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التاريخ اليميني 25

English (machine translation) 25

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English

25.1

After the Sultan Yamīn al-Dawla wa-Amīn al-Milla had won the two conquests and struck the sparks of the two successes, he turned aside to Ghazna to rest and to devote himself to thanking God for the blessings granted. He stayed there, sharpening his resolve for another campaign by which the bounds of Islam would be raised, the cheeks of the idols rubbed in the dust, and the banners of Satan reversed, along with the saddle he had bound for seduction and the rope he had stretched for error. For the loftiness of his ambition imposed on him what runs contrary [162b] to human nature: finding the soft bed rough, preferring thorns to the bedstring, choosing the clash of spearheads and lances over the plucking of the third and second strings of the lute, and favouring the edges of keen white swords over the cheeks of white-skinned, full-breasted maidens. All this was for glory he would build, renown he would acquire, might he would possess, and striving by and in which he would draw near to God. When the month of Rabīʿ al-Ākhir of the year mentioned had passed, he sought God's guidance in completing what he intended and saddling what he had undertaken to bridle, and set out trusting in God, who had so often fed him with His help [and made His works known to him]. When his march brought him to the bank of Wayhind, Brahmanpāl son of Āndpāl met him with armies surging with black men, in white blades and blue spears, shining coats of mail and dusky elephants. War bared its crooked fangs, and charges followed one another as the gleaming meteors fall and as the driving clouds are hurled along.

25.2

The millstone of thrusting and striking turned, grinding every eager brave and every obeyed chief. The battle lasted from the infancy of the day to the maturity of the evening, until the earth put on the colour of anemones from the blood of necks and shoulders. Fortune was about to turn in favour of the infidels, had not God aided the Sultan in a charge with his elite slave-guards, which struck [163a] their rears and wiped their traces from their positions. God gave him as spoils thirty elephants like the forms of palaces, nay like the waves of the seas. His men set about mowing them down wherever they caught them, in the bottoms of valleys and ravines and on the backs of deserts and hills. The Sultan himself followed his track among those places of flight, seeking fulfilment of God's promise to aid His religion and to throw every hypocrite and schismatic on his forehead, until the pursuit brought him to Bhīmnagar, the most strongly fortified castle, built on the edge of a lofty mountain in the midst of impassable water.

25.3

The kings of Hind and its notables [and the companies of ascetics who held property there] had kept it as a treasury for the greatest idol, and generation after generation they had brought to it kinds of treasures and precious jewels, light in weight but heavy in value and price when appraised, as an act of worship — so they claimed — for what would bring them good and draw them near to God. There the Sultan came upon the crow's date and the cream of the ages: what the backs of camels could not carry, nor the vessels of loads contain, nor the hands of scribes record, nor the thought of reckoners comprehend. He mustered his troops against it, planted his standards around it, and set about fighting its guardians with a bold heart, a proud nose, a keen resolve, a strong grip [163b] and an opinion that kindled rightly.

25.4

When those people saw those mountains choked with raiding troops and the arrows flying upward like sparks of a fire, terror and dread overwhelmed them and fear and panic carried off their wits, so that their eyes imagined those closed places to be breaches, those barriers to be gaps, and those dams to be bursts. The Sultan's fortune bewitched them, the dogs of retreat and abandonment howled at them, and every way to safety and security failed them except the path of seeking quarter. So they all cried out together the Sultan's battle-cry, opened the castle gate, and began to drop to the ground for quarter like sparrows driven out by sparrowhawks, or rains poured forth by lightning-flashing clouds. God opened that castle to the Sultan with an easy conquest, granted him from Himself a great work, and gave him as spoils what filled the expanse of souls, of the daughters of mines and seas and the adornments of heads and throats.

25.5

He entered it together with the governor of al-Jūzjān, Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Farīghūnī, and the rest of his intimates, and he put his two senior chamberlains, Altūntāsh and Āsightigin, in charge of the treasuries of gold and silver and of all the other objects of rank and value, while he himself took charge of the treasury of jewels. He carried off from it as much as the backs of his camels could bear, and had the leading men [164a] of his troops carry the rest. The amount of silver removed came to seventy million Shāhī dirhams, and of gold and silver vessels seven hundred thousand four hundred mann in weight; and of the various kinds of Tustarī cloths and Sūsī brocades so much that the elders of the age and those advanced in years declared that they had never known their like in workmanship, striping, floral patterning and fineness. Among what was found was a house of pure silver, the equal of the houses of the wealthy, thirty cubits long and fifteen cubits wide, made of beaten plates fitted to be folded and unfolded, set up and taken down; and a canopy of Byzantine brocade, forty cubits long and twenty cubits wide, with two poles of gold and two others of cast silver.

25.6

The Sultan placed in charge of that fortress some of his trusted men to watch over it and to discharge faithfully the trust of guarding it.

25.7

He turned back to Ghazna under the warrant of victory and triumph, in the company of ease and wealth. When his staff touched the ground of rest there, he ordered the courtyard of his palace to be spread with those jewels: pearls like piercing stars, which had escaped the hands of the piercers; rubies like embers before they die down, or wine after it has congealed; emeralds like the tips of myrtle in freshness, or chamomile leaves in lushness; and pieces of diamond like pomegranates in size [164b] and weight. Delegations from the outlying lands gathered to behold what the books of the ancients do not record having been gathered for any of the mightiest chiefs, or the kings of the Persians and the Byzantines. Present at that spectacle were the envoys of Ṭughān Khān, king of the Turks and brother of Ilek, and they saw what eyes had never seen, what conjecture had never reached, and what Qārūn had never possessed: the handiwork of God, whose command, when He wills a thing, is but to say to it "Be", and it is.

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