"He is out of joint with life," said his mother, weeping.
Old Isân-daulet sniffed. "Try him with a pretty girl," she suggested.
The Khânum shook her head. "He is not that sort--he will not even marry and that is nigh shameless--since he is one and twenty, yet without a child. 'Tis hard indeed on a woman of my age to have no grandchild."
"Except Dearest-One's boy," said the old woman, her stern face softening. "Lo! perfidious barbarian though the father be, I should like to see the child. It should have the makings in it of a man--from its mother." And she was silent for awhile; perhaps she was thinking of that night in Samarkand when a girl had waited patiently for worse than death. Then she spoke:
"See you, daughter! Your boy is not all King, no more than he is all my grandson. He hath material for half-a-dozen different persons in him and he hath not yet made choice of which to take. Lo!--mayhap--I have had too big a hand in the pease-porridge. Let be a bit. Let him do as he likes for a while and if that be to leave us for the time--so be it. Hurry not God's work."
It was wise advice. None wiser. So for two whole years, the King was King-errant indeed. Even whither he went none know. Most likely he fulfilled his boyhood's desire to see China; but this much is certain. He and a few intimate friends, not half-a-dozen at most, wandered for months and months. Over the White Mountains likely, amid eternal snows, across the high lying steppes to Kashgâr, and so onwards.
Or perhaps from Tashkend he may have wandered over high plateaux and past wide lakes to the Great Tian-Shan mountains. But either way, from some high peak, he must have caught one glimpse at least of a sight never to be forgotten. The sight of the wide plain of Eastern Turkhestân lying like a lake of pale amber beneath an encircling rim of snowy pearls, that change to rubies in the sunset. Marvellous indeed! All around the everlasting hills contemptuous of man and his finite work, glittering icily on that ever-present haze of dust, which effaced alike, the sand of the central desert, and the faint fringe of cultivation on the skirts of the hills. Over a thousand feet of golden dust-pall covering the corpses of the six sand-buried cities of Khotân!
Buried when, and how? And wherefore, in God's name, did humanity found its houses on the Moving Sands?
Fine stimulation here, for the imagination of a poet born.
Babar must have sat and looked, sat and learnt from the slow invincible march of the sand waves piled by the desert winds, something of the strength of patience. Slow and sure. Under the gentle call of a summer breeze, mayhap, one sand atom shifting place; then another and another. But in the end, a high-piled wave, ready to fall over and engulf what lay beyond, when the whistle of the winter winds rang over the wastes, rousing the hidden devil in those harmless sand grains, to whirls of death.