Omar Khayyam - a life Read online

  Tutush hoped this would content Omar. But he was mistaken. The Tentmaker went off to the bazaar in his old brown abba; he was seen talking to the camelmen of all the serais, and then he disappeared so completely that Tutush's spies could get no trace of him, although they tried much more diligently than they had sought for Abu'l Zaid.

  Omar was wandering with the camelmen. He was rising before the dawn from fitful sleep and seeking among the tents, looking into the hostelries where the merchants gathered when the camels were loaded, kneeling and grunting. He was asking them for tidings of an Abu'l Zaid, a cloth-merchant from Meshed. Through the dust and the outcry he hastened, to ask his questions.

  Driven by a fever of the mind more insistent than a fever of the body, he searched the rest houses of Meshed and the great shrine of the Imam where the pilgrims gathered. Long he sat by the pillar of Sebsevar, and in the caravan-serai of Bustan. Once he followed an Abu'l Zaid to the northern mountains and found him to be only a rugseller of the Bokhara market.

  The gnawing pain in his body would not let him sleep. When he hurried, beside the long-striding laden camels he felt easier. Yasmi would be in pain. Perhaps the sweat of fever clotted her dark hair. She had been sold like a slave, and taken off like a slave. They had beaten her and cried out upon her, and now she was somewhere in this ever-moving throng upon the roads.

  As the weeks passed, the brief moisture of spring was drawn out of the plain by the heat of the sun. The baked clay became hard as iron, and the green growth turned brown except along a stream's edge.

  In his agony, it seemed to the Tentmaker that he must not tread upon the last flowers by the water's edge. The jasmine and the lilies belonged, in his mind, with Yasmi and the fresh moist grass of the Nisapur River. . . .

  "Verily," said a dervish, "here is one afflicted of Allah."

  The increasing heat and the fatigue of continuous travel brought on a fever that laid Omar prostrate for two weeks, until the ache left his limbs and he rose, too weak to set out again upon his feet. A kindly Meshedi offered to take him on donkey-back to his home.

  Omar's head had cleared after the fever and he understood now that it was useless to wander from place to place in this fashion. It seemed to him that he had been trying to run away from a torment within himself. And certainly by now some word from Yasmi would have reached the tower, or Tutush's spies would have tidings for him. It was foolish to have gone away; but then for a while he had been too ill to return.

  Late one afternoon he descended from the donkey at the road to the cemetery and said farewell to the man of Meshed. He climbed the hill to his tower expecting to find no one there. Instead he found new buildings standing within the wall, and two servants tending a freshly dug garden. Over the parapet of the summit bronze instruments gleamed.

  On the hill beside the observatory a wooden pillar had been erected. Omar stopped to look at this shaft, with a circle traced on the hard clay about its base. A bearded servant came and stood by him respectfully.

  "Happy be your coming, O master," he said. "We have labored to make the place ready. Will it please the master to enter?"

  Only his eyes expressed a burning curiosity at the apparition of this gaunt and dust-caked youth in a tattered cloak.

  "Yes," said Omar.

  He went up to his own chamber. Nothing had been touched there; the dragon still coiled on its screen; the pillows lay neatly piled against the head of the bed quilt. "Say thou," he asked the servant, "was there a message—a token—that came?"

  The man nodded, smiling. "Ya khwaja—O master, every day a message came from the lord Tutush, to know if your honor had been pleased to return. Even now I have sent the boy to Nisapur to say that the arrival hath come to pass."

  "And no other messenger asked for me? No letter?"

  Yasmi could not write; still, she might have sent something by a letter writer in some bazaar.

  "Nay," the servant said, "no other messenger, or letter."

  Omar seated himself on the divan by the window, while the servant brought clean water in the silver water jar to bathe his feet, and a white-bearded man entered with ornate greetings saying that he was Mai'mun ibn Najib al-Wasiti, a mathematician of the Baghdad Nizamiyah—the academy for research founded in that city by the benevolent Nizam. Mai'mun peered in surprise at the silent Omar, saying in brittle dry words that he had brought with him a revised Ptolemaic table of the stars, and at Nizam's behest the great bronze celestial globe that had been used by Avicenna himself.

