The Year of Rice and Salt

The beautiful land they crossed was stitched by mountain ridges, between which stood high, broad plateaux. Crossing them, Bistami felt they had travelled up into a higher space, where sunsets threw long shadows over a vast, dark, windy world. Once when a last shard of sunset light shot under dark lowering clouds, Bistami heard from somewhere in their camp a musician playing a Turkish oboe, carving in the air a long plaintive melody that wound on and on, the song of the dusky plateau's own voice or soul, it seemed. The Sultana stood at the edge of camp, listening with him, her fine head turned like a hawk's as she watched the sun descend. It dropped at the very speed of time itself. There was no need to speak in this singing world, so huge, so knotted; no human mind could ever comprehend it, even the music only touched the hem of it, and even that strand they failed to understand – they only felt it. The universal whole was beyond them.

And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don't know we have, glimpses of that larger world – vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.

The Sultana stirred. The stars were shining in the indigo sky. She went to one of the fires. She had chosen him as their qadi, Bistami realized, to give herself more room for her own ideas. A community like theirs needed a sufi teacher rather than a mere scholar.

Well, it would become clearer as it happened. Meanwhile, the Sultana; the sound of the oboe; this vast plateau. These things only happen once. The force of this sensation struck him just as strongly as the feel of alreadyness had in the ribat garden.

Just as the Andalusi plateaux stood high under the sun, its rivers were likewise deep in ravines, like the wadi of the Maghrib, but always running. The rivers were also long, and crossing them was no easy matter. The town of Saragossa had grown in the past because of its great stone bridge, which spanned one of the biggest of these rivers, called the Ebro. Now the town was still substantially abandoned, with only some road merchants and vendors and shepherds clustered around the bridge, in stone buildings that looked as if they had been built by the bridge itself, in its sleep. The rest of the town was gone, overgrown by pine trees and shrubbery.

But the bridge remained. It was made of dressed stones, big squarish blocks worn so smooth they appeared bevelled, though they eventually met in lines that would not admit a coin or even a fingernail. The foundations on each bank were squat massive stone towers, resting on bedrock, Ibn Ezra said. He studied them with great interest as the backed up caravan crossed it and set camp on the other side. Bistami looked at his drawing of it. 'Beautiful, isn't it? Like an equation. Seven semi-circular arches, with a big one in the middle, over the deep part of the stream. Every Roman bridge I've seen is very nicely fitted to the site. Almost always they use semi circular arches, which make for strength, although they don't cover much distance, so they needed a lot of them. And always ashlar, that's the squared stones. So they sit squarely on each other, and nothing ever moves them. There's nothing tricky about it. We could do it ourselves, if we took the time and trouble. The only real problem is protecting the foundations from floods. I've seen some done really well, with iron tipped piles driven into the river bottom. But if anything's going to go, it's the foundations. When they tried to do those quicker, with a big weight of rock, they dammed the water, and increased its force against what they put in.'

'Where I come from bridges are washed out all the time,' Bistami said. 'People just build another one.'

'Yes, but this is so much more elegant. I wonder if they put any of this down on paper. I haven't seen any books of theirs. The libraries left behind here are terrible, all account books, with the occasional bit of pornography. If there was ever anything more it's been burned to start fires. Anyway, the stones tell the story. See, the stones were cut so well there was no need for mortar. The iron pegs you see sticking out were probably used to anchor scaffolding.'

'The Mughals build well in Sind,' Bistami said, thinking of the perfect joints in Chishti's tomb. 'But mostly the temples and forts. The bridges are usually bamboo, set in piles of stone.'

Ibn nodded. 'You see a lot of that. But maybe this river doesn't flood as much. It seems like dry country.'