Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/157

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AN IMPERIAL DESPOT IN DRESS AND UNDRESS
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under the leadership of Sultan Purwaz, one of his elder sons. Prince Khurrum's expedition derived all the importance which attaches to an effort to retrieve a failure, and Jehangir was determined that it should have the fullest advantage that could be derived from his presence in a commanding position directly overlooking the theatre of war. His courtiers were probably far from sharing his zeal for the maintenance of the imperial prestige. The route lay through a wild and inhospitable region, in which supplies were difficult to obtain, and the absence of anything in the nature of roads made the transport of the immense force included in the imperial camp a matter of the utmost difficulty. Mandu itself was little more than a heap of ruins. Its highest recommendation was that it was a strong position, but its fortifications, however useful they might be for the purposes of a post of observation such as Jehangir contemplated, offered no suitable shelter for the great train of nobles and Court functionaries, to say nothing of the horde of camp followers who ministered to the multifarious needs of the imperial camp.

Roe was so fortunate as to be able to establish himself in a deserted mosque which he found on the outskirts of the ruined city. As there was in close proximity to this a stream of pure water, he was fairly comfortable, but the hardships of the journey had told upon his constitution, and he was laid low for some time after his arrival with an attack of fever. It was for him a time of great depression. "Death and I have been house fellows," he wrote to a friend at home at this period, and somewhat later he stated that he was "full of India, even to fastidiousness."

His ill-health was aggravated, there can be no doubt, by the disappointments which he had sustained in the prosecu-