Omar Khayyam - a life

by Harold Lamb

  As he spoke the light left the mound abruptly. Hassan appeared not at all disturbed. Saying that he knew the labyrinth of the ruins as well as a priest knows a wineshop, he took Omar by the hand and started down the narrow path. Once below the summit, they could see nothing, yet Hassan pressed on with his long strides. Behind them, Omar heard the flapping of wings, as if the giant bird were following. Then without word of farewell, Hassan let go his hand and vanished into the night. The sound of the wings trailed away and ceased.

  In his own tent, Omar found the slaves waiting, crouched by the lighted lamp. For a while before sleeping he pondered the meeting with Hassan, who had a gift of the grotesque. Omar was aware that Hassan had expected him to come—the strange servant who brought the tale having vanished—and that in some way unknown to himself he had been put to a test.

  The light, no doubt, had been a cleverly concealed lamp. But who, except for hunting gazelles, had ever tamed an eagle?

  Omar asked many times for tidings of a Hassan ibn Sabah who spoke like an Egyptian, but he could find no one in the army who knew him.

  The mount above the valley of the damned, opposite the east wall of Jerusalem.

  By little things Omar understood that Nizam watched over him from a distance. No strolling players were allowed to confront him again. A smiling Hindu letter writer visited his tent at hours when he was alone, and gossiped about affairs in Balkh or Samarkand—and all Malikshah's actions.

  Most helpful of all, weekly letters came from Nizam himself. Apparently these letters gave tidings of Nizam's work: actually they discussed policies to be followed, dangers to be avoided. Thus, Omar came to understand how important it was for Malikshah's army to take possession of Jerusalem—Al Kuds, the Holy, Nizam called it. Malikshah had become the recognized champion of the Kalif of Baghdad, who was looked upon by millions of believers as the head of Islam. Already the Seljuk Turks had won the overlordship of the two holy cities, Mecca and Medinah. It was important to add the third, Jerusalem, to the empire, taking it from the unlawful rule of the schismatic kalif of Cairo.

  For a similar reason, Malikshah ought to press the campaign against the infidel Byzantines in the north. So long as the champion of Islam pursued the path of the jihad, the holy war, he would never lack for men to follow his banners . . . new clans of Turkish riders had drifted down from the steppes, and Nizam was sending them west to join the army.

  Thus Omar could understand clearly how Nizam wove together his threads, as a rugmaker sitting before the loom knotted together tiny bits of wool, meaningless in themselves, but part of the pattern of the whole rug.

  When he was asked by Malikshah if the time were favorable for an advance against Jerusalem, he did not need to hesitate.

  "Verily," he said, "this month will be favorable. The planet Mars stands close to thy Sign."

  This was true, as Malikshah well knew; yet if Omar had objected—so utterly did the Sultan rely on his astronomer—Malikshah would have changed his plans.

  The army was encamped then in the red plain of Aleppo, and Omar decided to ride south with the cavalry of Amir Aziz who was to occupy Jerusalem. He wanted to see the western sea—he had never beheld the shore of an ocean—and make the pilgrimage to the Farthest Mosque, which was in Jerusalem. So he explained to Malikshah. But he had searched the marketplace of Aleppo and all the towns upon the way without news of a cloth-merchant of Meshed who traveled with a young wife.

  From Aleppo, he knew that many caravans went south to Damascus, thence to cross the desert to Egypt. He might find some trace of Yasmi on this southern road. ... If only he had Tutush's means of gathering crumbs of information!

  "So thou wilt make the pilgrimage,' Malikshah assented. 'Then make a prayer of nine bowings for me at the mihrab of the Farthest Mosque."

  It seemed to the young Turk most fitting that the Tentmaker, whose wisdom was a gift from God, should complete a pilgrimage during the course of the campaign. But he was careful to have Omar leave him a chart of fortunate and unfortunate days for the term of his absence. The three planets, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter, were in conjunction in the sign of the Dragon, which was the sign ascendant at Malikshah's birth, so momentous events might be looked for. And he gave his astronomer a bimbashi with an imperial standard and a dozen horsemen of Black Cathay from his own guard for escort during the journey.

