If the old supreme monarch of the north had lost his sway, in the south the Mongol race was being lifted to its second period of empire under Tamerlane, the Iron Khan. His was the history of the first Mongol conqueror repeated. The ant that Timur watched during his exile, which fell back and returned sixty-nine times before it carried its grain of wheat to the top of the wall, was the symbol of his early career. Constant obscure tribal conflicts, unsuccessful at first, led finally to a gathering of the nomads into a terrible invading army. The Golden Horde was hurled against Dimitri, defeated him, and marched upon Moscow. It was sacked with the horrors of Genghis’ days, and all Russia was ravaged to the Don and the Sea of Azov. One of Tamerlane’s armies traversed the Pamir into India, and, by the capture of Delhi, opened the way for the Mogul Dynasty of his sons, which was to endure until the Indian Mutiny. His Indian army, returning, swept a swath of desolation through Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Georgia, and Armenia. Every city that was taken was sacked, and the event commemorated by a pyramid of skulls embedded in mortar. One hundred and twenty pyramids marked Tamerlane’s path through India alone. The Delhi pyramid was made from the skulls of one hundred thousand slain “with the sword of holy war.” Bajazet, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks,--themselves sprung from a nomad Mongol tribe,--was threatened by Tamerlane on the west. In a great battle Bajazet was defeated. Alhacen, Tamerlane’s Arabian secretary, relates that the conquered king was examined by his master. “Wherefore dost thou use so great cruelty towards men? Dost thou not pardon sex or age?” Bajazet might logically have responded with a “tu quoque,” but his position did not warrant it. “I am appointed by God to punish tyrants,” continued Tamerlane. He had an iron cage made; and locked within it like a linnet, the unfortunate sultan was carried from place to place, because, in the Tatar’s naïvely quoted words, “It is necessary that he be made an exemplary punishment to all the cruel of the world, of the just wrath of God against them.” The invasion of China was under way, in 1405, when Tamerlane died, leaving a renewed Mongol Empire, which stretched from the Hoang-ho to the Don, and from Siberia to India. Here again the descendants of the savage conquerors rose to the requirements of their sovereignty and obeyed the peaceful and humane maxims that each of the two great and warlike and pitiless tyrants had bequeathed to his successors. They ruled with a fair degree of wisdom and a large measure of success. A descendant of Tamerlane was to build at Agra, in 1630, the most splendid monument the world has ever seen, the Taj-Mahal.