blood. At his gate one sees always some fakir who has become rich, or
some living being who is put to death. His traits of generosity and
valour, and his examples of cruelty and violence towards criminals,
have obtained celebrity among the people. But apart from this he is
the most humble of men and the one who displays the most equity;
the ceremonies of religion are observed at his court; he is very
severe in all that concerns prayer and the punishment that follows
omission of it ... his dominating quality is generosity.... It rarely
happened that the corpse of some one who had been killed was not to
be seen at the gate of his palace. I have often seen men killed and
their bodies left there. One day I went to his palace and my horse
shied. I looked before me and I saw a white heap on the ground, and
when I asked what it was one of my companions said it was the trunk
of a man cut into three pieces.... Every day hundreds of individuals
were brought chained into his hall of audience, their hands tied
to their necks and their feet bound together. Some were killed,
and others were tortured or well beaten."[21]

A man of these seemingly opposite qualities, charity, generosity, and
religious fervour linked to unbridled lust for blood and an apparently
overmastering desire to take life, possesses a character so bizarre,
so totally opposed to Hindu ideals, that he would almost of necessity
be accounted as something superhuman, monstrous, a saint with the heart
of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint. Hence Muhammad in the
course of years gathered round his memory, centuries after his death,
all the quaint tales and curious legends which an Oriental imagination
could devise; and whenever his name is mentioned by the old chroniclers
it is always with some extraordinary story attached to it.

Nuniz, therefore, though accurate in the main, was a century too