  "Good," Omar responded absently. After the glare and the fever of the sunbaked plain, here was quiet, except for that dry voice.

  Khwaja Mai'mun snorted and withdrew as stiffly as a stork that has stepped unaware upon a tortoise. But long after dark, when Omar paced the tower summit, the elder mathematician could not resist going up to where his treasure stood. Without taking visible heed of the voiceless Omar, he lighted the four oil lamps fixed to the stand of the globe. Then he adjusted the shades so that a soft, clear glow covered the upper half of the great globe.

  Omar ceased his pacing, his eyes fastened on the polished bronze. Drawing closer he peered at it. A whole network of tiny patterns covered the points of the stars. The lines were finely drawn, and only a word or two among the constellations with obscure clusters marred the gossamer of the tracery. Many hands had worked at it—he could see where fresh lines crossed older incisions. Yes, here was the last point of the Dragon's tail, turning away from the Pole star. . . . Glancing from right to left at the horizon, he laid his hands on the globe, turning it slowly until it coincided with the sky above him. His hands groped for the horizon ring.

  "It is set so," Ishak's dry voice observed. "And it is locked in this manner."

  "Yes," said Omar. "Yes." Here he stood at last with the noble work of the masters under his hands, and a Baghdad mathematician vigilant as a sentry at his side, and the fruit of Avicenna's observation under his eyes. But he felt no elation.

  "My soul!" quoth Tutush the next morning, "you look like a hermit returned from the animal kingdom. How we searched for you! How will you cover the fire of Nizam's anger with the water of explanation? No matter—it is all one now that you are here."

  "While I was gone," Omar asked, "did Yasmi send a message, a token?"

  "Ah, that girl." The master of the spies blinked amiably. "Why, I think not—nay, I heard of nothing."

  "But your men have tidings?"

  Tutush pursed his lips and shook his head regretfully. His agents, he said, had watched like hawks; they had seen nothing. "After all," he observed brightly, "there are other girls in the market—little Persian bulbuls—Chinese slaves from Samarkand-way, very well trained, oh, most skillful. But Nizam is angry. We must have work to show him—some plan to lay before him."

  Omar was silent. He had not the ghost of a plan in his head.

  "Think, O youthful khwaja. Think of the plan you brought from the House of Wisdom. What was then in thy mind to accomplish, for a patron."

  "A new calendar."

  "What?"

  "A new measure of time that will be accurate, instead of losing hours."

  Tutush glanced at Omar apprehensively. The servants had said that the new master behaved strangely. "Now," he suggested, smiling, "lay the hand of pity on the ache of my ignorance. We have the moon, created by Allah to tell us by its first light when a new month begins. Surely no mortal can fashion an instrument to do better what the moon does. Eh—eh?"

  "The Egyptians have done it; the Christians have done it." Omar frowned impatiently. "But that small wooden gnomon you have planted here is fit for children to play with. Come, and see."

  With Khwaja Mai'mun bringing up the rear they went out to the slender wooden staff. Tutush had taken great pains in superintending its erection by carpenters from the Castle. He thought it cast a beautiful shadow on the carefully smoothed clay. But Omar uprooted it with one heave of his shoulders and cast it down the slope. A deep anger seemed to be burning in this man from
the desert roads.

  "That thing would bend in the wind and warp in the sun," he cried. "Are we children playing makebelieve? We need what the infidels had, a marble column five times the height of a man, true to a fingernail upon all sides and at the point. Then a base of mortar, and marble slabs to make a triangle for its shadow. The slabs must be ground, polished, bound together with copper and laid with a water level. Oh—send me artisans, and I will tell them what is needed."

  "First," muttered Tutush, "I must have the consent of Nizam al Mulk. This thing hath the sound of an infidel monument to me——"

  "It is the only way to measure a hair's breadth change in the shadow each day."

  "A hair's breadth!" Tutush seized his turban and drew the attentive Khwaja Mai'mun aside, to ask in a whisper if the mathematician did not believe Omar befuddled.

