[805] Are we to infer from this that the musk-rat (Crocidura cœrulea, Lydekker, p. 626) was not so common in Hindūstān in the age of Bābur as it has now become? He was not a careless observer (Erskine).
[806] Index s.n. Bābur-nāma, date of composition; also f. 131.
[807] In the absence of examples of bund to mean kūtal, and the presence “in those countries” of many in which bund means koh, it looks as though a clerical error had here written kūtal for koh. But on the other hand, the wording of the next passage shows just the confusion an author’s unrevised draft might shew if a place were, as this is, both a tūmān and a kūtal (i.e. a steady rise to a traverse). My impression is that the name Ghūr-bund applies to the embanking spur at the head of the valley-tūmān, across which roads lead to Ghūrī and Ghūr (PRGS 1879, Maps; Leech’s Report VII; and Wood’s VI).
[808] So too when, because of them, Leech and Lord turned back, re infectâ.
[809] It will be noticed that these villages are not classed in any tūmān; they include places “rich without parallel” in agricultural products, and level lands on which towns have risen and fallen, one being Alexandria ad Caucasum. They cannot have been part of the unremunerative Ghūr-bund tūmān; from their place of mention in Bābur’s list of tūmāns, they may have been part of the Kābul tūmān (f. 178), as was Koh-dāman (Burnes’ Cabool p. 154; Haughton’s Charikar p. 73; and Cunningham’s Ancient History, i, 18).
[810] Dūr-namāī, seen from afar (Masson, iii, 152) is not marked on the Survey Maps; Masson, Vigne and Haughton locate it. Bābur’s “head” and “foot” here indicate status and not location.
[811] Mems. p. 146 and Méms, i, 297, Arabs’ encampment and Cellule des Arabes. Perhaps the name may refer to uses of the level land and good pasture by horse qāfilas, since Kurra is written with tashdīd in the Ḥaidarābād Codex, as in kurra-tāz, a horse-breaker. Or the tāziyān may be the fruit of a legend, commonly told, that the saint of the neighbouring Running-sands was an Arabian.
[812] Presumably this is the grass of the millet, the growth before the ear, on which grazing is allowed (Elphinstone, i, 400; Burnes, p. 237).
[813] Wood, p. 115; Masson, iii, 167; Burnes, p. 157 and JASB 1838 p. 324 with illustration; Vigne, pp. 219, 223; Lord, JASB 1838 p. 537; Cathay and the way thither, Hakluyt Society vol. I. p. xx, para. 49; History of Musical Sands, C. Carus-Wilson.
[814] West might be more exact, since some of the group are a little north, others a little south of the latitude of Kābul.