And Ala-ud-din took with him mighty armies and great engines of war, and by sheer force of numbers and deadly weapons he bore down the brave little body of knights fighting on the walls of their beloved city.
Then again the knights sat in council. “Our weak and defenceless ones shall not,” they said, “fall into the hands of a coward enemy.”
And they took their women down into the vaults beneath the city, where the Rajput woman was wont to go through fire to meet her lord who had died in battle. And they left them enough wood and fire for the sacrifice.
And the women wore their most beautiful garments, to walk down to the vaults, a long line of beauty and courage led by the queen of beauty, the Lotus-Lady herself.
And now it was the turn of the men. And the King and his sons and his brave knights all strove as to who should be first to meet single-handed the enemy at the gates. And they cast lots: and went one by one clad in the Rajput saffron robe of conquest: and single-handed each hewed his way through the gates, strewing the moat and outworks with the bodies of the slain.
But Ayeshi, his beloved son, had the King sent secretly beforehand to a place of safety, that the race of warriors might still continue. And when night fell, the last of the Rajputs had left the city, having laid, each man, at the feet of the true knight and champion of the defenceless, a full sheaf of the unknightly ones.
And Ala-ud-din came walking carefully across this carpet of the dead, into a fortress of which the gates were wide. But no man nor woman nor child found he anywhere in Chittore. All was emptiness—palace and hut, and bathing-ghat, and council chamber, and garden and marble-latticed roof—empty, all empty.
Then at last did he realize that what was in his hands was not victory but defeat; and that the beauty and goodness of which we are not worthy, may not, in this life or the next, be taken by violence.
The Perfect Host
Rasmal Rana of Marwar had three sons—Sanga, Prithi Raj, and Jismal. And Prithi Raj was ambitious, and would boast that Fate meant him to lead the sons of Marwar.