Fakhr-jahān and Khadīja stayed eleven months, and were bidden good-bye before their return journey to Kābul on September 20th, 1528. After all, Khadīja did not go, having affairs of her own to detain her, and this delay allowed the Emperor to pay her another of the Friday calls which he habitually made, during the time of his occupation of Hindūstān, on his elder kinswomen. On the 17th three sisters of Fakhr-jahān and Khadīja arrived in the suburbs and were welcomed. From all these Bābar could hear the news and gossip of Kābul, and thus add to the impressions which led to his order for the begams to join him in India.

Apropos of the aunts of frequent mention, it may be said that both Bābar and Ḥaidar convey the opinion that defer­ence to elder women was a permanent trait of their age and set. Comings and goings of aunts are set down; houses and incomes provided; advice is sought; troubles are carried to them for sympathy; they are ambassadors of peace; their nephews vie with one another as to who shall entertain them; in short, both the Tūzūk and the Tārīkh indicate distinct deference to women of an elder generation.

A good deal about the exodus of the ladies can be gleaned from Bābar and from our princess, who now comes on the scene in her small person of five or six. The order for it was given at latest in 1528; this is clear from the royal letter to the khwāja and from the fact that Māham started in January, 1529. Bābar heard on March 22nd that all had really left Kābul, which news, taken with the arrival of the main cavalcade three months after her, suggests that Māham started first and travelled quickly, as being of a small company, and that the rest set off in detach­ments, as they and their transport were ready. The whole party would get off between January 21st and the end of February; this can be surmised, because the letter of March 22nd would be about a month in reaching Bābar. Most of the journey would be made by horse-litter, and some perhaps by palki with bearers. Men frequently dropped down the Kābul River on rafts, being thus able to do in twelve hours what ten marches covered; but one cannot suppose the ladies would make this adventurous journey, which was attended by risk even when people did not fall off the raft after potations, as some of Bābar's com­panions had done. Probably the road taken was that by But-khāk (Dust of Idols) and Jagdalik, and by Jalālābād and the Khaibar; but there is no certainty, because there is no information.

Gul-badan travelled with Māham in advance of her sisters, and thus had experiences all her own and a re­ception by her father unalloyed by numbers. Her liveli­ness would while away the tedium of the five months' travel, and help to distract Māham's sad thoughts from the loss of Fārūq, her youngest born. Unfortunately, she sets down nothing about the journey until near its end. Letters between the Emperor and the travellers were frequent. One of the couriers, named Shīrak (Little Lion), who was despatched by him on March 5th, carried not only letters to Māham, but was entrusted with a copy of the Memoirs which had been made to send to Samarqand.*

On April 1st, and at Ghāzīpūr, Bābar heard that the ladies had been met at the Indus on February 19th by their military escort under his master-of-horse, and by this amīr convoyed to the Chanāb. This might fitly be told of Māham's party, for there are other records of covering the distance to the Indus in about a month.

On the 22nd a servant of Māham brought letters to Arrah from her whom he had left at the Garden of Purity (Bāgh-i-ṣafā), near Pind-dādan Khān, and this is the last such entry. Māham reached Agra on June 27th, and Bābar met her outside the city at midnight.

Gul-badan gives amusing particulars of her own arrival, all of which she shall be left to tell. She followed Māham into Āgra on the 28th, not having been allowed to travel with her through the previous night. Then she saw her father. Of him she can have kept only a dim memory, and it is likely enough she would stand in some awe of him and his deeds, but no word he has written suggests that a child needed to fear him, and she soon experienced ‘happi­ness such that greater could not be imagined.’ Happy child! and happy father, too! who recovered such a clever and attractive little daughter. It is not only her book that lets us know she had a lively mind, but the fact of its com­position at an age when wits are apt to be rusted by domestic peace. Only a light that was strong in childhood would have burned so long to guide her unaccustomed pen after half a century of life, and only a youth of happy thoughts and quick perceptions have buoyed her, still gay and vivacious, across the worries and troubles of Humāyūn's time.

There were pleasant days after the coming to Āgra, when Bābar took Māham, and the child also, to see his works at Dholpūr and Sīkrī. He had always been a builder and a lover of a view, a maker of gardens and planter of trees. Much of the scenery of his new location displeased him; he thought the neighbourhood of Āgra ‘ugly and detestable’ and ‘repulsive and disgusting,’ words which do not now link well with that Āgra which he and his line have made the goal of the pilgrim of beauty. It is difficult to go back in fancy to the city without a Tāj, with no Sikundra near and with Sīkrī uncrowned.

Dholpūr and Sīkrī had much to show of work done by the orders of the Emperor,—‘my royal father,’ as Gul-badan generally calls him, using the home word bābā in­variably. At Sīkrī, amongst other buildings, was that in which she says he used to sit and write his book, i.e., the Tūzūk. There, too, the great battle which had been fought in 1527 will not have been ignored to ears so sym­pathetic as Māham's. Perhaps here the little girl first learnt dimly what it was to be a Ghāzī, and to fight on the side of Heaven. She says that when these excursions had been made, and three months after her own arrival had sped by, the begams, with Khānzāda as their chief, came within meeting distance of the capital, and that the Emperor went out to welcome them. There is nothing of this in the Memoirs, which are silent after the arrival of Māham as to the doings of the royal ladies. The reunion was soon to be clouded by anxieties and loss.

A brief return in the story of Humāyūn must be made here. In the summer of 1529 he heard in Badakhshān of his father's failing health, and, without asking leave, set off for India. He passed through Kābul, and there, to Kāmrān's surprise, met him, who had just come up from Ghaznī. The two conferred, and persuaded the ten-years-old Hindāl, who was under orders for Āgra, to take up the government of Badakhshān. Humāyūn then continued his march, and arrived in Āgra without announcement to his father.

He came to the presence just when, by a coincidence which Māham may have helped to bring about, his parents were talking of him. It would be natural for the mother, who cannot have been ignorant of her son's coming, to stir gentle thoughts of him and to warm his father's heart towards him before they met, and by this to break the shock of the unpermitted absence from duty.

Bābar was greatly angered by the desertion, which in truth placed Badakhshān in difficulty by withdrawing both troops and control. Its consequences were important, and caused him profound regret. To stand fast across the mountains and to push out the royal holdings beyond the Oxus from the vantage - ground of Badakhshān was a cherished dream, and one which he had taken steps through both Humāyūn and Kāmrān to realize. He wished Humā-yūn to return to his post, but the latter, while saying he must go if ordered, was not willing to leave his people again. Bābar then asked Khalīfa to go, but this request was evaded, and there is much to arouse surmise that Khalīfa saw in it the act of someone who wished him absent from the scene of crisis now foreseen as near. In his objection to leave Āgra, affection for his old master would be a natural factor; another was his own supreme influence, the sequel of his character and of Bābar's recent failure in health; and springing from his power was, perhaps the dominant factor of his objection to leave,—a disposition to supplant Humāyūn in the succession by a ruler of less doubtful character.

The fate of Badakhshān was decided by its bestowal on its hereditary chief, Sulaimān Mīrzā, Mīrān-shāhī, now a boy of sixteen, while Humāyūn's youthful locum tenens was ordered to come to India. Humāyūn betook himself to the idle enjoyments of his jāgīr of Sambhal, and was there, in a few months, attacked by illness which threatened life and which led to the remarkable episode of Bābar's self-sacrifice to save him. The narrative of this stands in all the histories and need not be repeated, but for the sake of making our princess' details clear, it is as well to state what was the rite performed by Bābar.