Ḥaram, the dominant partner in the command of Badakhshān, mother of a girl in whose veins was reputed to flow the blood of Alexander and of Tīmūr, daughter of a tribal chief, and conscious of intrinsic claim to deference, inquired of the two lowly messengers why no begam or lady (āghācha) had come to prefer the royal request. She must have known that Humāyūn could not mean to affront her; he had just given his daughter to her son and had testified gratitude for help in substantial ways to Sulaimān at the same time. She allowed herself to be mollified on condition that he himself should come to fetch his bride. The wedding does not seem to have taken place and the alliance was handed on to the next generation, in which, besides Ibrāhīm's, there was a betrothal of Muḥammad Hakīm to a daughter of Ḥaram.

While speaking of Ḥaram and the alliances of her family with the royal house, there may be named a high­handed act about another quasi-royal marriage. One of Kāmrān's wives was Muhtarīma Khānam Chaghatāi, and on his death Sulaimān wished to marry her. Of her as co-wife, Ḥaram would not hear, and contrived to make her a daughter-in-law by marrying her to Ibrāhīm.

The death of Hindāl in the night attack of Kāmrān, on November 20th, 1551, was a heavy blow to Gul-badan. She writes of it with feeling, and casts light on the question of rank in the affections of a Musalmān wife. She asks why her son or her husband was not killed rather than her brother. Perhaps she spoke out of feeling born of the fact that no dead father's son can be replaced, and from the deeps of family affection. Dutiful and admirable as were many of the wives of this time, the tie between the husband and a wife can never be so close as it is where the husband's affection is never a divisible factor in the household. Gul-badan shows that Musalmānī affection centred on those of the same blood.

The royal ladies must have felt it hard when, after having mourned Humāyūn through Kāmrān for nearly three months, Hindāl was killed. This happened near Khiẓr Khwāja's fief of Jui-shāhī, which explains why the body was sent there for burial and entrusted to the khwāja. It was removed later to Kābul and laid at Bābar's feet. Hindāl was thirty-two years old, and left one daughter, Ruqaiya, who became the first wife of Akbar and survived him, a childless woman, to the age of eighty-four.

Unfortunately for her readers, our begam's book ends abruptly (just after she has mentioned the blinding of Kāmrān,) in the only MS. of which we have knowledge, i.e., that belonging to the British Museum. The missing pages are a real loss. The narrative breaks off some three years before Akbar's accession, and for the future the best authority on our topics is silent. There is no occurrence of her own name in the histories until she goes to India in the first year of Akbar. Much of supreme importance happened to the royal family in the interval, and this makes regret the keener for the defective MS.

Set free from the burden of his brothers, Humāyūn determined, in 1554, to try his fortune again in Hindūstān. He left Kābul on November 15th,—a date so near that of Bābar's start in 1525 that it looks as if both obeyed the same omen of the heavens,—and with Akbar dropped comfortably down the river from Jalālābād to Peshāwar. The course of his advance beyond the Indus can be followed in Mr. Erskine's pages, and need not be repeated here. He was proclaimed Emperor in Dihlī on July 23rd, 1555.

A little-known episode of the time is the visit to India and the court of Sīdī 'Alī Reis, a Turkish admiral of Sulaimān the Great, who by the exigencies of war and weather found himself obliged to travel with a few officers and fifty sailors from Sūrat to Lāhōr and thence across all the wide intervening lands to Turkey.* He was welcomed by Musalmāns for his master's sake, and he was offered appointments in India, all of which he refused. He was received with great honour by Shāh Ḥusain Arghūn, of whom he says that he had then reigned forty years, and had become so invalided during the last five that he could not sit his horse and used only boats for travel. Else­where it is said of Shāh Ḥusain that he was subject to fever of such kind that he could live only on the river, and that he used to spend his time in going up and down from one extremity to the other of his territory in search of ease and health. Probably this is a detail of the admiral's remark. He heard of Māh-chūchak (wife of Ḥusain), whom he calls Ḥaji Begam, as prisoner of 'Īsā Tarkhān, and of her return to Ḥusain. He heard, too, something which is not supported by other writers, namely, that she poisoned Ḥusain, and that he died in consequence ten days after she rejoined him. The improbability of this story is shown by the fact that later on she conveyed Ḥusain's body to Makka for interment, an act which would be incredible if the accusation of murder were true. Much that is interesting is told of the journey to the first place where Sīdī 'Ali's route brought him into contact with Hu­māyūn's people, i.e., Lāhōr. He arrived early in August, shortly after the Restoration (July 23rd), and there awaited royal orders, because the governor would not let him go on until the Emperor had seen him. When one tries to picture one's self without telegrams or newspapers, one judges that a kindly-disposed amīr would endeavour to forward everyone who could tell a tale for the entertain­ment of the court. Humāyūn sent for the admiral, and had him received, in the first half of October,* outside Dihlī by Bairām Khān-i-khānān, other great amīrs, 1,000 men, and 400 elephants. He dined with the Khān-i-khānān, and was then introduced to the presence.

