932 AH. OCT. 18th 1525 TO OCT. 8th 1526 AD. 511
The lime (B. limu, C. acidd) is another. It is very plentiful, about the size of a hen's egg, and of the same shape. If a person poisoned drink the water in which its fibres have been boiled, danger is averted.1
The citron (P. turunj2 C. medico) is another of the fruits resembling the orange. Bajaurls and Sawadls call it bdlang and hence give the name bdlang-marabba to its marmalade (marabbd) confiture. In Hindustan people call the turunj bajauri.3 There are two kinds of turunj: one is sweet, flavourless and nauseating, of no use for eating but with peel that may be good for marmalade ; it has the same sickening sweetness as the Lamghanat turunj'; the other, that of Hindustan and Bajaur, is acid, quite deliciously acid, and makes excellent sherbet, well-flavoured, and wholesome drinking. Its size may be that of the Khusrawl melon; it has a thick skin, wrinkled and uneven, with one end thinner and beaked. It is of a deeper yellow than the orange (ndranj). Its tree has no trunk, is rather low, grows in bushes, and has a larger leaf than the orange.
The sangtdra 4 is another fruit resembling the orange (naranj).
' The Elph. Codex has a note mutilated in early binding which is attested by its scribe as copied from Humayun's hand-writing, and is to the effect that once on his way from the Hot-bath, he saw people who had taken poison and restored them by giving lime-juice.
Erskine here notes that the same antidotal quality is ascribed to the citron bj Virgil :
Media fert tristes succos. tardumque saporem Felicis mali, quo non praesentius ullum, Pocula si quando saevae infecere novercae, Miscueruntque herbas et non innoxia verba, Auxilium venit, ac membris agit atra venena.
Georgics II. v. 126. Vide Heyne's note i, 438.
1 P. turunj, wrinkled, puckered ; Sans, vijapura and H. bijaura (Ayin 28), seedfilled.
3 Babur may have, confused this with H. bijaura ; so too appears to have done the writer (Humayiin?) of a [now mutilated] note in the Elph. Codex (f. 238), which seems to say that the fruit or its name went from Bajaur to Hindustan. Is the country of Bajaur so-named from its indigenous orange (vijapura, whence bijaura) ? The name occurs also north of Kangra.
* Of this name variants are numerous, santra, santhara, sam/ara, etc. Watts classes it as a C. aurantium ; Erskine makes it the common sweet orange ; Firminger, quoting Ross (p. 221) writes that, as grown in the Nagpur gardens it is one of the finest Indian oranges, with rind thin, smooth and close. The Emperor Muhammad Shah is said to have altered its name to rang-tara because of its fine colour (rang) (Forbes). Speede (ii, 109) gives both names. As to the meaning and origin of the name santara or santra, so suggestive of Cintra, the Portuguese home of a similar orange, it may be said that it looks like a hill-name used in N. E. India, for there is a village in the
