The Year of Rice and Salt

The scholars went away amused, or irritated, but in any case in a ferment of philosophy. The madressas of Registan Square and elsewhere in the city, and out at Ulug Bek's old observatory, were buzzing with the new fashion of making demonstrations of various physical phenomena, and Khalid's was not the only mechanical workshop that could build an ever more complex array of new machines and devices. The mathematicians of Sher Dor Madressa, for instance, interested everyone with a surprising new mercury scale, simple to construct a bowl containing a pool of mercury, with a narrow tube of mercury, scaled at the top but not the bottom, set upright in the liquid in the bowl. The mercury in the tube dropped a certain distance, creating another mysterious void in the gap left at the top of the tube; but the remainder of the tube stayed filled with a column of mercury. The Sher Dor mathematicians asserted that it was the weight of the world's air on the mercury in the bowl that pushed down on it enough to keep the mercury in the cylinder from falling all the way down into the bowl. Others maintained it was the disinclination of the void in the top of the tube to grow. Following a suggestion of Iwang's, they took their device to the top of Snow Mountain, in the Zeravshan Range, and all there saw that the level of mercury in the tube had dropped, presumably because there was less weight of air on it up there, two or three thousand hands higher than the city. This was a great support for Khalid's previous contention that air weighed on them, and a refutation of Aristotle, and al Farabi and the rest of the Aristotelian Arabs, who claimed that the four elements want to be in their proper places, high or low. This claim Khalid ridiculed, at least in private. 'As if stones or the wind could want to be some place or other, as a man does. It's really nothing but circular definition again. "Things fall because they want to fall", as if they could want. Things fall because they fall, that's all it means. Which is fine, no one knows why things fall, certainly not me, it is a very great mystery. All the seeming cases of action at a distance are a mystery. But first we must say so, we must distinguish the mysteries as mysteries, and proceed from there, demonstrating what happens, and then seeing if that leads us to any thoughts concerning the how or the why.'

The sufi scholars were still inclined to extrapolate from any given demonstration to the ultimate nature of the cosmos, while the mathematically inclined were fascinated by the purely numerical aspects of the results, the geometry of the world as it was revealed. These and other approaches combined in a burst of activity, consisting of demonstrations and talk, and private work on slates over mathematical formulations, and artisanal labour on new or improved devices. On some days it seemed to Bahram that these investigations had filled all Samarqand: Khalid's compound and the others, the madressas, the ribat, the bazaars, the coffee stalls, the caravanserai, where the traders would take the news out to all the world… it was beautiful.

The Chest of Wisdom

Out beyond the western wall of the city, where the old Silk Road ran towards Bokhara, the Armenians were quiet in their little caravanserai, tucked beside the large and raucous Hindu one. The Armenians were cooking in the dusk over their braziers. Their women were bare headed and bold eyed, laughing among themselves in their own language. Armenians were good traders, and yet reclusive for all that. They trafficked only in the most expensive goods, and knew everything about everywhere, it seemed. Of all the trading peoples, they were the most rich and powerful. Unlike the Jews and Nestorians and Zott, they had a little homeland in the Caucasus to which most of them regularly returned, and they were Muslim, most of them, which gave them a tremendous advantage across Dar al Islam which was to say all the world, except for China, and India below the Deccan. Rumours that they only pretended to be Muslim, and were secretly Christians all the while, struck Bahram as envious backstabbing by other traders, probably the tricky Zott, who had been cast out of India long before (some said Egypt), and now wandered the world homeless, and did not like the Armenians' inside position in so many of the most lucrative markets and products.

Bahram wandered among their fires and lamplight, stopping to chat and accept a swallow of wine with familiars of his, until an old man pointed out the bookseller Mantuni, even older, a wizened hunchbacked little man who wore spectacles that made his eyes appear the size of lemons. His Turkic was basic and heavily accented, and Bahram switched to Persian, which Mantuni acknowledged with a grateful dip of the head. The old man indicated a wooden box on the ground, filled entirely with books he had obtained for Khalid in Frengistan. 'Will you be able to carry it?' he asked Bahram anxiously.