And then his followers! Some two hundred in all; mostly on foot with brogues to them: blanket frocks over their shoulders; clubs in their hands. A miserable court, indeed, for a Prince of the Blood Royal!
Yet the sense of Kingship rose stronger than ever in the young mind.
"Yea! I will be shaven!" he said, magisterially, and summoned the court barber. He came running barefoot with a tin basin.
"There should be ceremonials and entertainments," said the Khânum, his mother, plaintively. "Even at my brothers' first shavings there were ever illuminations and feastings, and thou art King; but what will you, here in the wilderness?"
Babar laughed. "One King is as like another King as split peas, when there is lather to his face, motherling; so quick, barber, image me to Sulaiman-the-Wise, or Haroun-ul-Raschid. Lo! I could be Emperor as well as they, were fate but kind."
So, out in the June sunshine, the young man sat while the white lather foamed up into his eyes and made them smart.
"Have a care! slave," he said sharply. "Lo! I shall see things cloudy--and I would fain see clear."
See clear! Aye! that was what he wanted. The past was leaving him--with his beard! He had made up his mind to that. Never again would he quarrel possession of that sweet valley on the extreme limits of the habitable world. He would go farther afield; how far depended--On what? On himself chiefly. So for the present he was on his way to Khorasân, the centre of civilisation.
Ay! Bare feet and blanket frocks were well enough in boyhood; but when a man came to his own there were other Kingships to be fought for besides those which involved a temporal throne. There was Kingship in thought, Kingship in Art; a dozen or more Kingships ready to be gripped.
The razor sweeping backwards and forwards, seemed to be shaving away all the disappointments of his past life; he leapt to his feet when the business was over and stretched his strong young arms out as if to embrace the whole world.