Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/27

 INDIA AND THE ARABS 3 to surmount the snows that barred the way to Hindu- stan. The Arabs never opened that perilous northwest passage from Afghanistan, which has poured so many foreign hordes into the teeming plains below. The only Arab attempt upon India came from a different quarter. Little as the Moslems of the desert relished the dangers of the deep, there were seafaring traders on the Arabian coasts to whom the ports of Western India had been familiar from the earliest times. Arab merchants sailed from Siraf and Hurmuz in the Persian Gulf, coasting along till they came to the mouth of the Indus, and thence on to Sapera and Cambay; or they even struck boldly across from their harbours at Kalhat and Kurayyat in Oman to Calicut and other ports on the Malabar coast. These men brought back tidings of the wealth and luxury of India, of gold and diamonds, of jewelled idols and gorgeous religious rites, and of a wonderful civilization. The temptation of such wealth was sanctioned by the zeal of the iconoclast, and the spoliation of the idolaters became a means of grace. At a time when the armies of Islam were over- running the known world, such a field of operations as India could not be overlooked, and accordingly we find a pillaging expedition visiting Tana (near the pres- ent Bombay) as early as 637, during the reign of the caliph Omar, the second successor of Mohammed the Prophet. Other forays followed, for the Arabs of the Persian Gulf were a venturesome folk. All these, however, were mere raids. Plunder, not conquest, was their aim, and they led to nothing more.