Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/91

 60 Jumgál, Jud Kuzi, and others, so often spoken of in the Second Part of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, and several more that are mentioned in the Zafar-Náma and the Tarikh-i-Jahán Kushat, now impossible to identify. They were typical of the Moghuls as a race—of a nation devoid of constructive instincts, destined only to fallow the land and then make place for others.

The period subsequent to the conquest of Chingiz's successors was one when disorder and intolerance prevented European travellers, who might have left a description behind them, from traversing the country of the Moghuls; but a side-light is shed on the subject by a brief mention in Rubruk's narrative of his visit to Mangu Kaán (Chingiz's grandson) at Karakorum in the year 1253, and consequently only just at the outset of the establishment of the Mongols in the region in question. Karakorum was then the Mongol capital: it numbered among its inhabitants many Chinese, Uighurs, and other comparatively cultivated people, and was, presumably, if not the only permanent Mongolian town, at any rate by far the best of them. Yet the walls only measured about a mile in circumference, and Rubruk relates of it: "You must understand that if you set aside the Kaán's own palace, it is not as good as the borough of St. Dennis; and as for the palace, the abbey of St. Dennis is worth ten of it! There are two streets in the town, one of which is occupied by the Saracens, and in that is the market-place. The other street is occupied by the Cathayans, who are all craftsmen There are also twelve idol temples belonging to different nations, two Mahummeries, in which the law of Mahomet is preached, and one Church of the Christians at the extremity of the town. The town is enclosed by a mud wall and has four gates." The Chinese travellers of the thirteenth century give no description of the inhabited centres of Moghulistan which they passed through, though one of them, Chang Té (who seems to have had an eye for irrigation) mentions briefly that at Almáligh there were reservoirs in the market-places, "connected by running water." Farther westward also, in the valley of the Chu, he remarks that the country was intersected in all directions by canals which irrigated the fields, while numerous ancient walls and other ruins were seen which he attributed to the days of the Kitan or the Kara Khitai. But all these marks of civilisation had been swept away in Mirza Haidar's time, as he himself implies in his description of