Samarkand

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At the bottom of the Atlantic there is a book. I am going to tell you its history.

Perhaps you know how the story ends. The newspapers of the day wrote about it, as did others later on. When the Titanic went down on the night of 14 April 1912 in the sea off the New World, its most eminent victim was a book, the only copy of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, the Persian sage, poet and astronomer.

I shall not dwell upon the shipwreck. Others have already weighed its cost in dollars, listed the bodies and reported peoples’ last words. Six years after the event I am still obsessed by this object of flesh and ink whose unworthy guardian I was. Was I, Benjamin O. Lesage, not the one who snatched it from its Asian birth-place? Was it not amongst my luggage that it set sail on the Titanic? And was its age-old journey not INTERRUPTED by my century’s arrogance?

Since then, the world has become daily more covered in blood and gloom, and life has ceased to smile on me. I have had to distance myself from people in order to hear the voice of my memory, to nurture a naive hope and insistent vision that tomorrow the manuscript will be found. Protected by its golden casket, it will emerge from the murky depths of the sea intact, its destiny enriched by a new odyssey. People will be able to finger it, open it and lose themselves in it. Captive eyes will follow the chronicle of its adventure from margin to margin, they will discover the poet, his first verses, his first bouts of drunkenness and his first fears; and the sect of the Assassins. Then they will stop, incredulous, at a painting the colour of sand and emerald.

It bears neither date nor signature, nothing apart from these words which can be read as either impassioned or disenchanted: Samarkand, the most beautiful face the Earth has ever turned towards the sun.