The Madressas Weigh In

The colour demonstrations caused a great deal of discussion and debate in the madressas, and Khalid learned during this period never to speak of causes in any opinionated way, or to impinge on the realm of the madressa scholars by speaking of Allah's will, or any other aspect of the nature of reality. He would only say, 'Allah gave us our intelligence to better understand the glory of his work,' or, 'the world often works mathematically. Allah loves numbers, and mosquitos in springtime, and beauty.'

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.

'Sure,' Bahram said, but he had his own worry: 'How much is this going to cost?'

'Oh no, it's already paid for. Khalid sent me off with the funds, otherwise I would not have been able to afford to buy these. They're from an estate sale in Damascus, a very old alchemical family that came to an end with a hermit who had no issue. See here, Zosimos' 'Treatise on Instruments and Furnaces", printed just two years ago, that's for you. I've got the rest arranged chronologically by date of composition, as you can see, here is Jabir's "Sum of perfection", and his "Ten Books of Rectification", and look, 'The Secret of Creation".'

This was a huge sheepskin bound volume. 'Written by the Greek Apollonius. One of its chapters is the fabled "Emerald Table",' tapping its cover delicately. 'That chapter alone is worth twice what I paid for this whole collection, but they didn't know. The original of 'The Emerald Table" was found by Sara the wife of Abraham, in a cave near Hebron, some time after the Great Flood. It was inscribed on a plate of emerald, which Sara found clasped in the hands of the mummified corpse of Thrice greatest Hermes, the father of all alchemy. The writing was in Phoenician characters. Although I must admit I have read other accounts that have it discovered by Alexander the Great. In any case here it is, in an Arabic translation from the time of the Baghdad caliphate.'

'Fine,' Bahram said. He wasn't sure Khalid would still be interested in this stuff.

'You will also find "The Complete Biographies of the immortals", a rather slender volume, considering, and "The Chest of Wisdom", and a book by a Frengi, Bartholomew the Englishman, "On the Properties of Things", also "The Epistle of the Sun to the Crescent Moon", and "The Book of Poisons", perhaps useful, and "The Great Treasure", and "The Document Concerning the Three Similars", in Chinese '

'Iwang will be able to read that,' Bahram said. 'Thank you.' He tried to pick up the box. It was as if filled with rocks, and he staggered.

'Are you sure you'll be able to get it back to the city, and safely?'

'I'll be fine. I'm going to take them to Khalid's, where Iwang has a room for his work. Thanks again. I'm sure Iwang will want to call on you to talk about these, and perhaps Khalid too. How long will you be in Samarqand?'

'Another month, no more.'