Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/44

Rh preferring the misery of the jungle to the apparent certainty of outrage.

To add to Bábar's troubles, there arose at this period discontent in his army. The men composing it were to a great extent mountaineers from the lofty ranges in Eastern Afghánistán. These men had followed their King with delight so long as there was a prospect of fighting. But Pánípat had given them Northern India. The march from Delhi to Agra was a march through a deserted country, at a season always hot, but the intense heat of which, in 1526, exceeded the heat of normal years. Like the Highlanders of our own Prince Charlie in '45, these highlanders murmured. They, too, longed to return to their mountain homes. The disaffection was not confined to the men. Even the chiefs complained; and their complaints became so loud that they at last reached the ears of Bábar.

Bábar had been greatly pleased with his conquest. Neither the heat nor the disaffection of the inhabitants had been able to conceal from him the fact that he had conquered the finest, the most fertile, the most valuable part of Asia. In his wonderful memoirs he devotes more than twenty large printed pages to describe it. 'It is a remarkably fine country,' he begins. 'It is quite a different world compared with our countries.' He saw almost at a glance that all his work was cut out to complete the conquest in the sense he attributed to that word. Henceforth the title of King of Kábul