Rulers of India. Babar

The blood of the two great Scourges of Asia Chingiz and Timiir mixed in his veins and to the daring and restlessness of the nomad Tatar he joined the culture and urbanity of the Persian. [...] He brought the energy of the Mongol the courage andapacity of the *Turk to the listless Hindu ; and himself a soldier of fortune and no architect of empire he yet laid the first stone of the splendid fabric which his granson Akbar achieved: His connexion with India began only in the lastto THE EMPEROR BABAR twelve years of his life. [...] The luscious pomegranates of Khojend were not to be despised but the melons of Akhsi—who could resist the melons of Akhsi which had not their equal in the world not even in the spreading melon fields of Bukhara ? If he thought of the apricots of Marghinan in the days of his exile Babar suffered the dreams of a Tantalus when he remembered the lost joys of the melons of Akhsi. [...] The Indian empire of the Great Moghuls ' had not then restored honour to the name and the Mongols of the pastoral steppes east and north of Farghfina must certainly have appeared an uncouth race to the comparatively polished gentlemen of the towns who wrote charming Persian odes and had a horror of the discomforts of the deserts. [...] Timar's mosque stood hard by the Iron Gate ; skilled masons and sculptors from HindOstan and Persia and Asia Minor had set their hands to the building and the colossal inscription from the Koran over the gate testified to the orthodoxy of the 'Scourge of God.' Near the stone fort is a college and here lie the bones of Timilr and his descendants the Kings of Samarkand.