road the few men who went with Ahmad to Tashkint (f. 103) may have been augmented to the force, enumerated as his in the battle by Muh. Salih (Sh. N. cap. un.).
When The Khans were captured, Babur escaped and made 'for Mughulistan," a vague direction seeming here to mean Tashkint, but, finding his road blocked, in obedience to orders from Shaibaq that he and Abu'l-makaram were to be captured, he turned back and, by unfrequented ways, went into the hillcountry of Sukh and Hushiar. There he spent about a year in great misery (f. 14 and H. S. ii, 318). Of the wretchedness of the time Haidar also writes. If anything was attempted in Farghana in the course of those months, record of it has been lost with Babur's missing pages. He was not only homeless and poor, but shut in by enemies. Only the loyalty or kindness of the hill-tribes can have saved him and his few followers. His mother was with him; so also were the families of his men. How Qiitluq-nigar contrived to join him from Tashkint, though historically a small matter, is one he would chronicle. What had happened there after the Mughul defeat, was that the horde had marched away for Kashghar while Shah Begim remained in charge of her daughters with whom the Aiizbeg chiefs intended to contract alliance. Shaibani's orders for her stay and for the general exodus were communicated to her by her son, The Khan, in what Muh. Salih, quoting its purport, describes as a right beautiful letter (p. 296).
By some means Qiitluq-nigar joined Babur, perhaps helped by the circumstance that her daughter, Khan-zada was Shaibaq's wife. She spent at least some part of those hard months with him, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. A move becoming imperative, the ragged and destitute company started in mid-June 1504 (Muh. 910 ah.) on that perilous mountain journey to which Haidar applies the Prophet's dictum, ' Travel is a foretaste of Hell,' but of which the end was the establishment of a Timurid dynasty in Hindustan. To look down the years from the destitute Babur to Akbar, Shah-jahan and Aurangzib is to see a great stream of human life flow from its source in his resolve to win upward, his quenchless courage and his abounding vitality. Not yet 22,