  "Fuddled he may be," the old man announced. "As to that I know not. But this I know——" his beard twitched in a faint semblance of a smile—"he is not foolish in making calculations. Such a gnomon as he describes would be accurate. I will even admit that if truly placed it would be as accurate as the great globe of Avicenna yonder."

  Tutush carried his perplexity to Nizam who listened coldly enough to his tale—Omar's disappearance had interfered with his own plans—until he admitted that Khwaja Mai'mun approved of the scheme to measure time.

  "A calendar," the minister of the Court mused. "It would go against tradition—ay, the Ulema would oppose it. The Christians have one calendar from the days of Rome, the Cathayans have their cycles, and we Persians had the Yazdigird era before the Moslem conquest. I think—I think it would be dangerous."

  Closing his eyes, Tutush sighed. "First Omar tells me Time is only one, and now the Arranger of the World doth declare that there are four different Times. Alas, for my understanding."

  "Four calendars," corrected Nizam. "And, Malikshah still asks for Omar."

  "And now Omar asks for a water clock to measure a single minute in a whole day. What would he do with such a contrivance—watch it every livelong moment of waking and sleeping?"

  "With it he could select the day in spring and autumn when day and night are equal to the minute. With the great gnomon he could determine the instant when the sun's shadow at noon is longest in the winter and shortest in the summer. And with his observation of the star movements he could revise both calculations. Yes, I understand what he would do."

  "Inshallah," murmured Tutush. "God willing."

  "If God wills. We could present Malikshah with a new calendar for his reign."

  Nizam suddenly felt that this would be an excellent plan. It would please the Sultan to have a new calendar devised for him alone; being doubly pleased with Omar, he might name the Tentmaker—as Nizam had anticipated from the first—astronomer to the King.

  "I will see that he has his new water clock," he decided. "But what made him wander in that fashion?"

  Tutush blinked and smiled. "Only God knows—thy servant is ignorant."

  "Make it thy task to see that he wanders not again. For I have need of him."

  When he had left Nizam's presence Tutush hastened to his own quarters. At times he retired from sight to a certain nook in an old warehouse overlooking the bazaar and the mosque courtyard, where he kept such belongings as he did not wish to be known to any one else. His hiding hole was guarded by a dumb Egyptian who posed as the owner of the rooms. And here, rooting into a chest with triple locks, Tutush drew out a slender armlet of silver set with turquoises the color of the clear sky.

  It had been brought to the tower by a hunchback who had been the favorite jester of the late Sultan. This hunchback had said it was a token from a woman named Yasmi who had said that her heart was sickening and she was being carried far along the western roads to Aleppo.

  "Only in this one respect is Omar stubborn," Tutush reflected. "And by my soul I will not have him starting off into the western world, to Aleppo. Not with Nizam's anger hanging over my head."

  He decided that he would rid himself of this silver token. Thrusting it into his girdle, he closed the chest and descended to the alleys. When he came to a bevy of half-grown girls playing around a fountain, he took out the silver armlet and dropped it. Nor did he turn his head at the click of the metal against pebbles. There was silence behind him, and then soft exclamations followed by a swift pattering of bare feet. Tutush glanced back.

  The fountain was deserted, and the silver armlet had vanished.

  "Hide a stone among stones," he quoted, smiling, "and a grain of sand in the desert."

  Nizam al Mulk was pleased with events at the observatory. Before the end of the hot season the water clock stood in the workroom. It had a small wheel that revolved sixty times in the hour, and a large wheel that turned once in the hour. A silver point like a spear point moved along a graduated scale bar exactly once between noon and noon, and then started on its return journey during the next day. At least Tutush thought it to be marvelously exact, but Khwaja Mai'mun informed him that after a year or so they would be able to determine its variation from true time. Tutush rejoined that it lacked a miniature horseman, to mark the days with his spear like the one in the Castle. And Mai'mun merely glanced at him, pityingly. Mathematicians, it seemed, did not need any tell-tale to remind them of the days.

