It had been well for these Slave kings had no other record survived of them than those which they have left in stone and marble. Great builders and mighty warriors they were in the cause of Allah and his Prophet, but their depravity was only exceeded by their cruelty. The story of the whole dynasty is a long-drawn tale of horrors until the wretched Kaikobad, having turned Delhi for a short three years into a house of ill-fame, was dragged out of his bed and flung into the Jumna, his infant child murdered, and the house of Khilji set up where the Slave kings had reigned. It was the second of these Khilji princes, Ala-ud-Din, who built, alongside of Kutub-ed-Din's mosque, the Alai Darwazah, the monumental gateway which is not only an exceptionally beautiful specimen of external polychromatic decoration, but, to quote Fergusson, "displays the Pathan style at its period of greatest perfection, when the Hindu masons had learned to fit their exquisite style of ornamentation to the forms of their foreign masters." Yet the atrocities of his twenty years' reign, which was one of almost unbroken conquest and plunder, wellnigh surpass those of the Slave kings. He had seized the throne by murdering his old uncle in the act of clasping his hand, and his own death was, it is said, hastened by poison administered to him by his favourite eunuch and trusted lieutenant, K[=a]fur, who had ministered to his most ignoble passions. To the Khiljis succeeded the Tughluks, and the white marble dome of Tughluk Shah's tomb still stands out conspicuous beyond the broken line of grim grey walls which were once Tughlukabad. The Khiljis had been overthrown, but the curse of a Mahomedan saint, Sidi Dervish, whose fame has endured to the present day, still rested upon the Delhi in which they had dwelt. So Mahomed Tughluk built unto himself a new and stronger city, but he did nothing else to avert the curse. Indeed, he invented a form of man-hunt which for sheer devilish cruelty has been only once matched in the West by the _cani del duca_ when the crazy Gian Maria ruled in Milan. Well may his milder successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital. Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and lavish charities. The record he kept of them is not without a certain naïve pathos: