Muhammad, have the first place in paradise—­those who shared in one or other of his first three battles, and believed in his holy mission before they had the evidence of a single victory over the unbelievers to support it.  At the head of these are the men who accompanied him in his flight from Mecca to Medina, when he had no evidence either from victories or miracles.  In all such matters the less the evidence adduced in proof of a mission the greater the merit of those who believe in it, according to the person who pretends to it; and unhappily, the less the evidence a man has for his faith, the greater is his anger against other men for not joining in it with him.  No man gets very angry with another for not joining with him in his faith in the demonstration of a problem in mathematics.  Man likes to think that he is on the way to heaven upon such easy terms; but gets angry at the notion that others won’t join him, because they may consider him an imbecile for thinking that he is so.  The Muhammadan generals and historians are sometimes almost as concise as Caesar himself in describing very conscientiously a battle of this kind; instead of ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, it is ’Ten thousand Musalmans on that day tasted of the blessed fruit of paradise, after sending fifty thousand unbelievers to the flames of hell’.

On the 10th we came on twelve miles to Kumbhir, over a plain of poor soil, much impregnated with salt, and with some works in which salt is made, with solar evaporation.  The earth is dug up, water is filtered through it, and drawn off into small square beds, where it is evaporated by exposure to the solar heat.  The gate of this fort leading out to the road we came is called, modestly enough, after Kumbhir, a place only ten miles distant; that leading to Mathura, three or four stages distant, is called the Mathura gate.  At Delhi, the gates of the city walls are called ostentatiously after distant places—­the Kashmir, the Kabul, the Constantinople gates.  Outside the Kumbhir gate, I saw, for the first time in my life, the well peculiar to Upper India.  It is built up in the form of a round tower or cylindrical shell of burnt bricks, well cemented with good mortar, and covered inside and out with good stucco work, and let down by degrees, as the earth is removed by men at work in digging under the light earthy or sandy foundation inside and out.  This well is about twenty feet below and twenty feet above the surface, and had to be built higher as it was let into the ground.[6]

On the 11th we came on twelve miles to Dig (Deeg), over a plain of poor and badly cultivated soil, which must be almost all under water in the rains.  This was, and still is, the country seat of the Jats of Bharatpur, who rose, as I have already stated, to wealth and power by aggressions upon their immediate neighbours, and the plunder of tribute on its way to the imperial capital, and of the baggage of passing