But, after a month or forty days, the little Glory of Womanhood went to share the Mercy of God.
She was his first child, and at the time he was just nineteen.
CHAPTER VIII
A Moment's Halt--a momentary taste
Of Being, from the Well amid the Waste,
And lo!--the phantom Caravan has reached
The Nothing it set out from.
Omar Khayyam.
Fate had called a halt in Babar's life. A court had once more gathered round him, and, as King of Samarkand, a city of colleges and culture, this was of different stamp from that of Andijân. It occupied itself with other things than the edge of a sword-blade or the merits of a polo-ball.
"Lo!" said Mulla Binâi the poet, his voice lubricated with artificial adulation to extreme oiliness, "I have at last found fitting memorial for the magnificent victory of the King in these poor words:
"'Tell me, my soul, the conquering day
Fateh Babar Bahadur,' I say."
The horrid doggerel, with its inlay of numerical letters giving the date of Babar's surprise of Samarkand, was allowed to pass muster in that crowd of flattering courtiers.
Only Kâsim Beg, bluff as he had been from the beginning, said, smartly: