Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/174

 638] announcing that he had deposed Khālid from his government, not because of tyranny or fraud, but because he deemed it needful to remove a stumbling-block out of the way of the people, who were tempted to put their trust in an arm of flesh, instead of looking alone to the Giver of all victory.

So closed the career of Khālid. The first beginning of ʿOmar's alienation was the affair of Mālik ibn Nuweira, followed by acts of tyranny in Chaldæa which grated on his sense of clemency and justice. But these acts had long since been condoned; and therefore his conduct now was both ungenerous and unjust. He used the "Sword of God" so long as he had the need, and when victory was gained, he cast the same ungratefully away. Khālid retired to Ḥimṣ, and did not long survive. His manner of life when in the full tide of prosperity, may be gathered from the brief notice that in the Plague, from which he fled with his family to the desert, he is said to have lost no fewer than forty sons. Soon after, in the eighth year of ʿOmar's caliphate, he died. In his last illness he kept showing the scars which covered his body, marks of bravery and unflinching prowess. "And now," he said, "I die even as a coward dieth, or as the camel breatheth its last breath." His end illustrates forcibly the instability of this world's fame. The hero who had borne Islām aloft to the crest of victory and glory, ended his days in penury and neglect. His tomb was visited by the traveller Ibn Jubeir in 1185, and is mentioned by Yākūt (1225), as also his house. According to another account, however, Khālid died, not at Ḥimṣ, but at Medīna. A part of his lance was long preserved in the great Mosque of Damascus.