Part 20 (1/2)

He came so near death, indeed, that some of his followers, despairing of life, s.h.i.+fted for themselves, and brought the news of his demise to Ferghana. Thus when the young king came back to consciousness, it was to find himself without a kingdom; for his friends, believing him dead, had surrendered.

”Thus for the sake of Ferghana I had given up Samarkhund, and now found I had lost the one without securing the other.”

Such is his philosophical comment. But Babar's remarks are always inimitable. When they hanged his envoy over the gate of the citadel, he sets down his instant belief that ”without doubt Khwaja Kazi was a saint: he was a wonderfully brave man--which is no mean proof of saints.h.i.+p. Other men, brave as they may be, have some nervousness or trepidation in them. The Kazi hadn't a particle of either.”

This reverse necessitated two years of wandering in the hills. He took his mother with him and his old grandmother, giving them the best shelter he could find. And wherever he wandered, he himself was always cheerful, always kindly, always ready to enjoy the beauties and the gifts of Nature; especially ”a wonderful delicate and toothsome melon, with a mottled skin like s.h.a.green.”

Until one day, just as the sun was setting, a solitary horseman bearing a message sped up the valley towards his mountain fastness, and in less than half an hour Babar was up and away through the deepening night in response to those who loved him; and there were many of them. Indeed his capacity for winning over most men to his side is one of his most salient characteristics. He was _bon camarade_ with half his world.

An eventful ride this over hill and dale, through darkness and through light. ”We had pa.s.sed three days and three nights without rest, neither man nor horse had strength left,” when, hanging on the edge of a hill, the city of his hope showed rose-red in the dawn. Then for the first time fear came. Had he been over-hasty? What if this were a trick to decoy him and his handful of followers to their death?

But ”there was no possibility of retreat, no refuge even to which we could retreat. So, having come so far, on we must go. (Nothing happens but by G.o.d's will.)”

The trite little sentence of consolation was justified. Babar found himself once more King of Ferghana; but he promptly lost his kingdom again by attempting to make his ill-disciplined Mongolian troops make rest.i.tution to the peasantry of the loot they had taken from them.

He admits his error frankly.

”It was a senseless thing to exasperate so many men with arms in their hands. In war and in statecraft a thing may seem reasonable at first sight, but it needs to be weighed and considered in a hundred lights before it is finally decided upon. This ill-judged order of mine was, in fact, the ultimate cause of my second expulsion.”

This was in A.D. 1500, when he was seventeen years old. Still his buoyancy remained, despite his evil fortune, and for the next few months his itinerary is full of the joys of ”a capital hunting-ground, with good covers for game,” in which he coursed, and shot, and hawked, to his heart's content.

Not for long, however. Samarkhund tempted him again in the summer; but he had to retire and seek shelter in the hills once more,

”by dangerous tracks among the rocks. In the steep and narrow ways and gorges which we had to climb, many a horse and camel dropped and fell out. After four or five days we came to the col of Sir-i-Tuk. This _is_ a pa.s.s! Never did I see one so narrow and steep, or follow paths more toilsome and strait. We pressed on, nevertheless, with incredible labour, through fearful gorges and by tremendous precipices, until, after a hundred agonies and losses, at last we topped those murderous steep defiles and came down on the borders of Kan, with its lovely expanse of lake.”

When eighteen he finally managed to conquer Samarkhund, and in the same year his first child, a daughter, was born; for he had wedded his cousin Ayesha while in hiding in the hills. He called the baby ”The Glory of Womanhood,” and chronicles regretfully that ”in a month or forty days she went to partake of the Mercy of G.o.d.”

Marriage, however, appears to have roused him to no emotion, for he admits first that he had ”never conceived a pa.s.sion for any woman, and indeed had never been so placed as even to hear or witness words of love or amorous discourse”; secondly, that in the beginning of his wedded life, shyness almost overcame affection; ”and afterwards,” he adds quaintly, ”as my affection decreased my shyness increased.”

A curious record of clean-living this for an Eastern king in the very hey-day of youth.

Babar's success did not last for long. Two years after he was once more a fugitive, and this time he did not succeed in saving all his womenkind. His favourite sister, older than he was by some years, remained behind, part of the price paid for bare freedom, and entered his victorious enemy's harem. This was a bitter pill to swallow, and Babar never forgot it. This sister figures in the Memoirs of Babar's daughter, Gulbadan, as ”Dearest Lady.” She seems to have kept her brother's deep devotion to the last.

So for three long years Babar wandered once more. This is perhaps the most exciting portion of his Autobiography. It is absolutely packed full with hair's-breadth escapes, crowded in each word with human interest. We see the young king, now in the very prime of his manhood, standing stripped for his bathe in ”a stream that was frozen at the banks, but not in the middle, by reason of its swift current.” We watch him ”plunge in and dive sixteen times, but the biting chill of the water cut through me.” We follow breathlessly the vain endeavour made by him and three trusted friends to induce his frightened troops to rally: ”I was constantly turning with my three companions to keep the enemy in check, and bring them up short with our arrows; but we could not make the men stand anyhow.” We mourn with him on another occasion his ignorance that ”the hors.e.m.e.n who followed were not above twenty or twenty-five, while we were eight.” We agree with him that had he ”but known their number at first, he would 'have given them warm work.'” We share his faith in his own nimbleness in climbing a hill as the only escape from the arrows of bowmen, and we positively hold our breath in the amazing story of the Garden at Tambal, where he waited for Death, and found Life, and friends, and new hope.

This was the capture of Kabul. The kingly blood in him craved a kingdom. He felt he must have one if he died for it.

Surely never was claimant for royalty worse fitted out for the quest than was Babar! Even Prince Charlie, with his head in Flora Macdonald's lap, does not come up in forlornness with Zahir-ud-din Mahomed Babar, who gave his only tent to his mother, and whose followers, ”great and small, were more than two hundred and less than three. Most on foot with brogues to their feet, clubs in their hands, and tattered cloaks over their shoulders.” Yet a short time afterwards he finds himself, ”to my own great surprise,” at the head of quite a respectable army.

A short time, again, and he is King of Kabul; such are the amazing ups and downs of this most unfortunate, most fortunate of princes.

By this time his wife, Ayesha, had left him, giving as her reason the perfectly true plaint that he did not love her. He had, however, fallen in love with some one else; the woman who was to be the mother of his son Humayon, and of his three daughters, who were named by Babar's express wish, ”Rose-face, Rose-blush, Rose-body.” It was at Kabul that Humayon was born. At Kabul, also, Babar lost his mother, whom he helped to carry shoulder high to her grave in the Garden of the New Year, outside the city, ”the sweetest spot in all the neighbourhood.”

He remained King of Kabul until he made his first expedition to India in 1514. He gives us detailed accounts of his new kingdom. He seems to know everything that is to be known about it. The names and habits of every animal, bird, and beast, even to the fact that in stormy weather the migratory birds are stopped by the everlasting snows of the Hindu-Kush hills, and so are taken in hundreds by the bird-fowlers. He knows the place where the rarest tulips are to be found, and is unceasing in his praise of three-and-thirty different kinds, one ”yellow, double, scented like a rose.” Doubtless, the parents of that favourite in modern gardens, ”Yellow Rose.”

He knows also of the different clans and people of Kabul, their past history, their present languages. In fact, he knows all things that are possible to vivid vitality, all things that are given to friendly hand and seeing eye.