"For what?" gloomed Babar--"to get back Âkshi and lose Andijân or get Andijân and lose Âkshi? 'Tis all one in the end."
"Not the fine fighting, child!" replied the old lady craftily. "That is the same, be it in Gehannum or Bihisht." (Hell or Heaven.)
That was undoubtedly true; and there was no good to be gained by rambling from hill to hill as he had been doing.
So, once more, the young adventurer gathered together a very scanty band of followers; for old Kâsim Beg, who till then had never left him, had come to words with Isân-daulet over these same Moghuls, and refused to accompany him.
"I say not, sire," remonstrated the wise old soldier, "that these men are bad soldiers for me; but they are for the Most Exalted, who has ideas of discipline. Besides, I care not to risk my own neck for a chance. In obedience to the Most Exalted's commands I beheaded quite a number of these men in the last campaign, for marauding. Wherefore, therefore, should I go amongst their mourning relatives? I will come if there be fighting. Then there is no leisure and little desire for private revenge; blood can be let anywhere and one corpse is as good as another."
So Kâsim went with his immediate adherents towards Hissâr; and Babar set off to Tashkend with rather a heavy heart. In a somewhat didactic mood also, for resting for a day or two beside a spring in the lower hills, he caused a verse to be inscribed on a stone slab which formed one side of the well where the water gushed in from the hill above, to disappear into the earth when it had run through a masonry trough.
"Many a man has rested and has drunk
Thy water, and like thee, O spring, has sunk
Swift to a grave where he lies all forgot,
Conqueror or vanquished, libertine or monk."
He was not, however, at home in the rubâi, as he had not, at that time, studied with much attention the style and phraseology of poetry.
Indeed, one of his first actions on reaching Tashkend was to submit some of his compositions to the Khân who had pretensions to taste, and who, moreover, wrote verses himself; though his odes, to be sure, were rather deficient in manner and substance. The younger poetaster, however, did not get either explicit or satisfactory criticism, and came to the conclusion that his uncle had no great skill in poetic diction. He did not know, for instance, that in the Turkhi language it was allowable, by poetic licence, to interchange certain letters for the sake of the rhyme.
"He will think thee a nincompoop," stormed Isân-daulet. "Why did'st not show him thy sword play?"