CHAPTER XVIII
THE TOMB OF OMAR KHAYYAM
- Strange, is it not ? that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road, Which to discover we must travel too.'
— FitzGerald, Buhaiyat of Omar Khayyam^ 64.
The afternoon sun was beginning to light up the lingering streaks of snow which gleamed in steel-like bands upon the dis- tant mountains as we drove out to visit Omar Khayyam's tomb, which lies about four miles southeast of the city, just beyond the ruined site of Shadiakh, the once delightful suburb of the older city of Nishapur that lay in earlier times in that direction and not far from it.
Our road ran for a time through an old graveyard, recalling the fact that the ' cemetery of the Descendants of Husain,' men- tioned by the Oriental geographers of a thousand years ago, lay southward from the bazar of the older city, although it could not be identical with this crumbling home of the dead. Not far distant, on the lower side of ruined Shadiakh, was the tomb of the poet Farid ad-Din Attar, already mentioned, who lived at Nishapur and died there in 1230 a.d.^
The fields of poppies springing up by the wayside — though not Omar's roses and tulips that marked the blood of buried kings 2 — formed a bright contrast to the dusty heaps of clay and sand that outlined the walls of the Shahr-i Kuhnah,
1 Khanikoff, Memoire, p. 94, notes 109, Wh, 104, har jd kih gnll u Idlah that Attar's tomb is marked by a black zdri bud-ast/az surkhi khun-i shahri- marble tablet bearing a long inscrip- drl bud-ast, ' each place where a rose tion in verse ; but Omar's grave has or tulip-bed hath been, hath been the nothing to mark its identity. red blood of a ruler.'
2 FG. 18 (19), Th. 18, H-A. 43, P.
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