[661] In the Turkī text this saying is in Persian; in the Kehr-Ilminsky, in Turkī, as though it had gone over with its Persian context of the W.-i-B. from which the K.-I. text here is believed to be a translation.
[662] Cf. f. 96b and Fr. Map for route over the Kīndīr-tau.
[663] This account of Muḥ. Bāqir reads like one given later to Bābur; he may have had some part in Bābur’s rescue (cf. Translator’s Note to f. 118b).
[664] Perhaps reeds for a raft. Sh. N. p. 258, Sāl aūchūn bār qāmīsh, reeds are there also for rafts.
[665] Here the Turkī text breaks off, as it might through loss of pages, causing a blank of narrative extending over some 16 months. Cf. App. D. for a passage, supposedly spurious, found with the Ḥaidarābād Codex and the Kehr-Ilminsky text, purporting to tell how Bābur was rescued from the risk in which the lacuna here leaves him.
[666] As in the Farghāna Section, so here, reliance is on the Elphinstone and Ḥaidarābād MSS. The Kehr-Ilminsky text still appears to be a retranslation from the Wāqi‘āt-i-bāburī and verbally departs much from the true text; moreover, in this Section it has been helped out, where its archetype was illegible or has lost fragmentary passages, from the Leyden and Erskine Memoirs. It may be mentioned, as between the First and the Second Wāqi‘āt-i-bāburī, that several obscure passages in this Section are more explicit in the First (Pāyanda-ḥasan’s) than in its successor (‘Abdu-r-raḥīm’s).
[667] Elph. MS. f. 90b; W.-i-B. I.O. 215, f. 96b and 217, f. 79; Mems. p. 127. “In 1504 AD. Ferdinand the Catholic drove the French out of Naples” (Erskine). In England, Henry VII was pushing forward a commercial treaty, the Intercursus malus, with the Flemings and growing in wealth by the exactions of Empson and Dudley.
[668] presumably the pastures of the “Ilak” Valley. The route from Sūkh would be over the ‘Alā‘u’d-dīn-pass, into the Qīzīl-sū valley, down to Āb-i-garm and on to the Aīlāq-valley, Khwāja ‘Imād, the Kāfirnigān, Qabādīān, and Aūbāj on the Amū. See T.R. p. 175 and Farghāna Section, p. 184, as to the character of the journey.
[669] Amongst the Turkī tribes, the time of first applying the razor to the face is celebrated by a great entertainment. Bābur’s miserable circumstances would not admit of this (Erskine).
The text is ambiguous here, reading either that Sūkh was left or that Aīlāq-yīlāq was reached in Muḥarram. As the birthday was on the 8th, the journey very arduous and, for a party mostly on foot, slow, it seems safest to suppose that the start was made from Sūkh at the end of 909 AH. and not in Muḥarram, 910 AH.