[845] Perhaps, no conifers; perhaps none of those of the contrasted hill-tract.
[846] While here dasht (plain) represents the eastern skirt of the Mehtar Sulaimān range, dūkī or dūgī (desert) seems to stand for the hill tracts on the west of it, and not, as on f. 152, for the place there specified.
[847] Mems. p. 152, “A narrow place is large to the narrow-minded”; Méms. i, 311, “Ce qui n’est pas trop large, ne reste pas vide.” Literally, “So long as heights are not equal, there is no vis-a-vis,” or, if tāng be read for tīng, “No dawn, no noon,” i.e. no effect without a cause.
[848] I have not lighted on this name in botanical books or explained by dictionaries. Perhaps it is a Cis-oxanian name for the sax-aol of Transoxania. As its uses are enumerated by some travellers, it might be Haloxylon ammodendron, ta-ghas etc. and sax-aol (Aitchison, p. 102).
[849] f. 135b note to Ghūr-bund.
[850] I understand that wild-goats, wild-sheep and deer (āhū) were not localized, but that the dun-sheep migrated through. Antelope (āhū) was scarce in Elphinstone’s time.
[851] qīzīl kīyik which, taken with its alternative name, arqārghalcha, allows it to be the dun-sheep of Wood’s Journey p. 241. From its second name it may be Ovis amnon (Raos), or O. argalī.
[852] tusqāwal, var. tutqāwal, tus̱aqāwal and tūshqāwal, a word which has given trouble to scribes and translators. As a sporting-term it is equivalent to shikār-i-nihilam; in one or other of its forms I find it explained as Weg-hüter, Fahnen-hüter, Zahl-meister, Schlucht, Gefahrlicher-weg and Schmaler-weg. It recurs in the B.N. on f. 197b l. 5 and l. 6 and there might mean either a narrow road or a Weg-hüter. If its Turkī root be tūs, the act of stopping, all the above meanings can follow, but there may be two separate roots, the second, tūsh, the act of descent (JRAS 1900 p. 137, H. Beveridge’s art. On the word nihilam).
[853] qūshlīk, aītlīk. Elphinstone writes (i, 191) of the excellent greyhounds and hawking birds of the region; here the bird may be the charkh, which works with the dogs, fastening on the head of the game (Von Schwarz, p. 117, for the same use of eagles).
[854] An antelope resembling the usual one of Hindūstān is common south of Ghaznī (Vigne, p. 110); what is not found may be some classes of wild-sheep, frequent further north, at higher elevation, and in places more familiar to Bābur.