232 NISHAPURj THE HOME OF OMAR KHAYYAM
conquest ; and his wine-bibbing verses, except when given a strained mystical and allegorical interpretation by the Sufis, are taken literally ; while his freedom of thought in expressing his attitude toward the One Eternal Being is looked upon as little less than blasphemy.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that our driver had not the faintest idea of what was implied by the name Omar Khay- yam ; but he was not slow to make up for his lack of knowl- edge by inquiring of the next passer-by the direction of the road that would bring us to ' that noted Hakim in whom the farangls (foreigners) were interested.* He whipped up his four horses with a sharp slash, and away we started, only to find to our chagrin that the road led to the house of a Jewish quack doctor (haklm^ ' doctor, learned man,' having been under- stood in the sense of ' physician ') to whom some Europeans had once gone for medical advice when passing through Nishapur ! There was consequently nothing left to do but wheel about and drive hurriedly to the chdpdr-khdnah, or post-house.
The horses galloped along a wide lane that ran between fields of * golden grain.' ^ To my memory kept recurring image after image from the FitzGerald version of the Ruhaiyat^ though whether ' old Fitz,' who was steeped also in the Persian poetry of Attar and Jami, derived these metaphors from Omar himself or adapted them from the latter Persian sources, is best known to those who have compared his version, quatrain by quatrain, with the text of the original rubd'is. ' The reviving herb whose tender green fledges the river-lip ' is a truly Persian picture based ultimately on the original text, and was actually before our eyes, since nature smiles more gratefully in Persia than elsewhere when earth receives the smallest drop of water. Our journey of five hundred miles across Northern Iran had been for days along the edge of the great desert of the Lut, and time and again I had thought of FitzGerald's graphic lines about ' the strip of herbage strown, that just divides the desert from 1 FG. 16 (16) seems to be wanting in the Persian.
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