(31) Account of the governor of ‘Alabur and of his death in battle. The governor of ‘Alabur was the Abyssinian Badr, a slave of the Sultan’s, a man of the kind whose bravery becomes proverbial. He was continually making raids on the infidels alone and single handed, killing and taking captives, so that his fame spread far and wide and the infidels went in fear of him. He was tall and corpulent, and used to eat a whole sheep at a meal, and I was told that after eating he would drink about a pound and a half of ghee, following the custom of the Abyssinians in their own country. He had a son nearly as brave as himself.
[787] It happened that he raided a village of the infidels on one occasion with a company of his slaves and his horse fell with him into a matamore. The villagers gathered around him and one of them struck him with a qattara, which is a piece of iron resembling a ploughshare into which a man inserts his hand (32) so that it covers his forearm leaving a projection two cubits in length.(1) A blow with this is mortal, so he killed Badr with that blow. His slaves put up a vigorous fight, took possession of the village, killed its men, seized its women and everything in it, and got the horse out of the matamore safe and sound and brought it to his son. By a strange coincidence he was mounted on that same horse and had set out for Dihli when the infidels came out against him; he fought with them until he was killed and the horse returned to his companions who handed it over to his household. Later on a brother-in-law of his was riding the same horse when the infidels killed him on it also.
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)1) Urdu katar, defined as ‘a dagger having a broad straight blade, the hilt of which comes up on either side of the wrist, while it is grasped by a crossbar in the centre’ (S. W. Fallon, A New Hindustani-English Dictionary, Banaras, 1879, 2 vols).