is thereby rendered almost indisputable.

Mahomed Yakoob's early years were passed at his home at Piskent, and it
is said that it was intended that he should follow the profession which
his father had repudiated. As a youth he was too wayward to submit to
any check on his impulses, and the design of educating him as a
"mollah," if it was ever seriously entertained, was abandoned long
before he arrived at man's estate. He appears to have passed the first
twenty years of his life in an idle, uneventful manner at Piskent, and
then suddenly to have resolved to seek his fortune as best he might in
the troubled waters of Khokandian politics. In 1845, we find him in the
train of the newly seated khan, Khudayar, as "mahram," or chamberlain,
and shortly afterwards, by the influence of his brother-in-law, the
Governor of Tashkent, nominated a Pansad Bashi, a commander of 500. This
was in 1847, about which year he married a Kipchak lady of Zuelik, a
village in the district of Ak Musjid. He had three sons, of whom we
shall hear more hereafter, by this marriage--Kooda Kul Beg, Kuli Beg,
and Hacc Kuli Beg. Later on, in the year 1847, he was raised to the rank
of Koosh-Bege, or "lord of the family"--more intelligibly described as
vizier--and entrusted with the charge of the important post on the Syr
Darya, called Ak Musjid, "White Mosque." This post he held with credit
for six years, until 1853, when the Russians commenced that forward
movement, of which we have not yet seen the close. At that time, Russia
had not acquired one of the numerous strategic points now in her
possession. The Syr Darya then was as far off from her frontier as the
Oxus is now. Ak Musjid, built in the lower reaches of the river, and
representing a Khokandian outpost of exceptional importance, was the
grand obstacle in the path of the Russians operating from Kazalinsk, at
the mouth of the Syr Darya. It was resolved, therefore, that this post,
which, doubtless, encouraged all the marauders in the neighbourhood to
continue their depredations against the Russian caravans, should be
wrested from the hands of its owners, and either razed to the ground or
converted into a Russian stronghold. General Perovsky was entrusted with
this undertaking. The distance from Kazalinsk, or Fort No. 1, to Ak
Musjid is not much over 200 miles, along the banks of the Syr Darya. Not
many commissariat arrangements were necessary, nor did the distance to
march require much time to delay