formed great schemes of conquest, and carried out some of them. His mad projects for the invasion of Khorasan and of China came to nothing, or to miserable disaster, but within the bounds of India he was more successful, and had at one time subjected nearly the whole of the Peninsula. In the end, however, nearly all his conquests were wrested from him, either by the native king or by the revolt of his own servants. Respecting this king and the history of his reign, Ibn Batuta's narrative gives many curious and probably truthful details, such subjects being more congenial to his turn of mind than the correct observation of facts in geography or natural history, though even as regards the former his statements are sufficiently perplexed by his contempt for chronological arrangement.
After a detention of two months at Multan, Ibn Batuta was allowed to proceed, in company with the distinguished foreigners, for whom invitations to the court arrived. The route lay by ABOIIAR in the desert, where the Indian, as distinguished from the Sindian provinces commenced, the castle of ABU BAKHR, AJuDAHAN, SARSATI, HANSI, MASUDABAD, and PALAM, to DEHLI.1 The city, or group of cities, which then bore the latter name did not occupy the site of the modern capital built by Shah Japan in the seventeenth century, but stood some ten miles further south, in a position of which the celebrated Kutb Minar may be taken as the chief surviving landmark.
1 I cannot trace Abu Bakhr. Ajudin or Pâk Pattan (The Pure or Holy Ferry) is a town on the right bank of the Sutlej valley, about half way between Bhawalpnr and Firuzpiir, the site of â very sacred Mahomedan shrine, for the sake of which Timur on his devastating march spared the few persons found in the town. Abohar is a town in the desert of Bhattiana, some sixty miles east of Ajudin. The narrative brings Ibn Batuta to Abohar first, and then to Abu Bakhr and Ajodin, and I have not ventured to change the order ; but this seems to involve a direct retrogression. Sarsati is the town now called Sirsa on the verge of the Desert. Hansi retains its name as the chief town of an English Zillah. Sixty years ago it was the capital of that singular adventurer George Thomas, who raised himself from being a sailor before the mast to be the ruler of a small Indian principality. Masudabad I do not know ; it must have been in the direction of the modern Bahadargarh. Palam still exists, a few miles
west of the Dehli of those days, to one of the gates of which it gave its name.
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