Page:Aurangzíb and the Decay of the Mughal Empire.djvu/55

Rh time to admire the gallant attempt with disinterested coolness, and bade his followers take the daring Ráhtor alive – too late.

The cool courage of the one Prince and the fiery valour of the other daunted Dárá's division. The Rájputs had been slain in heaps, many of their chiefs were dead, and now Rustam, the commander of the imperial left wing, had fallen in rallying his men to one more spirited charge. The advantage was still on the side of the Agra army, and Aurangzíb and Murád-Bakhsh were perilously hemmed in by raving Rájputs, maddened with bang, and furious at the death of their chiefs: but it needed little to turn the balance of fortune either way. It was Dárá's unlucky destiny always to turn it against himself. At this crisis he committed the most fatal error that an Indian commander could perpetrate. All the army looked to his tall elephant as to a standard of victory. Yet now, when the day seemed almost his own, he must need dismount. He may have been alarmed at the rocket which just then struck his howdah, or listened to the treacherous counsel of Khalíl-Alláh, the commander of the right wing, who had chosen to consider himself held in reserve, and had looked on with his 30,000 Mughal troops without stirring a finger in the fight. Whatever impelled him, Dárá descended. Murád-Bakhsh was still there on his gory elephant, with his howdah stuck as full of arrows as a porcupine with quills, grimly dealing blow for, blow and shaft for shaft.