Samarkand Read Online Free PDF Page B

point. ‘Let us say that I would like something in exchange.’
    They had arrived at the gateway of his residence. He invited Khayyam to continue their conversation around a table laden with
     food.
    ‘I have thought up a project for you, a book project. Let us forget your
Rubaiyaat
for a moment. As far as I am concerned they are just the inevitable whims of genius. The real domains in which you excel
     are medicine, astrology, mathematics, physics and metaphysics.Am I mistaken when I say that since Ibn Sina’s death there is none who knows them better than you?’
    Khayyam said nothing. Abu Taher continued:
    ‘It is in those areas of knowledge that I expect you to write the definitive book, and I want you to dedicate that book to
     me.’
    ‘I don’t think that there can be a definitive book in those disciplines, and that is exactly why I have been content to read
     and to learn without writing anything myself.’
    ‘Explain yourself!’
    ‘Let us consider the Ancients – the Greeks, the Indians and the Muslims who have come before me. They wrote abundantly in
     all those disciplines. If I repeat what they have said, then my work is redundant; if I contradict them, as I am constantly
     tempted, others will come after me to contradict me. What will there remain tomorrow of the writings of the intellectuals?
     Only the bad that they have said about those who came before them. People will remember what they have destroyed of others’
     theories, but the theories they construct themselves will inevitably be destroyed and even ridiculed by those who come after.
     That is the law of science. Poetry does not have a similar law. It never negates what has come before it and is never negated
     by what follows. Poetry lives in complete calm through the centuries. That is why I wrote my
Rubaiyaat
. Do you know what fascinates me about science? It is that I have found the supreme poetry: the intoxicating giddiness of
     numbers in mathematics and the mysterious murmur of the universe in astronomy. But, by your leave, please do not speak to
     me of Truth.’
    He was silent for a moment and then continued:
    ‘It happened that I was taking a walk round about Samarkand and I saw ruins with inscriptions that people could no longer
     decipher, and I wondered, “What is left of the city which used to exist here?” Let us not speak about people, for they are
     the most ephemeral of creatures, but what is left of their civilisation? What kingdom, science, law and truth existed here?
     Nothing, I searched around those ruins in vain and all I found was a face engraved on a potsherd and a fragment of a frieze.
     That is what my poems will be in a thousand years – shards, fragments, the detritus of a worldburied for all eternity. What remains of a city is the detached gaze with which a half-drunk poet looked at it.’
    ‘I understand your words,’ stuttered Abu Taher, rather at sea. ‘However you would not dedicate to a
qadi
of the Shafi ritual poems which smack of wine!’
    In fact, Omar would be able to appear conciliatory and grateful. He would water down his wine, so to speak. During the following
     months, he undertook to compile a very serious work on cubic equations. To represent the unknown in this treatise on algebra,
     Khayyam used the Arabic term
shay
, which means thing. This word, spelled
xay
in Spanish scientific works, was gradually replaced by its first letter, x, which became the universal symbol for the unknown.
    This work of Khayyam’s was completed at Samarkand and dedicated to his protector: ‘We are the victims of an age in which men
     of science are discredited and very few of them have the possibility of committing themselves to real research. The little
     knowledge that today’s intellectuals have is devoted to the pursuit of material aims. I had thus despaired of finding in this
     world a man as interested in the scientific as the mundane, a man preoccupied by the fate of mankind, until God accorded me