Note 2519 — SECTION III. HINDŪSTĀN (continued 4)

Prayāg, Ilāhābād, Allāhābād. Between the asterisk in my text (supra) and the one following “ford” before the foliation mark f. 364, the Ḥai. MS. has a lacuna which, as being preceded and followed by broken sentences, can hardly be due to a scribe’s skip, but may result from the loss of a folio. What I have entered above between the asterisks is translated from the Kehr-Ilminsky text; it is in the two Persian translations also. Close scrutiny of it suggests that down to the end of the swimming episode it is not in order and that the account of the swim across the Ganges may be a survival of the now missing record of 934 AH. (f. 339). It is singular that the Pers. trss. make no mention of Pīāg or of Sīr-auliya; their omission arouses speculation, as to in which text, the Turkī or Persian, it was first tried to fill what remains a gap in the Ḥai. Codex. A second seeming sign of disorder is the incomplete sentence yūrtgha kīlīb, which is noted below. A third is the crowd of incidents now standing under “Tuesday”. A fourth, and an important matter, is that on grounds noted at the end of the swimming passage (p. 655 n. 3) it is doubtful whether that passage is in its right place.—It may be that some-one, at an early date after Bābur’s death, tried to fill the lacuna discovered in his manuscript, with help from loose folios or parts of them. Cf. Index s.n. swimming, and f. 377b, p. 680 n. 2.