That winter Shaibāq Khān crossed the Khujand river on the ice and plundered near Shāhrukhiya and Bīsh-kīnt. On hearing news of this, we gallopped off, not regarding the smallness of our numbers, and made for the villages below Khujand, opposite Hasht-yak (One-eighth). The cold was mightily bitter,[589] a wind not less than the Hā-darwesh[590] raging violently the whole time. So cold it was that during the two or three days we were in those parts, several men died of it. When, needing to make ablution, I went into an irrigation-channel, frozen along both banks but because of its swift current, not ice-bound in the middle, and bathed, dipping under 16 times, the cold of the water went quite through me. Next day we crossed the river on the ice from opposite Khaṣlār and went on through the dark to Bīsh-kīnt.[591] Shaibāq Khān, however, must have gone straight back after plundering the neighbourhood of Shāhrukhiya. (_e. Death of Nuyān Kūkūldāsh._) Bīsh-kīnt, at that time, was held by Mullā Ḥaidar's son, `Abdu'l-minān. A younger son, named Mūmin, a worthless and dissipated person, had come to my presence in Samarkand and had received all kindness from me. This sodomite, Mūmin, for what sort of quarrel between them is not known, cherished [Sidenote: Fol. 98b.] rancour against Nuyān _Kūkūldāsh_. At the time when we, having heard of the retirement of the Aūzbegs, sent a man to The Khān and marched from Bīsh-kīnt to spend two or three days amongst the villages in the Blacksmith's-dale,[592] Mullā Ḥaidar's son, Mūmin invited Nuyān _Kūkūldāsh_ and Aḥmad-i-qāsim and some others in order to return them hospitality received in Samarkand. When I left Bīsh-kīnt, therefore they stayed behind. Mūmin's entertainment to this party was given on the edge of a ravine (_jar_). Next day news was brought to us in Sām-sīrak, a village in the Blacksmith's-dale, that Nuyān was dead through falling when drunk into the ravine. We sent his own mother's brother, Ḥaq-naẕar and others, who searched out where he had fallen. They committed Nuyān to the earth in Bīsh-kīnt, and came back to me. They had found the body at the bottom of the ravine an arrow's flight from the place of the entertainment. Some suspected that Mūmin, nursing his trumpery rancour, had taken Nuyān's life. None knew the truth. His death made me strangely sad; for few men have I felt such grief; I wept unceasingly for a week or [Sidenote: Fol. 99.] ten days. The chronogram of his death was found in _Nuyān is dead_.[593]