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CHAPTER 23
Since he had left Isfahan, Khayyam had been leading effectively the existence of
a fugitive and a pariah. When he betook himself to Baghdad, the Caliph forbad
him to speak in public or to receive his numerous admirers who presented
themselves at his door. When he visited Mecca, his detractors sniggered: ‘A
pilgrimage of servility!’ When, on his return, he passed through Basra, the sons
of the 
qadi
of the city came to ask him, in the politest of terms, to cut short his
stay.
His fate then was unsettling in the extreme. No one contested his genius or
his erudition; wherever he went large groups of intellectuals gathered around
him. He was questioned on astrology, algebra, medicine and even religious
problems and he was listened to warmly. However, without fail, a few days or
weeks after his arrival, a clique would emerge and would disseminate all sorts of
lies. He would be called an infidel or a heretic, and his friendship with Hassan
Sabbah would be recalled. Sometimes the accusations of being an alchemist,
raised against him of old in Samarkand, were dredged up. Ardent opponents
were sent to break up his discussions and those who dared shelter him were
threatened with reprisals. Usually, he put up no opposition. As soon as he felt the
atmosphere become uncomfortable he would feign illness in order not to appear
in public again, and he would then not linger, but would go away to somewhere
new where his stay would be just as short and precarious.
Honoured and cursed, with no companion other than Vartan, he was
constantly in search of a roof, a protector and a patron too; the generous pension
which Nizam had allotted to him was no longer being paid out since his death
and he was forced to visit princes and governors and prepare their monthly

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horoscopes. However, even though he was often in need, he managed to get
himself paid without bowing his head.
It was told that a vizir, astonished to hear Omar demand a sum of five
thousand golden dinars, remarked:
‘Do you know that I myself am not paid that much?’
‘That is quite normal,’ retorted Khayyam.
‘And how so?’
‘Because there is only a handful of intellectuals like me every century, while
one could name five hundred vizirs like you every year.’
The chroniclers state that the man found this extremely amusing and went on
to satisfy Khayyam’s demands, courteously recognising the correctness of such a
haughty equation.
‘No Sultan is happier than I, no beggar sadder,’ Omar wrote during this
period.
The years passed and we find him again in 1114 in the city of Merv, the old
capital of Khorassan, still famous for its silks and its ten libraries, but deprived
for some time now of any political role. To restore some lustre to its tarnished
court, the local sovereign was trying to attract the celebrities of the time. He
knew just how to seduce Khayyam – by offering to build him an observatory
identical to that of Isfahan. At sixty-six years of age, Omar no longer dreamt of
anything else and he accepted with adolescent enthusiasm and set right down to
work on the project. Soon the building was rising up on a hilltop in the district of
Bab Senjan in the middle of a garden of daffodils and white mulberries.
Omar was happy for two years and he worked feverishly. We are told that he
carried out astonishing experiments in weather forecasting, his knowledge of the
sky allowing him to note exactly the changes of climate over five successive
days. He also developed his mathematical theories which were way ahead of his
time. It was not until the nineteenth century that European researchers
recognized him to be the brilliant precursor of non-Euclidean geometry. He also
wrote