190 TIMUR'S ACCOUNT OF HIS INVASION they made prisoners of their women and children and secured an enormous booty. I directed towers of the skulls of those obstinate unbelievers to be built on the mountain, and I ordered an engraver on stone, who was in my camp, to cut an inscription somewhere on those defiles to the effect that I had reached this coun- try by such and such a route, in the auspicious month of Ramazan, A. H. 800 (May, 1398), so that, if chance should conduct any one to that spot, he might know how I had reached it. Thus far I had received no intelligence of Prince Rustam and Burhan Aghlan, whom I had detached against the country of the Siyah-poshes, and since this same Burhan Aghlan had displayed great sloth and military incapacity on a former occasion, when I had appointed him commander of a predatory incursion (to retrieve which negligence I had given him the command on the present occasion), doubts entered my mind as to what he might be doing. One night, too, I dreamt that my sword was bent, and interpreted this as a sure sign that Burhan Aghlan had been defeated. I immedi- ately appointed one of my household slaves, named Mohammad Azad, to go and ascertain something re- specting him, and I placed under his command Daulat Shah and Shaikh Ali, the son of Airakuli Adighur, and Shaikh Mohammad, and Ali Bahadur, with a body of four hundred men, of whom one hundred were Tartars and the rest Tajiks, and gave them a native of Kator as a guide. Mohammad Azad and his band of heroes immediately commenced the march, and after crossing