As was natural, the Emperor wished to keep his guest at court permanently, if possible, and if not this, then long enough to ‘calculate solar and lunar eclipses, their degree of latitude and exact date, and to help the court astrologers to study the sun's course and the points of the equator.’ What fastened interest on the Ottoman was that he learned to write verses in Chaghatāi Tūrkī so well that Humāyūn called him a second 'Alī Shīr Nawaī. He had a turn for chronograms, too, and at his first audience presented one of the taking of Dihlī, and made others subsequently which were admired. He was a clever man, and his literary aptitudes suited his royal host and the tone of the entourage. But he had other acquirements than those which ring well the change of words and obtained him his sobriquet of ‘book-man,’ and these others he used to bring about an agreement between the Emperor and his own former host, Sulān Maḥmūd Bhakkarī. An official paper was drawn up, to which Humāyūn, literally, set his fist, for he dipped his clenched hand in saffron and laid it on the deed. Maḥmud was much pleased, and both he and his vizier wrote their thanks to the mediator. This incident, and others too, gave occasion for other Tūrkī ghazels and higher praise. Sīdī 'Alī was constantly in the royal circle, and there were contests in verse-making and dilettante amusements which reveal the true and newly-risen Huma once more at ease in untranquillized India. The traveller had not much to coax court favour with in the way of gifts, and this plumed his poetic flights; when he was wearied by his detention, he carried two ghazels to the royal seal-bearer and let them plead for his departure. They were heard, and he got ‘leave to go,’ with gifts and passport.

His affairs were all in order for his start when there happened the fatal accident which ended Humāyūn's life. That Humāyūn should die violently was in keeping with the violent changes of his career; and that he met his death in a building of Shīr Shāh was a singular chance. His last hours of activity were filled by pleasant occupations; old friends had been seen who had just come back from Makka and would bring him news of both pilgrim brothers; letters had been read from home in Kābul; he had gone up to the roof of the Shīr Mandal, which he used as his library, and had shown himself to the crowd assembled below; then he had interested himself in the rising of Venus, with the object of fixing a propitious hour for a reception,—perhaps to include the farewell of the Turkish guest.

The Shīr Mandal is a two-storied building with flat roof in the middle of which rises a small cupola which looks like a shade from the sun. The roof is reached by two discon­tinuous, steep, and narrow flights of high and shallow granite steps, which are enclosed in walls and the upper one of which emerges through the roof. The Emperor on that Friday evening of January 24th, 1556, had started down the upper flight and was on its second step, when the mu'aẕẕin raised the cry for prayer from the neighbouring mosque. Sīdī 'Ali says, as though it were some individual habit of Humāyūn, that the latter had the custom of kneeling whenever he heard the cry; other writers say that he tried to seat himself. His foot became entangled, some say in his mantle (postīn), his staff slid along the smooth step, and he fell to the bottom of the flight with severe injuries to head and arm. It is professed that a letter went after the fall from him to Akbar, but this may be a part of the well-meaning deception in which the dangerous nature of the injuries was shrouded; it would seem more probable from the admiral's account of the episode, which is silent as to any recovery of consciousness, that the injuries to the head were too severe to allow of restoration to sense. Three days later Humāyūn died, on January 27th, and in the forty-eighth year of his age.