Note 24 — PART I.—DESCRIPTION.

The following more detailed, but also more confused, story is told in the Wákiăt-i-Mushtáki (Elliot, IV. 552–54): A man named Mehmúd, son of Mughís Khilji, came to Hoshang and entered his service. He was a treacherous man, who secretly aspired to the throne. He became minister, and gave his daughter in marriage to the king. [Farishtah, Pers. Text, II. 474, says: “Malik Mughís gave his daughter (Mehmúd’s sister) in marriage, not to Hoshang, but to Hoshang’s son Muhammad Shah.”] His father Malik Mughís, coming to know of his son’s ambitious designs, informed the king of them. Hereupon Mehmúd feigned illness, and to deceive the king’s physicians shut himself in a dark room and drank the blood of a newly killed goat. When the physicians came Mehmúd rose hastily, threw up the blood into a basin, and tossing back his head rolled on the floor as if in pain. The physicians called for a light. When they saw that what Mehmúd had spat up was blood they were satisfied of his sickness, and told the king that Mehmúd had not long to live. The king refrained from killing a dying man. This strange story seems to be an embellishment of a passage in Farishtah (Pers. Text, II. 477). When Khán Jehán, that is Malik Mughís the father of Mehmúd, was ordered by Sultán Muhammad to take the field against the Rájput rebels of Nádoti (Hároti?) many of the old nobles of Málwa went with him. In their absence the party hostile to the Khiljis represented to Sultán Muhammad that Mehmúd Khilji was plotting his death. On hearing that the Sultán was enraged against him Mehmúd secluded himself from the Court on pretence of illness. At the same time he worked secretly and bribed Sultán Muhammad’s cup-bearer to poison his master. On the death of Sultán Muhammad the party of nobles opposed to Mehmúd, concealing the fact of Muhammad’s death, sent word that Muhammad had ordered him immediately to the palace, as he wanted to send him on an embassy to Gujarát. Mehmúd, who knew that the Sultán was dead, returned word to the nobles that he had vowed a life-long seclusion as the sweeper of the shrine of his patron Sultán Hoshang, but that if the nobles came to him and convinced him that the good of his country depended on his going to Gujarát he was ready to go and see Sultán Muhammad. The nobles were caught in their own trap. They went to Mehmúd and were secured and imprisoned by him. ↑