It is necessary to say something further about the position of the suburbs in the 15th century. Bābur quotes as especially suitable to Akhsī, the proverbial questions, ‘Where is the village?'[2754] (qy. Akhsī-kīnt.) ‘Where are the trees?’ and these might be asked by some-one in the suburbs unable to see Akhsī or vice versâ. But granting that there were no suburbs within two miles of the town, why had the whole inner circle, two miles of Yāqūt’s four, gone out of cultivation? Erosion would have affected only land between the river and the town.
Again;—if the Sīr only were working in the 15th century to destroy a town standing on the Kāsān-water, how is it that this stream does not yet reach the Sīr?
Various ingatherings of information create the impression that failure of Kāsān-water has been the dominant factor in the loss of the Akhsī township. Such failure might be due to the general desiccation of Central Asia and also to increase of cultivation in the Kāsān-valley itself. There may have been erosion, and social and military change may have had its part, but for the loss of the oasis lands and for, as a sequel, the decay of the town, desiccation seems a sufficient cause.
The Kāsān-water still supports an oasis on its riverain slope, the large Aūzbeg town of Tūpa-qūrghān (Town-of-the-hill), from the modern castle of which a superb view is had up the Kāsān-valley, now thickly studded with villages.[2755]
B.—THE BIRDS, QĪL QŪYIRŪGH AND BĀGHRĪ QARĀ.
Describing a small bird (qūsh-qīna), abundant in the Qarshī district (f. 49b), Bābur names it the qīl-qūyirūgh, horse-tail, and says it resembles the bāghrī qarā.
Later on he writes (f. 280) that the bāghrī qarā of India is smaller and more slender than ‘those’ i.e. of Transoxiana (f. 49b, n. 1), the blackness of its breast less deep, and its cry less piercing.
We have had difficulty in identifying the birds but at length conclude that the bāghrī qarā of Transoxiana is Pterocles arenarius, Pallas’s black-bellied sand-grouse and that the Indian one is a smaller sand-grouse, perhaps a Syrrhaptes. As the qīl qūyirūgh resembles the other two, it may be a yet smaller Syrrhaptes.