Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/469

 composed against his royal patron when disappointed, in his old age, of the reward that was to crown his work. Tradition says that Firdausi was a septuagenarian when he finished the last of the sixty thousand couplets that make up his ' Book of Kings ' ; and he now looked for the recompense of his twenty-five (or, according to other accounts, thirty, or thirty-five) years of labor. But jealousy had, meanwhile, sprung up at court, and subtle intrigue had not been idle during his long residence near Mahmud's throne. The Ghaznavid monarch was induced to send sixty thousand silver dirhams, instead of the same number of gold dinars, as a remuneration for the poem. Firdausi is said to have been in the bath when the elephant laden with the money bags arrived. On discovering the deception, the infuri- ated poet divided the money between the bath-attendant and the man who brought him a glass of sherbet, and then vented his spleen in the famous satire on Mahmud, after which he fled for his life. For ten years he was a wanderer, though meeting ultimately with a princely patron in Tabaristan, who sought to assuage his wrath against Mahmud, so that he expunged the savage lines written in derision of the unappreciative monarch, while to his new benefactor he dedicated the romantic poem, composed in his old age, of * Yusuf and Zulaikha,' on the love of Potiphar's wife for Joseph. In the bard's last days the longing came upon him to return to his old home at Tus, where he died of a broken heart, it is said, on hearing a little child in the market-place repeating verses from his terrible satire.

The story goes on to say that Mahmud in the meanwhile had relented of his anger, and had despatched to the city of Tus a magnificent caravan with gifts fully equivalent to the promised gold pieces of which Firdausi had been disappointed. But all too late. The treasure-laden camel train entered the city gate as the funeral cortege was conducting the dead poet's body to the grave. The final details are best told in the words of Nizami of Samarkand, who visited Firdausi's tomb in the year 1116 or 1117 A.D.

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