Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

Author:Amin Maalouf [Maalouf, Amin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
ISBN: 9780748131242
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2012-04-18T18:15:00+00:00

For a long time it was believed that the Samarkand Manuscript had also been consumed in the inferno of Alamut.

BOOK THREE

The End of the Millennium

Arise, we have eternity for sleeping!’

OMAR KHAYYAM

CHAPTER 25

Until now I have spoken little of myself. I have been trying to expose, as faithfully as possible, what the Samarkand Manuscript reveals of Khayyam and of those he knew and some of the events he witnessed. It remains to be told just how this work, spared at the time of the Mongols, has come down to our time, and through what adventures I managed to gain possession of it, and to start with – through what stroke of luck I learnt of its existence.

I have already mentioned my name, Benjamin O. Lesage. In spite of its French sound, the heritage of a Huguenot forebear who emigrated in Louis XIV’s century, I am an American citizen and a native of Annapolis in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, a modest inlet of the Atlantic. My connection with France is not limited, however, to that distant forefather and my father applied himself to renewing the link. He had always had an obsession about his origins – even noting in his school book: ‘Was my genealogical tree felled in order to construct a get-away boat!’, and he set about learning French. Then, with pomp and circumstance, he crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the hands of time.

His year of pilgrimage was either extremely badly or well chosen. He left New York on 9 July 1870, on board the Scotia; he reached Cherbourg on the 18th and was in Paris on the evening of the 19th with war having been declared at mid-day. There followed retreat, calamity, invasion, famine, the Commune and massacres. My father was never to live a more intense year. It would remain his finest memory, why should it be denied? There is a perverse joy in finding oneself in a besieged city where barricades fall as others arise and men and women rediscover the joys of primitive bonding. How many times in Annapolis, around the inevitable holiday turkey, would father and mother recall with emotion the piece of elephant trunk they had shared on New Year’s eve in Paris and which they had bought for forty francs a pound at Roos’, the English butcher on Boulevard Haussmann!

They had just become engaged, they were to be married a year later, and the war christened their happiness. ‘Upon my arrival in Paris,’ my father would recall, ‘I took up the habit of going to Cafe Riche in the morning, on the Boulevard des Italiens. With a pile of newspapers, le Temps, le Gaulois, le Figaro, la Presse, I would settle down at a table, reading every line and listing discreetly in a notebook the words I could not understand – words such as “gaiter” or “moblot” – so that I would be able, upon my return to my hotel, to ask the erudite concierge.

‘The third day a man with a grey moustache came and sat at the next table.

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