222 THE EMPEROR BABAR He would not have written this sweeping and wholly unjust condemnation had he lived longer in India and seen more of its people; and he does indeed admit that there are advantages, such as the abundance of work- men, and the " pleasant climate during the rains "; but, on the whole, to him " the chief excellency of Hin- dustan is that it is a big country with plenty of gold and silver." One can see that even from his throne at Agra he looked back with regret to his own land, the land of melons and cool waters, and remembered with the pang of the exile the joyous days he spent beside tha Kabul river. He was not the man he had been. Fever and a wandering restless life, joined to frequent bouts of drinking and constant use of opium, had undermined a wonderful constitution. Yet between his fits of fever his vigour remained extraordinary. He could take up a man under each arm, and run with them round the battlements of a fortress, leaping the embrasures, and even in March, 1529, he notes: " I swam across the river Ganges for amusement. I counted my strokes, and found that I swam over in thirty-three strokes. I then took breath, and swam back to the other- side. I had crossed by swimming every river I had met, except only the Ganges." He was also constantly in the saddle, and often he did his eighty miles a day. All this did not make for long life, and Babar's snapped with the suddenness of an overstrained spring. .He passed away in Ms beautiful garden palace at Agra on the 26th of December, 1530 a man of only forty-eight, a king of
