India Through the Ages Part 20

He came so near death, indeed, that some of his followers, despairing of life, shifted 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 saintship. 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.

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 hardship, 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 fellowship 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."