  To the bimbashi, he gave command never to allow Omar, asleep or awake, out of sight of two of his men.

  So, go where he would, Omar was always attended by a pair of silent bowmen. ( The bimbashi had informed his followers that the one who lost sight of Omar would lose his head.)

  And Omar led them into unexpected bypaths. From Damascus, where he had haunted the marketplace, he led them up over the pine-clad shoulders of Lebanon past the gray summit of mighty Hermon with its snow cap gleaming against the sky, down to the waters of the sea.

  Omar spent hours wandering along the sandy beaches, sniffing the air, examining the strange debris cast up at the water's edge.

  This was the edge of the Great Sea, over which the Greeks and Romans had come in their galleys, to build ports of marble, now half ruined. Here was Tyre, stretching far out into the sea, and Sidon with its foundations visible beneath the water. He climbed the round height of Mount Carmel where strange Christian saints had lived and died.

  Then he rode inland, to descend the steep slope to the sunken lake of Galilee. It seemed to the Cathayans as if there must be devils in this valley lying down in the maw of the earth, with its sulphur springs and mosaic pavement of a forgotten palace, and its sad, bearded men called Jews.

  But when they ascended toward Jerusalem they found themselves in familiar surroundings. The Sultan's army, after its capture of the holy city, had pillaged the infidels upon the countryside. They rode through fields of trampled grain, beneath the blackened walls of monasteries that had been sacked and given to the torch. At times they saw groups of strange people—men without turbans and women unveiled, with children in their arms—laboring to make graves for heaps of bodies.

  On the highroad they passed chains of slaves, bought by traders from the Turkish soldiers, on their way north to be sold at Damascus. And Omar remembered his return along the great Khorasan road with Zoë and Yarmak.

  He halted at the camp of Malikshah's commander, the Amir Aziz, because the bimbashi insisted it would not be safe to stay at night within the walls of Jerusalem. But he went by daylight to visit the Moslem sanctuary, where there had been no fighting.

  This marble enclosure, the Haram, he found thronged with mullahs who had accompanied the army and who had now taken possession of the Aksa mosque—the imam pronouncing the prayers from the pulpit in the names of the Kalif of Baghdad and Sultan Malikshah. The Egyptian preachers had fled the city. To escape the crowd, Omar entered the Dome of the Rock, where in the half darkness of the painted glass windows there was silence.

  Here he knelt to pray with his hands upon the gray rock that was only less sacred than the black stone within the sanctuary of Mecca. The half-pagan Cathayans who followed at his heels knelt also, peering curiously at the marble piers of the dome and the gold mosaics.

  When Omar rose, a low voice greeted him respectfully.

  "Peace, to the seeker of salvation."

  "And upon thee, the peace," he responded.

  Hassan ibn Sabah stood at his elbow with another man. This time Hassan wore pilgrim dress and he chose to speak in Arabic which seemed to be as familiar to him as Persian.

  'To Allah the praise," he smiled, "that I have found my friend again. Wilt thou know what is in this Dome of the Rock, more than the Rock itself?"

  When he spoke, heads turned toward him. Hassan had the gift of holding attention, and the listeners drew closer as he explained that a mark upon the gray stone had been made by the foot of Muhammad the Prophet, when he ascended into heaven from this spot—and the holes along its edge had been made by the hand of the angel Gabriel, restraining the rock from rising after Muh
ammad. (The Cathayans pressed near with exclamations of wonder at this evidence of a manifest miracle.)

  "Below," Hassan explained, "is the cavern where the waiting souls will gather at the Judgment Day. Follow me!"

  Lighting a candle—he seemed to know where to find everything—he persuaded a mullah to let them descend into the grotto beneath the rock, where he pointed out in whispers certain signs of the supernatural. The Cathayans, grim in their leather armor and bronze helmets, grew afraid, but Hassan's companion, a stout man in a velvet kaftan, whispered to Omar that there would hardly be room here for more than a score of souls—unless, indeed, souls should become smaller than atoms.

  Going up to the rotunda of the shrine, Hassan held his candle close to one of the piers.

  "Long ago, soon after the ascension of our lord Muhammad," he said, "a Kalif of Islam caused these words to be written in gold. Behold!"

