The Rashīdī History 97.3

97.3

Then tell your men to let him secretly out of the camp, so that when he returns to his fellows they may not look upon him with contempt. Thus the poor man will, in a measure, have executed his mission." Further, I never saw a more accurate reader than the Khan. However faulty the orthography might be, he would read off verse or prose without hesitating, in such a way that listeners might suppose he knew it by heart. He wrote Naskh Talik excellently, and his spelling in Turki and Persian was faultless. He also composed letters [insha] well in Turki: other people could only have composed them with great difficulty and application. I have rarely met with such power and capability in writing verse [shir]. He never said poems by heart, but in assemblies and social gatherings, if any collection of odes [divan] that was at hand was opened, and he was given any metre and rhyme, he would extemporise a poem. If he repeated a poem once or twice, everybody could remember it; but he was not pleased if any one made a copy of it. I have remembered, and here reproduce, some of the extempore poems which the Khan recited in the assemblies. [Turki verses.] I only once knew him make verses in Persian. He performed on the *tM2, and the sihtara, and the chartara, and the ghachak, but best of all on the chartara. He had a sound knowledge of bone-cutting, and was skilled in making arrows.