  At last all the instruments were in place, and four more observers selected. The new marble gnomon reared skyward, and even Mai'mun admitted that they were ready to begin their great task of measuring time anew. Mai'mun believed it would take seven years, while Omar thought it could be done in four or five.

  "My soul!" cried Tutush. "We could build a palace in four or five weeks."

  "Yes," said Omar, his dark eyes kindling, "and when your palace is broken dust with lizards dwelling there, our calendar will be unchanged."

  "If I had a palace," laughed the plump master of the spies, "I would not care a whit what came to pass after I was laid among the lizards."

  But he reported to Nizam that the six astronomers were ready, with their loins girded up and their wits whetted down to a sword's edge. Nizam thereupon arranged a little drama for the benefit of his lord the Sultan, the week before the autumn equinox—when Omar had told him they planned to begin observations.

  That day Malikshah the Sultan was persuaded to visit the tower after his return from a gazelle hunt. By mid-afternoon the observatory looked like a pleasure pavilion, with carpets spread throughout the new garden and trays of sweetmeats and sherbet set out beneath the trees.

  Thither came a deputation of professors from the academy, with Master Ali the Algebraist—all in court robes—and a group of silent mullahs from the mosque who kept apart from the others. Nizam welcomed these mullahs with all ceremony—and seated them nearest the silk-covered dais reserved for Malikshah, because they were members of the all-powerful religious Council and they brought with them no sympathy for scientific innovations. He whispered to Omar to be careful to stand behind them, and not to speak before them.

  Omar had no desire to say anything. He felt like a spectator at another's party, and he was glad when the salutations ceased and all eyes turned toward a cavalcade of horsemen coming up the slope from the river.

  Malikshah handed his hunting spear to a slave and dismounted at the gate before the anxious servants could spread a carpet for him. He was dusty and in high good humor after his long ride, but Omar thought that the young Sultan felt no real pleasure in meeting Nizam and the oldest of the mullahs. Malikshah's pale face was poised upon a corded neck; he moved with an animal's grace. He did not lift his hands or raise his voice when he spoke.

  When Nizam led Omar forward to kneel before him, he looked intently at the young astronomer. "That is the man," he said in his low voice.

  "The servant," Omar murmured the expected phrase, "of the Lord of the World."

  "At a serai on the Khorasan road thou didst come to me, prophesying what was to be—although those about me had filled my ears with lying words. I have not fo
rgotten. I will not forget. What wilt thou have, now, from my hand?"

  For a moment the two contemplated each other—the warrior still isolated in his thoughts from the crowded world of Islam, still the child of the remote Kha Khan who had ruled an empire of cattle and men up there beyond the Roof of the World—and the scholar who still lived in his imagination. Malikshah was twenty years of age, Omar twenty-two.

  "I ask to be taken into the service of the King."

  "It is done." Malikshah smiled. "Now show me what thou hast made, here."

  He was pleased with the lofty gnomon, and he studied the other instruments curiously. When the aged Mai'mun, rendered awkward by the throng and the presence of his king, tried to explain the great celestial globe, Malikshah turned to Omar and bade him explain. He liked the clear words of the young astronomer.

  The chief of the mullahs, exasperated by the attention shown to the scientific instruments, came forward to assert his dignity.

  "Give heed!" he cried. "It is written, 'Bend not in adoration to the sun or the moon, but bend in adoration before God who created them both, if ye would serve Him!'"

  A murmur of assent from the mullahs greeted the words of the Koran.

  "Also," said Omar at once, "it is written, 'Among his signs are the night and the day, and the sun and the moon. Unless the signs be made clear, how shall we receive them?'"

  Malikshah said nothing. His grandsires, pagan Turks and barbaric, had been converted to Islam, and Malikshah was as devout as the fanatical Nizam. He took farewell ceremoniously of the oldest mullah, but he summoned Omar to his stirrup when he had mounted his horse.

  "The Minister hath besought me," he remarked, "to grant thee the post of astronomer to the King. It is done. At the Council tomorrow a robe of honor shall be given thee." He leaned down impulsively, "Come and sit beside me often. By my head, I have need many times of a true sign."