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For three years that followed he lived the life of an adventurer: now an exile in the desert; now marching and gaining a throne; always joyous; always buoyed up by hope of ultimate success; always acting with energy and vigour. He attempted to win back, and had been forced to abandon, Fergháná; then he resolved, with a motley band of two to three hundred men, to march on Khorásán.
Two railway lines cross Turkestan, one from the Kirghiz Steppe to Tashkent, the other from the Caspian Sea to Tashkent and Ferghana. Ferghana is the most fruitful part of Turkestan and lies between mountains in its eastern portion. Tashkent, the capital of Turkestan, has 200,000 inhabitants, and is the headquarters of the governor-general.
Nowhere, neither in Fergháná, nor in Samarkand, nor in Kábul, nor in the Punjab, nor in India, had it shot down any roots. It was in fact impossible it could do so, for it possessed no germinating power. And now, at the close of 1556, the empire won and lost and won again was in the hands of a boy, reared in the school of adversity and trial, one month over fourteen years.
And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came From far, and a more doubtful service own'd; The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks Of the Jaxartes, men with scanty beards And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes Who roam o'er Kipchak and the northern waste, Kalmucks and unkempt Kuzzaks, tribes who stray Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes, Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere; These all filed out from camp into the plain.
By this sudden change of fortune, he found himself all at once King of Kábul and Ghazní, a kingdom far more powerful than the Fergháná which he had inherited and lost. Bábar had but just began to feel his seat in his new kingdom when he received an invitation to invade a district called Bhera, south of the river Jehlam, and therefore within the borders of India.
The deserts of the interior are the sickly consumptive parts of the body where vitality is low, while the peninsulas are the limbs which facilitate communication between different peoples across the intervening seas. In the month of February, 1894, I was at Margelan, which is the capital of Ferghana, the granary of Central Asia, a rich and fruitful valley begirt on all sides by mountains.
His efforts would have availed him little, if there had not existed jealousies and divisions in the hostile camp. These worked for him so as to secure to him all that remained of Fergháná. But he had lost the important towns of Khojend, Marghinan, and Uratiupé. For two years after the retirement of the invader, the boy rested, consolidating his resources, and watching his opportunity.
Beyond this point exact information fails us; but we may suspect that this is the expedition commemorated by Mirk-hond, wherein the Great Khan, having invaded the Persian territory in force, made himself master of Shash, Ferghana, Samarkand, Bokhara, Kesh, and Nesf, but, hearing that Hornisdas, son of Chosroes, was advancing against him at the head of a numerous army, suddenly fled, evacuating all the country that he had occupied, and retiring to the most distant portion of Turkestan.
But that only proves that the system introduced by Bábar was the system to which he had been accustomed all his life the system which had alternately lost and won for him Fergháná and Samarkand; which had given him Kábul, and, a few years later, India; the system of the rule of the strongest.
But they are mere puppets to move as the Czar of Russia pulls the strings. As for Khokand, it has disappeared from the map of Asia, being replaced by the Russian province of Ferghana.
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