been procured at the expense of strengthening the Maráthás. Sivají had annexed all the southern territory which his father had lately won for the King of Bijápúr; he had full possession of the western Gháts and Konkan; and his forts continually sent out armed expeditions to harry the country north and east, wherever the blackmail had not been humbly paid. The 'great Captain,' indeed, was dead, but his genius lived in the nation he had created. Aurangzíb could not realize the power of those freebooters. He understood the solid weight of organized states and disciplined armies; but he never estimated the irregular domination of the Maráthás at its true value, until years of fruitless contest had seared the truth upon his mind and spread its witnesses in the starved and butchered corpses of his Grand Army through the length and breadth of the peninsula.
However little he may have appreciated the gravity of the situation which he had suffered to grow up in the Deccan, Aurangzíb saw that the time had come for decisive action. He had by this time come to terms with the Rájputs of Udaipúr[1], and abandoned a vain attempt to subdue the irrepressible tribes of Afghánistán; and, though in neither case could he feel satisfied with the makeshifts he had been obliged to adopt, he felt himself free for a while to dismiss Rájput and Afghán affairs from his mind, and to take the Deccan imbroglio into his own hand. At the close of 1681, Aurangzíb arrived at Burhánpúr, and took
- ↑ See above, p. 141.
