Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/399

 A brief halt was made at the post-station near a ' battered caravansarai ' ^ resembling those that were known in the days of Omar, and then a fresh start was taken at a quickened pace, in order that we might reach the city before noon.

Pilgrims with the green banners of Islam thronged the road. Whether or not they represented one or other of ' the two-and- seventy jarring sects,' ^ they were certainly not on their way to free-thinking Omar's tomb, but had been on a pilgrimage to the hallowed shrine at Mashad, the holiest city in Persia, and were homeward-bound with the rich store of accumulated merit that was assured them by the tenets of their faith.

If questioned about Nishapur and its history, some of them, by the merest chance, might have told us stray snatches of the legendary tales of the town, while among a few there might linger the memory that the storms of the Tartar and Mongol invasions had swept over the city in the early thirteenth cen- tury, joining more than once with devastating earthquakes to shift the site of Nishapur, as explained hereafter. Surely all would know that the blue dome of the shrine yonder in the distance was raised over the sacred remains of the Imam-zadah Muhammad Mahruk, mentioned hereafter as a kinsman of the sainted Riza of Mashad and a pillar of the faith. Only a half dozen would know of Omar, and then as Hakim Khayyam^ ' Doctor Khayyam,' the scientist and astronomer whose compu- tations ' reduced the year to better reckoning ' ; they might possibly add that he was a philosopher and sage, but none would remember him as a poet.^ Omar, in fact, has not the qualities that appeal to Muhammadan orthodoxy in Persia. He was a Sunnite, whereas they belong to the Shiite sect ; his very name recalls the hated Sunni caliph Omar and the Arab

1 FG. 16 (17), P. 199, Wh. 70, Th. » I recall the fact that one of the 16, In kuhnah ribdt, 'this old fortified Grand Vizirs at Teheran, who knew caravansarai.' English, said to me, 'Your famous

2 FG. 43 (59), cf. Th. 43, H-A. 77, version by FitzGerald is better than Wh. 194, haftdd u du millat, 'seventy the original'

and two sects.'

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