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468
HINDUSTAN
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Mahdl Khvvaja, Muhammad SI. Mlrza, Adil Sultan, and the whole of the left, namely, SI. Junaid, Shah Mir Husain, Qutluqqadam, and with them also sent Abdu'1-lah and Kitta Beg (of the centre). They crossed from our side of the water at the Mid-day Prayer, and between the Afternoon and the Evening Prayers bestirred themselves from the other bank. Biban having crossed the water on pretext of this movement, ran away. {April 2nd) At day-break they came upon the enemy ;' he nade as if coming out in a sort of array, but our men closed with his at once, overcame them, hustled them off, pursued and unhorsed them till they were opposite Ibrahim's own camp. Hatim Khan was one .of those unhorsed, who was Daud Khan (Lt'tdzys elder brother and one of his commanders. Our men brought him in when they waited on me. They brought also 60-70 prisoners and 6 or 7 elephants. Most of the prisoners, by way of warning, were made to reaxh their death-doom.
(t. Preparations for battled)
While we were marching on in array of right, left and centre, the army was numbered;2 it did not count up to what had been estimated.
At our next camp it was ordered that every man in the army should collect carts, each one according to his circumstances. Seven hundred carts {araba) were brought3 in. The order given
1 fari-wagti, when there is light enough to distinguish one object from another.
2 dim kitruldi (Index s.u. dim). Here the L. & E. Memoirs inserts an explanatory passage in Persian about the dim. It will have been in one of the IVaqi'al-i-babtiri AfSS. Erskine used ; it is in Muh. S/iirdzi's lithograph copy of the Udaipiir Codex (p. 173). It is not in the TurkI text or in all the MSS. of the Persian translation. Manifestly, it was entered at a time when Babur's term dim kiiru/di requires explanation in Hindustan. The writer of it himself does not make details clear; he says only, "It is manifest that people declare (the number) after counting the mounted army in the way agreed upon amongst them, with a whip or a bow held in the hand." This explanation suggests that in the march-past the troops were measured off as so many bow- or whip-lengths (Index s.ti. dim).
3 These araba may have been the baggage-carts of the army and also carts procured on the spot. Erskine omits {Memoirs p. 304) the words which show how many carts were collected and from whom. Doubtless it would be through not having these circumstances in his mind that he took the araba for gun-carriages. His incomplete translation, again, led Stanley Lane-Poole to write an interesting note in his Babur (p. 161) to support Erskine against de Courteille (with whose rendering mine agrees) by quoting the circumstance that Humayiin had 700 guns at Qanauj in 1540 Ai». K must be said in opposition to his support of Erskine's "gun-carriages" that there is no textual or circumstantial warrant for supposing Babur to have had guns, even it
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