Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/30

 6 MOHAMMEDAN INVASION tains, and by desert from all peoples of kindred race and faith. Youth and high spirit, however, forbade alike fear and foreboding. The young general had at least six thousand picked horsemen at his back, chosen from the caliph's veterans, with an equal number of camelry, and was supplied with a baggage-train of three thousand Bactrian camels. Marching through Mekran, along the Persian coast, he was joined by the provincial governor with more troops; and five stone-slings for siege-work were sent by sea to meet him at Daibul, or Debal, in Sind, the great mediaeval port of the Indus valley and forerunner of the modern city of Karachi. There at Daibul, in the spring of 712, Mohammad ibn Kasim set up his catapults and dug his trench. A description of this siege has come down to us from the early historian al-Baladhuri (about 840), from which it appears that the Arab spearmen were drawn up along the trench, each separate company under its own ban- ner, and that five hundred men were stationed to work the heavy catapult named " the Bride." A great red flag flaunted on the top of a tall Hindu temple, and the order came from Hajjaj, with whom the general was in constant communication, to " fix the stone-sling and shorten its foot and aim at the flagstaff." So the gun- ners lowered the trajectory and brought down the pole with a shrewd shot. The fall of the sacred flag dis- mayed the garrison; a sortie was repulsed with loss; the Moslems brought ladders and scaled the walls, and the place was carried by storm. The governor fled, the Brahmans were butchered, and after three days of car-