"by dangerous tracks among the rocks. In the steep and narrow ways and gorges which we had to climb, many a horse and camel dropped and fell out. After four or five days we came to the col of Sir-i-Tuk. This _is_ a pass! Never did I see one so narrow and steep, or follow paths more toilsome and strait. We pressed on, nevertheless, with incredible labour, through fearful gorges and by tremendous precipices, until, after a hundred agonies and losses, at last we topped those murderous steep defiles and came down on the borders of Kân, with its lovely expanse of lake." When eighteen he finally managed to conquer Samarkhûnd, and in the same year his first child, a daughter, was born; for he had wedded his cousin Ayêsha while in hiding in the hills. He called the baby "The Glory of Womanhood," and chronicles regretfully that "in a month or forty days she went to partake of the Mercy of God." Marriage, however, appears to have roused him to no emotion, for he admits first that he had "never conceived a passion for any woman, and indeed had never been so placed as even to hear or witness words of love or amorous discourse"; secondly, that in the beginning of his wedded life, shyness almost overcame affection; "and afterwards," he adds quaintly, "as my affection decreased my shyness increased." A curious record of clean-living this for an Eastern king in the very hey-day of youth. Babar's success did not last for long. Two years after he was once more a fugitive, and this time he did not succeed in saving all his womenkind. His favourite sister, older than he was by some years, remained behind, part of the price paid for bare freedom, and entered his victorious enemy's harem. This was a bitter pill to swallow, and Babar never forgot it. This sister figures in the Memoirs of Babar's daughter, Gulbadan, as "Dearest Lady." She seems to have kept her brother's deep devotion to the last.