And yet, when it did come, human nature was almost too strong for her. She could only point to the little sleeper in reply to that clamour for "The King! The King!" And still she had to wait. To weep reservedly over her own darling, to do him reverence, and so, the last ceremony over, steal away hastily to where her king waited her in the rushes. Then, dry-eyed, stern, she carried him, drawing life from her bereaved breast, over wild hill and dale, till, reaching the mountain fortress of Komulmêr, she could set her nurseling on the governor's knee, and say: "Guard him--he is the King!" Udâi-Singh, unfortunately, grew up unworthy of his foster-mother's sacrifice. Still, he held Chitore, and many another Râjput prince held other portions of the central tableland of India, whose rocky mountains form an ideal country for independence and revolt. For the rest, as we have seen, the Dekkan, Guzerât, and Mâlwa were held by Mahomedan dynasties, as were the smaller principalities of Khandêsh, Bengal, Joûnpur, Multân, Sinde. Towards the south-east the vast kingdom, mostly forest, of Orissa remained unexplored, and in the west, the whole narrow strip which includes the Western Ghâts figures not at all in history. Yet it was on this narrow strip that the first grip of Europe on Hindustan was to be laid. Columbus was sailing the High Seas. The maritime nations, Italy, England, Spain, were on the _qui vive_ for new worlds, and in 1484--just a year after Babar was born on Valentine's day--one Pedro de Covilham set out for India, overland, by the orders of King John of Portugal, with instructions to return with a report as to the practicability of reaching Hindustan' by sea. He reached India, being, apparently, the first European to touch its soil, but was detained on the return journey by the Arabs. Ere he reached home in A.D. 1525 (after close on six and-thirty years of imprisonment), Portugal had acted on the advice which he had managed to send, God knows how. Vasco da Gama, leaving the Tagus in 1497, "coasted Guinea southwards, until he rounded into the Indian Ocean"; so reached Calicut in A.D. 1498. It was the beginning. Almost each year that followed saw a fresh, and ever a larger armament sent out chiefly by the Portuguese Order of Christ, with the ostensible object of converting the heathen. We read of nine, of seventeen, finally, in 1507, of twenty-two ships carrying one thousand five hundred fighting-men, and the very first Viceroy of India, Dom Francesco Almeda. Goa was taken and made the seat of Government by Dom Alfonso Albuquerque--after a tussle for the Viceroyalty--in 1510, and in 1542 St Francis Xavier, joint founder of the Jesuits with Ignatius Loyola, went out on a mission and had an enormous success of marvellous stability, since to this day a large proportion of the population on the south-west coast is professedly Roman Catholic.