Page:Babar.djvu/128

Rh less to their host's relief, carried with him the intriguing grandmother Sháh Begum, who came of the ancient stock of the Badakhshán kings, who traced their descent, they said, from Alexander the Great. Sháh Begum went even further: 'It has been our hereditary kingdom, she declared, for 3,000 years. Though I, being a woman, cannot myself attain to the sovereignty, yet my grandson, Khán Mirza, can hold it. Males descended from me and my children will certainly not be rejected.' Nor were they, for Khán Mirza reigned in Badakhshán till his death, in faithful subjection to his cousin.

Relieved of the presence of possible conspirators, the Emperor divided his time between the inevitable 'punitive expeditions' against the Afghán tribes, the delights of great hunting parties, and the pleasure he always took in beautifying his capital and laying out gardens and parks. The continual round of enjoyments described by his visitor was no doubt shared to the full by the Emperor, the centre and life of his society; but the break in the Memoirs from 1508 to 1519 deprives one of the minute record of the daily occupations of the writer which is so full and interesting at other periods, and one is thrown back upon the imagination to fill in the picture from the analogy of earlier and later years.