindostan; but
that, owing to the vulgar prejudice which regarded those families as
ennobled who thus lost one of their members, the practice was greatly
encouraged.
On arriving at Delhi, which, for strength, beauty, and extent, he
pronounces the greatest city, not only of all Hindostan, but of all
Islamism in the east, he resorted to the palace of the queen-mother and
presenting his presents, according to custom, was graciously received
and magnificently established by the bounty of that princess and the
vizier. It is to be presumed, that the money he had received in presents
from various princes on the way had exceeded his travelling expenses,
and gone on accumulating, until, on his arrival at Delhi, it amounted
to a very considerable sum; for with his house, costly furniture, and
forty attendants, his expenditure seems greatly to have exceeded the
munificence of his patrons; indeed, he very soon found that all the
resources he could command were too scanty to supply the current of his
extravagance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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