All manuscripts agree in having 504, and Babur wrote a tract (risala) upon the transpositions.1 None of the modern treatises on Oriental Prosody allow a number so high to be practicable, but Maulana Saifi of Bukhara, of Babur's own time (£_i8o£) makes 5°4 seem even moderate, since after giving much detail about rubd'i measures, he observes, " Some say there are 10,000" {Arus-i-Saifi, Ranking's trs. p. 122). Presumably similar possibilities were open for the couplet in question. It looks like one made for the game, asks two foolish questions and gives no reply, lends itself to poetic license, and, if permutation of words have part in such a game, allows much without change of sense. Was Babur's cessation of effort at 504 capricious or enforced by the exhaustion of possible changes? Is the arithmetical statement 9x8x7 = 504 the formula of the practicable permutations ?
(2) To improvise verse having a given rhyme and topic must have demanded quick wits and much practice. Babur gives at least one example of it (f. 252$) but Jahanglr gives a fuller arid more interesting one, not only because a ruba'i of Babur's was the model but from the circumstances of the game :2 It was in 1024 AH. (1615 AD.) that a letter reached him from Mawara'u'nnahr written by Khwaja Hashim Naqsh-bandi [who by the story is shown to have been of Ahrari's line], and recounting the long devotion of his family to Jahanglr's ancestors. He sent gifts and enclosed in his letter a copy of one of Babur's quatrains which he said Hazrat Firdaus-makani had written for Hazrat KhwajagI (Ahrari's eldest son; f. 36^, p. 62 n. 2). Jahanglr quotes a final hemistich only, "Khwajagira indnddim, Khwdjagird banddim" and thereafter made an impromptu verse upon the one sent to him.
A curious thing is that the line he quotes is not part of the quatrain he answered, but belongs to another not appropriate for a message between darwesh and pddshdh, though likely to have been sent by Babur to KhwajagI. I will quote both because
1 I have found no further mention of the tract; it may he noted however that whereas Babur calls his Treatise on Prosody (written in 931 AH.) the lAruz, Abii'1-fazl writes of a Mufassa/, a suitable name for 504 details of transposition.
3 TuzuA-i-jaAangir\ith.ed. p. 149; and Memoirs ofJahanglrtrs. i, 304. [In both books the passage requires amending.]
