"The Moguls have proved little different from other martial races that controlled the north in millennia past, which is to say that the weapons and tactics that served them well in the plains and deserts proved ineffective in breaching the mountain-wall of Satpura. But unlike some who have been content simply to make the Narmada their southern border, they have nursed the ambition of making all Hindoostan a part of the dar al-Islam and so probed southwards via the only route that is passable: which happens to be the very road that we are treading on now. Coastal cities such as Broach on the Narmada and Surat on the Tapti they have conquered with ease, and, with a great deal of difficulty, retained. But south of Surat, the interior of Hindoostan is guarded from the western sea by a formidable range of mountains, the Ghats, which are ever a refuge into which the Hindoo resistance—the Marathas—may withdraw when they desire not to meet the Moguls in pitched battle in the plain. Likewise the Satpura Range is mottled with strongholds of the Marathas, even as far west as the Rajpipla Hills. From time to time the Moguls will venture up there and expel them, for those Hills, because of their situation, are like a blade against the throat of the Moguls’ commerce; all Western trade, as you know, comes in to the ports of Daman, Surat, and Broach, and the Maratha chieftains well know that they may sever those ports’ links to the north by issuing from their forts in the Rajpipla Hills and descending the Ravines of Dh¯aroli to the Broach Plain—which is where we are now—and catching the caravans when they are backed against the River Narmada. Surat is infested with their sympathizers, and you may be assured that their spies saw us mustering there, and preceded us along this road and have already sent them word of our movements."