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streams was one of the most fertile in Asia. Farghána itself was prodigal of fruit and laden with heavy harvests. Abundantly watered by the Sir, and sheltered on all sides from the outer world by fostering hills—save where a gap to the south-west opened out towards Samarkand—the little province, smaller than Ireland, was a garden, an orchard, a vineyard. Grapes and melons ripened to perfection at Andiján, innumerable mills plashed in the watercourses and ground the grain yielded by the generous earth. The beautiful gardens of Ush, a day’s march to the south, were gay with violets, tulips, and roses in their seasons, and between the brooks the cattle browsed on the rich clover meadows. At Marghinán, a little to the west, the third city of Farghána, grew such apricots and pomegranates that a man would journey from afar to taste them: many years after he was banished from his land, Bábar recalled with a sigh the flavour of the dried apricots stuffed with almonds which were so good at Marghinán. 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 Bukhárá? If he thought of the apricots of Marghinán in the days of his exile, Bábar suffered the dreams of a Tantalus when he remembered the lost joys of the melons of Akhsi. But there was more sustaining food than melon-pulp among the hills and woods of his native land. The pastures nourished herds of cattle, sheep and goats cut