  Omar made out an inscription in rectangular Kufic, which he could barely interpret; yet Hassan read it with ease:

  " 'There is no God but God alone; he hath no partner . . . Verily Jesus, the son of Mary, is the messenger of God. Then believe in God and his messengers, and do not say there are three Gods; forbear, and it will be better for you.'"

  Hassan touched Omar upon the arm. "Few have beheld these words since they were placed there; fewer have read them—and who has understood them? But thou wilt remember, and thou wilt understand, perhaps."

  Then, as if growing impatient of the crowd that gathered around him, Hassan led the Tentmaker through the narrow streets of the city, pointing out things that would have escaped another's notice. The other man followed them silently, buried in his own thoughts.

  "Here," explained Hassan, "is the arch and the window from which a Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, spoke to the priests of the Jews, when that same Nazarene—upon whom be peace—was delivered to the soldiery to be slain on a cross. Now the rock upon which that cross stood has been forgotten by the Christians."

  Pushing past groups of armed Turks, arguing over piles of spoil in the streets, he smiled. "Thus it has always been with Jerusalem—its walls broken down, its people slain by the soldiers of the kings. Yea, in one lifetime during the last years of our lord Muhammad—upon whom be peace—the Persian Chosroes, egged on by the Jews, laid it waste, and the swords of the Roman emperor, Heraclitus, took it again. Then the Christians made great slaughter of the Jews. Our Kalif, Omar, entered the city in truce and shed no blood; he cleared the dung and rubbish from the rock—thou hast seen it—of the Haram which is the true rock of the temple of Solomon and David. But now these Turks have shed blood, in ignorance. Their day will be short, for the city will be taken from them by new enemies."

  "By whom?" asked the other man.

  Impatiently Hassan shook his head. "That lies behind the curtain of the Invisible. I say only that the Moslems will lose Jerusalem—ay, at the hand of a new and terrible foe—because they could not dwell here in peace. 'Believe in God and his messengers, and do not say that there are three Gods; forbear, and it will be better for you.' But who will heed the written word of truth?"

  Omar thought of Nizam weaving his fabric of empire, and of Malikshah. Neither of them had seen the bare-headed people burying their dead, or the blackened walls of monasteries. He felt stirred by Hassan's passionate words.

  "We know," said the other man calmly, "that there are three Gods in the minds of men. One is the Yahweh of the Jews, one is the God of the Christians, one is the Allah of the Koran."

  "Thrice," replied Hassan, "thou hast said 'one.' What if there be but one? What if the Jews, the Christians, and the Moslems have each a little insight toward the truth, that there is One greater than Allah——"

  He broke off, with a quick glance about him, and motioned them to follow.

  This time he led them back toward the Haram, but turned aside to go out through the gate that opened to the east. They walked through the tombstones of the Moslem cemetery that pressed against the very wall of the city.

  The path wound down into a ravine of clay and bare stones where along the dry bed of a stream mounted archers were driving sheep and black goats pillaged from the countryside. Seeing that Omar wished to pass through the sheep, the two Cathayans opened up a way, the archers hastening to aid them, at sight of the uniforms of the Sultan's guard.

  "It seems," observed Hassan's companion, smiling, "that the cohorts of war are your servants."

  He was a heavy man, who moved slowly upon his feet. His eyes were veined, wearied, and always guarded. His words, few and penetrating, revealed nothing of himself. Hassan called him Akroenos and said that he was grandfather of all the merchants.

  "And why not?" Hassan inquired, "when the soldiers obey the Sultan's will, and Master Omar shapes the Sultan's will? He is not only court astrologer, he is prophet-in-particular to the beardless Seljuk emperor."

  Akroenos looked at Omar without expression, as if weighing him in the scales of his mind. They were climbing a gravel slope, past a grove of gnarled olive trees. Almost hidden in the trees lay the body of a monk in its black robe with its arms outstretched in the form of a cross. The shaven head made a white spot against the gray stones.

  " 'Tis some sanctuary of the Christians," Hassan remarked. "This that we climb, they call the Mount of Olives."

