154 DESTINY DISRUPTED
The Mongol Invasions of the Islamic World
horrors, roughly the same statistics for the casualties. The two historians
could not have known each other, and they were writing more or less si-
multaneously, so neither one could have used the other as his source. Both
then were recounting what was in the air, what people were saying from
Delhi to Baghdad.
When the Mongols attacked Persia, they destroyed, among other
things, the qanat, ancient underground canal works that were, to an agri-
cultural society in a riverless land, life's blood itself. Some of the qanats
were destroyed outright and some filled up with sand and vanished just as
surely as if they had been deliberately destroyed because no one was left
to repair them. When the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote a de-
scription of western Iran, northern Afghanistan, and the republics north
of the Oxus River a few years before the Mongol invasion, he described a
fertile, flourishing province. A few years after the invasion, it was a desert.
It still is.
Chengez did not live to carry out all the destruction wrought by the
Mongols. He died in 624 AH (1227 CE), but after his death his empire