Page:History of Aurangzib (based on original sources) Vol 1.djvu/118

88 and massacred holymen and children with as little pity as they showed to fighting foemen. In one place, they shut up in a mosque and roasted alive a pious darvish and 400 school-boys whom he had led in a procession to entreat their mercy. Similar atrocities were committed by them elsewhere. These ferocious robbers were not hampered in their marches by any baggage or provisions; the coarsest food sufficed for them. The deepest rivers they crossed by swimming their horses, in a long line, the bridle of one being fastened to the tail of another, while the saddles, which were mere bundles of sticks, could not be damaged by water. The men crossed on rafts made from the reeds that grew plentifully on the river bank. The horses, as hardy as their riders, lived on the wild wormwood of the steppe and yet covered a hundred miles a day. From Bukhara beyond the Oxus their forays extended to Khurasan, and the well-mounted Persian cavalry could not overtake them.

For many centuries Balkh, with its adjunct of Badakhshan, had been a dependency of Bukhara, and was governed by a viceroy (often a prince of the blood) and garrisoned by the fierce and hardy Scythians from beyond the Oxus. Early in the seventeenth century, the