History of the Parsis : including their manners, customs, religion and present position : with coloured and other illustrations : in two volumes

CHAP, I.] FLIIGHT FROM SANJAN. 47

against the Parsis. The two armies joined in battle ; the carnage on both sides was great, and blood flowed in torrents. Fortune did not favour the allies on this occasion. A dart struck the Parsi leader, who fell headlong from his saddle, and, as is the case with all Oriental nations, the army, having lost its chief, hesitated and gave way, and was completely routed by the enemy. The Hindu prince is also said to have fallen in this battle. Alp Khan was now master of Sanjan, and the Parsis soon found it impossible to call that place any longer their home.?

After the overthrow of the Hindu government the Parsis suffered many wrongs at the hands of the Mahomedan troops, and in consequence the greater part of them fled to the mountains of Bahrut,? about eloht miles east of Sanjan, taking with them the sacred fire which they had consecrated at the latter place. Here, however, they did not remain long. According to the Kissah-i-Sanjan, the fugitives, after a sojourn of twelve years, quitted this mountainous district, and, still carrying their sacred fire, went to a place called Bansda, about fifty miles north-east of Navsari, where a few Parsi families had already settled, and

7 In the year 1839, when the great Bombay missionary, Dr. John Wilson, visited Sanjan, he found only one or two Parsi families there, but not a single Parsi is residing there at the present day, and the ruins of a “dokhma ” or tower of silence for the dead are now the only monument that exists of Parsi settlement in that place.

2 A cave is still shown in the mountain in which the sacred fire was kept.