So Mahmûd, his army, and his vast loot, set out for the desert, set their faces for the last time away from the wealth and idolatry of India. Set them, as it turned out, very nearly away from all wealth, all faiths; for in the desert the whole army was misled for three days and three nights by a Hindu guide, "so that many of the troops died raving mad from the intolerable heat and thirst." A Hindu guide who, under torture, confessed exultantly that he was one of the priests of Som-nâth, and so died, satisfied with his measure of revenge.
Mahmûd, however, had only to prostrate himself once more, and lo! a guiding meteor, and after a long night-march, water! Water, even though it must have been the Great Salt Lake.
After this, time passed in comparative uneventfulness, until on the 23rd of April A.D. 1030, in the sixty-third year of his age, "this great conqueror gave up his body to death and his soul to immortality amid the tears of his people."
One of his last recorded remarks was his exclamation when, in answer to his enquiry, the Lord High Treasurer told him that before becoming extinct, the last dynasty had accumulated seven pounds weight of precious stones. "Thanks be to Thee, All-Powerful Being!" cried Mahmûd, prostrating himself yet once more. "Thou hast enabled me to collect more than a hundred pounds."
What did he do with all the vast wealth which in the course of his missionary work he managed to annex? We know that he built a magnificent mosque at Ghuzni called "The Celestial Bride"; but that could not have absorbed it all.
Indeed we know much of it was still in the treasury; for two days before his death he ordered all the gold and the caskets of precious stones to be brought before him, and "having seen them, he wept with regret, ordering them to be carried back, without exhibiting his generosity at that time to anybody."
Gold had evidently gripped at the heart and soul of this middle-aged, well-shaped, ugly man, who was strongly pitted with the smallpox. His was not a lovable personality in any way. Gifted with a touch of genius, gifted above all things with that marvellous vitality which is always as magic to the Indian, he was just, curiously callous, and absolutely sceptical.
He openly doubted if he was really the son of his father, and scoffed at the idea of a future state. Certainly annihilation would be a kinder fate than the one which the poet Sa'adi gives to him in the Gulistan, and which may be paraphrased thus:--
"The King of Khurasan saw in a dream
Mahmûd the son of Subaktigeen,
Dead for this hundred years or more,
His head and his heart, his arms and his thighs
Dissolved to dust, and only his eyes
Moved in their sockets and saw
His gold, his empire, everything
He loved in the hands of another King."