minstrelsy as the embodiment of Hindu chivalry, equally gallant and
daring in love and in war--the last to make a stand in northern India
against the successive waves of Mahomedan conquest which Central Asia
had begun to pour in upon India in 1001, with the first of Mahmud
Ghazni's seventeen raids. In the next century an Afghan wave swept down
on the top of the original Turki wave, and Kutub-ed-Din, having
proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi in 1206, built the great Mosque of
_Kuwwet-el-Islam_, "The Power of Islam," and the lofty minaret, still
known by his name, from which for six centuries the Moslem call to
prayer went forth to proclaim Mahomedan domination over India.

With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped
in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The
annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently
to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was
shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the wild spaces
of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again like a
devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed the
long line of Moghul Emperors who first under Baber and then under Akbar
won the Empire of Hindustan at the gates of Delhi, and for a time
succeeded in bringing almost the whole of India under their sway. But
their splendid marble halls in the great Fort of Delhi recall not only
the magnificence of the Moghul Empire, but its slow and sure decay,
until it became a suitor for the protection of the British power, which,
at first a mere trading power that had once sued humbly enough for its
protection, had risen to be the greatest military and political power
in India. It was at Delhi at the beginning of the nineteenth century
that Lord Lake rescued a Moghul Emperor from the hands of Mahratta
jailers, and it was at Delhi again that in 1857 the last semblance of
Moghul rulership disappeared out of history in the tempest of the