and sent 100,000 men into the Himalayas, where almost all of them
miserably perished; and when the survivors returned in despair the king
put them all to death. He tried to introduce a depreciated currency
into his territories as a means to wealth, issuing copper tokens for
gold, which resulted in entire loss of credit and a standstill of
trade. This failing to fill the treasury he next destroyed agriculture
by intolerable exactions; the husbandmen abandoned their fields and
took to robbery as a trade, and whole tracts became depopulated,
the survivors living in the utmost starvation and misery and being
despoiled of all that they possessed. Muhammad exterminated whole
tribes as if they had been vermin. Incensed at the refusal of
the inhabitants of a certain harassed tract to pay the inordinate
demands of his subordinates, he ordered out his army as if for a hunt,
surrounded an extensive tract of country, closed the circle towards
the centre, and slaughtered every living soul found therein. This
amusement was repeated more than once, and on a subsequent occasion
he ordered a general massacre of all the inhabitants of the old
Hindu city of Kanauj.[19] These horrors led of course to famine,
and the miseries of the Hindus exceeded all power of description. On
his return from Devagiri on one occasion he caused a tooth which he
had lost to be interred in a magnificent stone mausoleum, which is
still in existence at Bhir.

But perhaps the best known of his inhuman eccentricities was his
treatment of the inhabitants of the great city of Delhi. Muhammad
determined to transfer his capital thence to Devagiri, whose name he
changed to Doulatabad. The two places are six hundred miles apart. The
king gave a general order to every inhabitant of Delhi to proceed
forthwith to Devagiri, and prior to the issue of this order he had
the entire road lined with full-grown trees, transplanted for the