Note 66 — Feast of the Second New Year.

I heard at Kabul that in the time of Maḥmūd of Ghazni a person of the name of K͟hwāja Tābūt66 had died in the neighbourhood of Ẓuḥāk and Bāmiyān, and was buried in a cave, whose limbs had not yet rotted asunder. This appeared very strange, and I sent one of my confidential record writers with a surgeon to go to the cave and, having seen the state of affairs as they were, to make a special report. He represented that half of the body which was next the ground had most of it come asunder, and the other half which had not touched the ground remained in its own condition. The nails of the hands and feet and the hair of the head had not been shed, but the hair of the beard and moustache as far as one side of the nose had been shed. From the date that had been engraved on the door of the cave it appeared that his death had occurred before the time of Sult̤ān Maḥmūd. No one knows the exact state of the case.