White Castle Read Online Free PDF Page B

return home, and since I felt that to debate the particulars of his ‘ideas’, to which I listened with little interest, would, if anything, delay my return, I never openly disagreed with Hoja.

    So we passed the first year, burying ourselves in astronomy, struggling to find proofs of the existence or non-existence of the imaginary planet. But while he worked to design telescopes for the lenses he imported from Flanders at great expense, invented instruments and drew up tables, Hoja forgot the question of the planet; he had become involved in a more profound problem. He would dispute Ptolemy’s system, he said, but we didn’t engage in disputation; he talked while I listened: he said it was folly to believe that the planets hung from transparent spheres; there was something else that held them there, an invisible force, a force of attraction perhaps; then he proposed that the Earth might, like the sun, be revolving around something else, perhaps all the stars turned around some other heavenly centre of whose existence we had no knowledge. Later, claiming his ideas would be far more comprehensive than Ptolemy’s, he included a number of new planets in his observations for a much wider cosmography, producing theories for a new system; perhaps the moon revolved around the Earth, and the Earth around the sun; perhaps the centre was Venus; but he quickly grew tired of these theories. He had just come to the point of saying that the problem now was not to suggest these new ideas but to make the stars and their movements known to men here – and he would begin this task with Sadik Pasha – when he learned that the pasha had been banished to Erzurum. It seems he’d been involved in an abortive conspiracy.

    During the years we waited for the pasha to return from exile, we researched a treatise Hoja would write about the causes of the Bosphorus currents. We spent months observing the tides, roaming the cliffs overlooking the straits in a wind that chilled us to the bone, and descending into the valleys with the pots we carried to measure the temperature and flow of the rivers that emptied into the straits.

    While in Gebze, a town not far from Istanbul where we’d gone at the pasha’s request for three months to look after some business of his, the discrepancies between times of prayer at the mosques gave Hoja a new idea: he would make a clock that would show the times of prayer with flawless accuracy. It was then that I taught him what a table was. When I brought home the piece of furniture I’d had made by a carpenter according to my specifications, Hoja was not pleased. He likened it to a four-legged funeral bier, said it was inauspicious, but later he grew accustomed both to the chairs and the table; he declared he thought and wrote better this way. We had to go back to Istanbul to have gears for the prayer clocks cast in an elliptical shape corresponding to the arc of the setting sun. On the return journey our table, its legs pointing to the stars, followed us on the back of a mule.

    In those first months, while we sat facing one another at the table, Hoja tried to work out how to calculate the times of prayer and fasting in northern countries where there was a great variation in the duration of day and night and a man went for years without seeing the face of the sun. Another problem was whether or not there was a place on earth where people could face Mecca whichever way they turned. The more he realized that I was indifferent to these problems, the more contemptuous he became, but I thought at the time that he discerned my ‘superiority and difference’, and perhaps he was irritated because he believed that I, too, was aware of it: he talked about intelligence as much as he did about science; when the pasha returned he would gain favour by his plans, his theories of cosmography which he would develop further and then demonstrate by means of a model, and by the new clock; he would infect all of us with the