  The level sun of the late afternoon beat against the bare hill. On the summit the three men sat in silence, while miniature human beings pressed up and down the ravine below them, and the setting sun gilded the distant Dome of the Rock.

  Omar knew the name of this valley, the Wadi Jehannem, the Valley of the Damned. Here, the mullahs of Islam taught, the souls of the condemned would pass at the Judgment day when all souls would be weighed in the balance. There were queer-looking tombs on the slope beneath him, already dark in shadow. The sun had become a ball of fire, deepening into red, suspended above the domes of the holy city.

  Beside them a line of old men moved slowly down into the valley. Each one grasped the garment or the shoulder of the one before him, as they shuffled and stumbled along, some with faces upraised, some with drooping heads, for they were blind.

  "Look," cried Hassan suddenly, "there go we. Ay, we peer at the sky, we search the earth with blind eyes. If we could know the truth!"

  "We know," murmured Akroenos, "enough."

  Hassan stretched out his arms toward the setting sun, his eyes kindling. "Nay, we are the blind. We know only what is behind us. What do we hold sacred, but old stones and buried bones? What if there be a higher God than the Allah of the Koran?"

  Rubbing his fingers through his beard, Akroenos was silent.

  Omar watched the ball of the sun take shape in the sunset fire. But a passion of speech had come upon the son of Sabah.

  He believed in a new God, inaccessible to human reason. All religions in the past, he said, had been successive steps toward this final understanding. All, to a certain extent, had enlightened men. So with the six prophets—Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. In time—no one could say when—there would appear a seventh, to reveal the final truth.

  "And how," asked Akroenos calmly, "will he be known?"

  "He will be known, because he hath been among us in the past, when the time was not arrived. He was the seventh imam of the race of Ali, heritor of the soul of Ali. To some he is known as the seventh imam, to others as the Veiled One. What matter the name? He is the Mahdi, whom we await, unknowing."

  Behind the gray wall and the domes of the holy city, the ball of the sun sank out of sight. Akroenos sighed gently.

  "The Mahdi," Hassan repeated. "He was here when the white hand of Moses stretched from the bough, and again when the breath of Jesus passed over this land. But he will come again."

  A step sounded behind them. One of the Cathayan archers who had been dozing while the wise men talked, said diffidently that it was time to return to the camp. Hassan smiled, his mood changing.

  "The soldier always has the last word—whether
Roman or Turk."

  That twilight upon the Mount of Olives remained fixed in Omar's mind long after he had washed and supped in his own tent. While he was musing, the merchant Akroenos appeared, followed by a boy who laid a roll of white floss silk at the feet of the Tentmaker.

  "A small gift," Akroenos said, "as remembrance of our meeting. If a merchant can aid your Excellency——"

  "What think ye of Hassan?"

  Akroenos rubbed his grizzled beard. "Eh, he may be mad, yet he knows more than any other man I have met. There be many who believe in his message. Now I have heard that your Excellency seeks tidings—some word of it came to me in the caravanserai."

  "Yes."

  "It was told me that several months ago Abu'l Zaid, the cloth-merchant of Meshed who took another wife in Nisapur——" he glanced inquiringly at Omar.

  "What of him?"

  "He abode a while in Aleppo, and then departed to the north. It was several months ago."

  Omar drew a deep breath. At least Yasmi had been at Aleppo, and he might come upon some trace of her.

  "Thou hast brought me two gifts," he said gravely. "What wilt thou have, from my hand?"

  "For myself, nothing," Akroenos hesitated. "But think kindly of Hassan, who would be your friend. A time may come when he will lay the hand of supplication upon the skirt of your generosity."

  When the merchant had made his salaam and departed, a vagrant memory tugged at Omar's mind. Going to the box of Nizam's letters, he drew out one and reread it carefully. It contained a warning against a new sect of mulahid, impious ones. "They preach," the Minister had written in his precise hand, "the coming of a new Mahdi who will overthrow the thrones and the laws of Islam, and they assert that their religion will be the seventh and last of the world. They have been making secret appeals to the followers of the accursed one who called himself the Veiled One of Khorasan. These heretics wear white when they preach their abominable falsehoods—may Allah send them to everlasting torment."