Part 20 (2/2)

It was from Kabul that he went on a visit to his cousins, the Princes of Herat. Here, for the first time, he learnt what luxury meant, for Herat was the home of culture and of ease. At first he is somewhat shocked. There are so many things ”contrary to the inst.i.tutions of Chengiz Khan”--that sacred rule from which his family never deviated.

Then he began to meditate that after all ”Chengiz had no divine authority,” and that if a ”father has done wrong, the son should change it for what is right.”

From this to doing at Rome what Rome did is but a step; and yet it seems as if he had kept his vow of drinking no wine sacred while at Herat. Pity he did not keep it so always.

It was in returning to Kabul by the mountains from his twenty days'

visit to the most charming ”city in the whole habitable world,” that Babar met with the following adventure which shows him at his best. He and his army were lost in the snow, and ”met with such suffering and hards.h.i.+p, as I have scarcely endured at any other time of my life.”

The poem about it which he sat down to write has not survived, but Babar's prose is sufficient for most things.

”For about a week we went on trampling down the snow. I helped with Kasim Beg, and his sons, and a few servants. Each step we sank to the waist, or the breast; but still we went on. After a few paces a man became exhausted, and another took his place. Then we dragged forward a horse without a rider. The horse sank to the stirrups and girths, and after advancing ten or fifteen paces, was worn out and replaced by another. It was no time for using authority. Every one who has spirit does his best at such times, and those who have none are not worth thinking about.

”In three or four days we reached a cave at the foot of the Yerrin pa.s.s. That day the storm was terrible, and the snow fell so heavily, we all expected to die together. When we reached the cave the storm was at its worst. We halted at the mouth. It seemed small, so I took a hoe and, clearing away the snow, made a resting-place for myself about as big as a prayer-carpet, and found a shelter from the wind in it.

Some were for my going into the cave, but I would not. I felt that for me to be within in comparative comfort while my soldiers were in snow and drift would be inconsistent with that fellows.h.i.+p and suffering which was their due. So, remembering the proverb, 'Death in the company of friends is a feast,' I continued to sit in the drift. By bedtime prayers 4 inches of snow had settled on my head and lips and ears.”

The description is excellent, and gives a delightful background to the quaint comment with which it finishes: ”_N.B_.--That night I caught a cold in my ear.”

Then once again the haunting dream of Samarkhund, the desire to possess the throne of his ancestor Timur, came to obsess him, and bring disaster. He gained the throne once more, only yet once more to lose it. Whether by his own fault, or because Fortune's wheel had turned for the time, we know not. The Autobiography is silent.

All we know is that in A.D. 1519--that is, when he was thirty-six years of age--he finally gave up the thought of Samarkhund, and turned his eyes to India.

Timur had conquered it; why should not he?

THE GREAT MOGHULS

BABAR, EMPEROR OF INDIA

A.D. 1519 TO A.D. 1530

These eleven years are all that India really can claim of Babar's life; yet ever since the day when, after a fatal battle in 1503, he had taken refuge in a shepherd's hut on the Kuh-i-Suliman hills, and (as he sate eating burnt bread like another Alfred, and looking out to where in the dim distance the wide plain of Hindustan rose up like a sea ending the vast vista of mountains) an old woman, ragged, decrepid, had told him tales of her youth when the earth trembled under Timur--ever since then the idea of India had been part and parcel of his adventurous mind.

To do as his great ancestor had done; that became his ambition. At thirty-six he tried to make that ambition a reality.

How the last twelve years from A.D. 1507 had pa.s.sed, we have no record. The Memoirs are silent, the Diary has ceased to be written.

Why, it is impossible to say. Perhaps Babar felt his life too tame and commonplace for record, especially after his melodramatic youth.

We left, therefore, a young man of four-and-twenty, inclined to be shocked at a wine party, we find him again a man of thirty-six and an inveterate toper. Anything and everything is an excuse for the wine-cup. ”Looking down from my tent on the valley below, the watch-fires were marvellously beautiful; that must be the reason, I think, why I drank too much wine at dinner that evening.” For Babar is still translucently frank. ”I was miserably drunk,” is an oft confession, and he does not hesitate to record the fact that he and his companions ”sate drinking wine on the hill behind the water-run till evening prayers; when we went to Tardi-Beg's house and drank till midnight--it was a wonderfully amusing and guileless party.”

It was the vice of his age. He had resisted it apparently until he was six-and-twenty, and he had every intention of giving it up at a stated time, for he writes in 1521: ”As I intended to abstain from wine at the age of forty, and as I now wanted somewhat less than a year of that age, I therefore drank copiously.”

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