We went into a house and for awhile my eyes closed in sleep. Those mannikins artfully said to me, 'You must not bestir yourself to leave Karnān till there is news of Qādīr-bīrdī but this house is right amongst the suburbs; on the outskirts the orchards are empty; no-one will suspect if we go [Sidenote: Fol. 118.] there.' Accordingly we mounted at mid-night and went to a distant orchard. Bābā Sairāmī kept watch from the roof of a house. Near mid-day he came down and said, 'Commandant Yūsuf is coming.' Great fear fell upon me! 'Find out,' I said, 'whether he comes because he knows about me.' He went and after some exchange of words, came back and said, 'He says he met a foot-soldier in the Gate of Akhsī who said to him, "The pādshāh is in such a place," that he told no-one, put the man with Walī the Treasurer whom he had made prisoner in the fight, and then gallopped off here.' Said I, 'How does it strike you?' 'They are all your servants,' he said, 'you must go. What else can you do? They will make you their ruler.' Said I, 'After such rebellion and fighting, with what confidence could I go?' We were saying this, when Yūsuf knelt before me, saying, 'Why should it be hidden? Sl. Aḥmad Taṃbal has no news of you, but Shaikh Bāyazīd has and he sent me here.' On hearing this, my state of mind was miserable indeed, for well is it understood that nothing in the world is worse than fear for one's life. 'Tell the truth!' I said, 'if the affair is likely to go on to worse, I will make [Sidenote: Fol. 118b.] ablution.' Yūsuf swore oaths, but who would trust them? I knew the helplessness of my position. I rose and went to a corner of the garden, saying to myself, 'If a man live a hundred years or a thousand years, at the last nothing ...'[665] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. Friends are likely to have rescued Bābur from his dangerous isolation. His presence in Karnān was known both in Ghawā and in Akhsī; Muḥ. Bāqir Beg was at hand (f. 117); some of those he had dropped in his flight would follow him when their horses had had rest; Jahāngīr was somewhere north of the river with the half of Bābur's former force (f. 112); The Khāns, with their long-extended line of march, may have been on the main road through or near Karnān. If Yūsuf took Bābur as a prisoner along the Akhsī road, there were these various chances of his meeting friends. His danger was evaded; he joined his uncles and was with them, leading 1000 men (Sh. N. p. 268), when they were defeated at Archīān just before or in the season of Cancer, _i.e._ _circa_ June (T. R. p. 164). What he was doing between the winter cold of Karnān (f. 117b) and June might have been known from his lost pages. Muḥ. Ṣāliḥ writes at length of one affair falling within the time,—Jahāngīr's occupation of Khujand, its siege and its capture by Shaibānī. This capture will have occurred considerably more than a month before the defeat of The Khāns (Sh. N. p. 230).