Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/414

 ��THE TOMB OF OMAR KHAYYAM

��and he took me out to the Hirah Cemetery. I turned to the left and saw his grave (lit. ' dust ') located at the end of the garden-wall. Pear-trees and peach-trees raised their heads from outside the garden ; and so great a shower of blossoms (shikufat) was poured upon his grave that the grave became hidden beneath the roses \_gul, literally ' rose,' but used also of flowers or blossoms in general] ; and the saying occurred to me, which I had heard from him at Balkh. Thereupon I began to weep, because I saw nowhere any one like to him in all this world or in all the regions of the universe.' ^

We turned to the left, as did Nizami of Samarkand eight hundred years ago, and approached the spot where rests the dust of him who gave expression in quatrain poetry to Persia's freest thought.

Though at the end of the garden wall, Omar's grave is now beneath an arched wing ^ that has been added to the left of the Mosque of the Imam-zadah Muhammad Mahruk, a Moslem saint of the eighth century A.D., who was martyred fully three hundred years before Omar's time.^ The present edifice, which

��1 This interesting passage is from Nizami of Samarkand, Chahdr Makdla, edited by Muhammad of Kazvin, in Browne's Gibb Memorial Series, pp. 62-63, London, 1910. Consult also the rendering by Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia, 2. 247, reproduced from his translation in JRAS. 1899, pp. 100- 101 ; and compare the comment made on gul, ' rose,' below. It may also be of interest to note that the story of the rose-blossoms has long been known to the Occident, being recorded, for in- stance, by Hyde, Historia Religionis Vetemm Persarum, pp. 498-500, Ox- ford, 1700, and now familiar to almost everyone who knows of Omar Khay- yam.

2 Even in 1822 Fraser, p. 401, when speaking of the Mosque of Mahruk, said : ' Close by this large edifice there is a small building, in which re- pose the relics of Omar Keyoomee, a

��poet who flourished in the days of the celebrated Nizamool Moolk, '

3 Imam-zadah Muhammad Mahruk, was called Mahruk, ' Burnt,' because he was burned to death by one of the Sunnite governors of Khurasan for having converted to the Shiite tenets a princess of the Caliph's family, with whom he had fallen in love (Sykes, Pilgrimage, p. 137). Nasir ad-Din Shah, Diary, p. 156, simply notes 'Mahruk the Burnt was so named because he was burned alive by the enemies of the true religion ; at his grave is an inscribed stone, said to be seven yards long, although only one yard of it is above ground.' Mahruk was a relative of the famous saint. Imam Riza, of Mashad, who died in 817 A.D. (Sykes, JBAS. 1910, p. 1130, and Pilgrimage, p. 137) ; according to Eraser, p. 400 (of. also p. 618), he was Imam Riza's brother. Yate,

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