[2345] If then, as now, Scorpio’s appearance were expected in Oct.-Nov., the Aūzbegs had greatly over-estimated their power to check T̤ahmāsp’s movements; but it seems fairly clear that they expected Scorpio to follow Virgo in Sept.-Oct. according to the ancient view of the Zodiacal Signs which allotted two houses to the large Scorpio and, if it admitted Libra at all, placed it between Scorpio’s claws (Virgil’s Georgics i, 32 and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ii, 195.—H. B.).
[2346] It would appear that the Aūzbegs, after hearing that T̤ahmāsp was encamped at Rādagān, expected to interpose themselves in his way at Mashhad and to get their 20,000 to Rādagān before he broke camp. T̤āhmāsp’s swiftness spoiled their plan; he will have stayed at Rādagān a short time only, perhaps till he had further news of the Aūzbegs, perhaps also for commissariat purposes and to rest his force. He visited the shrine of Imām Reza, and had reached Jām in time to confront his adversaries as they came down to it from Zawarābād (Pilgrims'-town).
[2347] or, Khirjard, as many MSS. have it. It seems to be a hamlet or suburb of Jām. The ‘Ālam-ārāī (lith. ed. p. 40) writes Khusrau-jard-i-Jām (the Khusrau-throne of Jām), perhaps rhetorically. The hamlet is Maulānā ‘Abdu’r-raḥmān Jāmī’s birthplace (Daulat Shāh’s Taẕkirat, E. G. Browne’s ed. p. 483). Jām now appears on maps as Turbat-i-Shaikh Jāmī, the tomb (turbat) being that of the saintly ancestor of Akbar’s mother Ḥamīda-bānū.
[2348] The ‘Ālam-ārāī (lith. ed. p. 31) says, but in grandiose language, that ‘Ubaid Khān placed at the foot of his standard 40 of the most eminent men of Transoxania who prayed for his success, but that as his cause was not good, their supplications were turned backwards, and that all were slain where they had prayed.
[2349] Here the 1st Pers. trs. (I.O. 215 f. 214) mentions that it was Chalma who wrote and despatched the exact particulars of the defeat of the Aūzbegs. This information explains the presumption Bābur expresses. It shows that Chalma was in Ḥiṣār where he may have written his letter to give news to Humāyūn. At the time Bīān Shaikh left, the Mīrzā was near Kishm; if he had been the enterprising man he was not, one would surmise that he had moved to seize the chance of the sult̤āns’ abandonment of Ḥiṣār, without waiting for his father’s urgency (f. 348b). Whether he had done so and was the cause of the sult̤āns’ flight, is not known from any chronicle yet come to our hands. Chalma’s father Ibrāhīm Jānī died fighting for Bābur against Shaibāq Khān in 906 AH. (f. 90b).
As the sense of the name-of-office Chalma is still in doubt, I suggest that it may be an equivalent of aftābachī, bearer of the water-bottle on journeys. T. chalma can mean a water-vessel carried on the saddle-bow; one Chalma on record was a safarchī; if, in this word, safar be read to mean journey, an approach is made to aftābachī (fol. 15b and note; Blochmann’s A.-i-A. p. 378 and n. 3).
[2350] The copies of Bābur’s Turkī letter to Humāyūn and the later one to Khwāja Kalān (f. 359) are in some MSS. of the Persian text translated only (I.O. 215 f. 214); in others appear in Turkī only (I.O. 217 f. 240); in others appear in Turkī and Persian (B. M. Add. 26,000 and I.O. 2989); while in Muḥ. Shīrāzī’s lith. ed. they are omitted altogether (p. 228).
[2351] Trans- and Cis-Hindukush. Pāyanda-ḥasan (in one of his useful glosses to the 1st Pers. trs.) amplifies here by “Khurāsān, Mā warā’u’n-nahr and Kābul”.
[2352] The words Bābur gives as mispronunciations are somewhat uncertain in sense; manifestly both are of ill-omen:—Al-amān itself [of which the alāmā of the Ḥai. MS. and Ilminsky maybe an abbreviation,] is the cry of the vanquished, “Quarter! mercy!”; Aīlāmān and also ālāman can represent a Turkmān raider.
[2353] Presumably amongst Tīmūrids.