CHAPTER III.. The Turki Mss. and Work Connecting with Them.

THE TURKI MSS. AND WORK CONNECTING WITH THEM.

This chapter is a literary counterpart of "Babur Padshah's Stone-heap," the roadside cairn tradition says was piled by his army, each man laying his stone when passing down from Kabul for Hindustan in the year of victory 1525 (932).

For a title suiting its contents is "Babur Padshah's Book-pile," because it is fashioned of item after item of pen-work done by many men in obedience to the dictates given by his book. Unlike the cairn, however, the pile of books is not of a single occasion but of many, not of a single year but of many, irregularly spacing the 500 years through which he and his autobiography have had Earth's immortality.