Read Online Omar Khayyam - a life by Harold Lamb - Free Book Online

mourning. Still, there were paths near by along the river, and friendly clumps of willows where lovers awaited them.
    Yasmi had wandered far off. She lay outstretched on a hillock, watching the pigeons that circled over her head. These pigeons had their home in the half-ruined wall that surrounded the girl. The wall had no roof, because it was only a barrier about the great tower that rose within it.
    The tower had been built originally for a watch post to overlook the river and the plain beyond the cemetery; but in these last years of peace the tower had been abandoned to the pigeons and to chance wanderers like Omar who had frequented it at night to study the stars.
    "Ai-a" Yasmi murmured, "why did I come?"
    Her thoughts darted forth heedlessly as the pigeons that circled against the sun. She had planned very carefully what she would do at such a time, copying her sister in casting bewitching glances and speaking provocative words to the man at her side—until the man would lose his very senses in desire for her. But her hands trembled in the long sleeves of the Friday gown, and her words tumbled out without meaning.
    And the man at her side had been silent such a long time. There was a hunger in his eyes.
    "Eh, say," she insisted.
    'What shall I say, little Yasmi?" Omar did not so much as turn his head, but he was conscious of the girl's white throat, the darkness of her lips and shadowed eyes.
    "Have you not been to the war and seen the Sultan? And— and many other girls in many towns? What else did you see? Tell me!"
    Fleetingly Omar thought of Zoë and the long Khorasan road.
    "It was nothing," he said suddenly. " W'allah , we moved about like pawns upon a chessboard, and then we were back in our boxes again. Who can tell anything about a battle?"
    Yasmi remembered as if from a great age the conquering amir of the white horse with swordsmen at his tail who would take her away to the pleasure kiosk with its swans.
    "What will you do in Nisapur?" she asked curiously.
    "Who knows?"
    "Are you going away again?"
    Omar shook his head. He did not want to go away, or to think about anything except Yasmi who had changed in these years from a grave child to a lovely and disturbing woman. And yet she had not changed. With his chin on his arm, his dark face intent, he watched the tiny people moving back from the cypresses of the cemetery to the distant gates of the city.
    "They say," persisted the girl, "you were the favored disciple of the Mirror of Wisdom, and now you are like to be a master."
    It did not surprise Omar that she had heard such talk, for the Street of the Booksellers knew the gossip of the Academy.
    "And I say," he smiled, "that I have no place to work, no protector, nor anything of my own. The dervish hath his tricks and the teacher hath his living, but what have I?"
    Yasmi snuggled down into the grass pleasantly. If he were really a beggar, then he would not be taken away from her. So much the better. "Instead of being wise—" the words slipped from her lips—"thou art more foolish than Ahmed the soothsayer who gets much silver for reading the stars. He has an abba of silk and a black slave. . . . Look, the last of the women are turning back. Surely, I must go!"
    But when he laid his hand upon her wrist she did not rise. The pigeons were perched in crannies of the tower, leaving the sky empty. "There is the moon," she said, pointing, "and now I must go."
    "Soon there will be a star between the horns of that new moon."
    "Nay, I shall not see it." A laugh rippled from her. "Thou alone, perched in this great tower of thine, wilt see it—and all the other stars. Are you not afraid of the ghosts that come up from the burying place, to sit in their shrouds?"
    "Nay, they are friendly ghosts. They bring me astrolabes and star lanterns and teach me what the Chaldeans knew."
    Her eyes widened in sudden fright. Men had said that Omar possessed a strange wisdom, by which mysteries were revealed to him, and perhaps he did