No one expected Khalid to be spared after this debacle. His wife Fedwa was in a state of mourning already, and Esmerine was inconsolable. All the work of the yard stopped. Bahram fretted in the strange silence of the empty workshops, waiting to be given the word that they could collect Khalid's body. He realized he didn't know enough to run the compound properly.
Eventually the call came; they were ordered to attend the execution. Iwang joined Bahram for the trip to Bokhara and the palace there. Iwang was both sad and irritated. 'He should have asked me, if he was so short of cash. I could have helped him.'
Bahram was a little surprised at this, as Iwang's shop was a mere hole in the wall of the bazaar, and did not seem so very prosperous. But he said nothing. When all was said and done he had loved his father in law, and the black grief he felt left little room for thinking about Iwang's finances. The impending violent death of someone that close to him, his wife's father – she would be distraught for months, perhaps for years – a man so full of energy; the prospect emptied him of other thought, and left him sick with apprehension.
The next day they reached Bokhara, shimmering in the summer heat, its array of brown and sandy tones capped by its deep blue and turquoise mosque domes. Iwang pointed at one minaret. 'The Tower of Death,' he noted. 'They'll probably throw him off that.'
The sickness grew in Bahram. They entered the cast gate of the city and made their way to the palace. Iwang explained their business. Bahram wondered if they too would be taken and killed as accomplices. This had not occurred to him before, and he was shaking as they were led into a room that opened onto the palace grounds.
Nadir Devanbegi arrived shortly thereafter. He looked at them with his usual steady gaze: a short elegant man, black goatee, pale blue eyes, a sayyed himself, and very wealthy.
' You are said to be as great an alchemist as Khalid,' Nadir said abruptly to Iwang. 'Do you believe in the philosopher's stone, in projection, in all the so called red work? Can base metals be transmuted to gold?'
Iwang cleared his throat. 'Hard to say, effendi. I cannot do it, and the adepts who claimed they could, never said precisely how in their writing. Not in ways that I can use.'
'Use,' Nadir repeated. 'That's a word I want to emphasize. People like you and Khalid have knowledge that the Khan might use. Practical things, like gunpowder that is more predictable in power. Or stronger metallurgy, or more effective medicine. These could be real advantages in the world. To waste such abilities on fraud… Naturally the Khan is very angry.'
Iwang nodded, looking down.
'I have spoken with him at length about this matter, reminding him of Khalid's distinction as an armourer and alchemist. His past contributions as master of arms. His many other services to the Khan. And the Khan in his wisdom has decided to show a mercy that Mohammed himself must have approved.'
Iwang looked up.
'He will be allowed to live, if he promises to work for the khanate on things that are real.'
' I am sure he will agree to that,' Iwang said. 'That is merciful indeed.'
'Yes. He will of course have his right hand chopped off for thievery, as the law requires. But considering the effrontery of his crime, this is a very light punishment indeed. As he himself has admitted.'
The punishment was administered later that day, a Friday, after the market and before prayers, in the great plaza of Bokhara, by the side of the central pool. A big crowd gathered to witness it. They were in high spirits as Khalid was led out by guards from the palace, dressed in white robes as if celebrating Ramadan. Many of the Bokharis shouted abuse at Khalid, as a Samarqandi as well as a thief.
He knelt before Sayyed Abdul Aziz, who proclaimed the mercy of Allah, and of he himself, and of Nadir Devanbegi for arguing to spare the miscreant's life for his heinous fraud. Khalid's arm, looking from a distance like a bird's scrawny leg and claw, was lashed to the executioner's block. Then a soldier hefted a big axe overhead and dropped it on Khalid's wrist. Khalid's hand fell from the block and blood spurted onto the sand. The crowd roared. Khalid toppled onto his side, and the soldiers held him while one applied hot pitch from a pot on a brazier, using a short stick to plaster the black stuff to the end of the stump.
Bahram and Iwang took him back to Samarqand, laid out in the back of Iwang's bullock cart, which Iwang had had built in order to move weights of metal and glass that camels couldn't carry. It bumped horribly over the road, which was a broad dusty track worn in the earth by centuries of camel traffic between the two cities. The big wooden wheels jounced in every dip and over every hump, and Khalid groaned in the back, semi conscious and breathing stertorously, his left hand holding his pallid, burned right wrist. Iwang had forced an opium laced potion down him, and if it hadn't been for his groans it would have seemed he was asleep.
Bahram regarded the new stump with a sickened fascination. Seeing the left hand clutching the wrist, he said to Iwang, 'He'll have to eat with his left hand. Do everything with his left hand. He'll be unclean for ever.'
'That kind of cleanliness doesn't matter.'
They had to sleep by the road, as darkness caught them out. Bahram sat by Khalid, and tried to get him to eat some of Iwang's soup. 'Come on, Father. Come on, old man. Eat something and you'll feel better. When you feel better it'll be all right.' But Khalid only groaned and rolled from side to side. In the darkness, under the great net of stars, it seemed to Bahram that everything in their lives had been ruined.
Effect of the Punishment
But as Khalid recovered, it seemed that he didn't see it that way. He boasted to Bahram and Iwang about his behaviour during his punishment: 'I never said a word to any of them, and I had tested my limits in jail, to see how long I could hold my breath without fainting, so when I saw the time was near I simply held my breath, and I timed it so well that I was fainting anyway when the stroke fell. I never felt a thing. I don't even remember it.'
'We do,' said Iwang, frowning.
'Well, it was happening to me,' Khalid said sharply.
'Fine. You can use the method again when they chop off your head. You can teach it to us for when they throw us off the Tower of Death.'
Khalid stared at him. 'You're angry with me, I see.' Truculent and hurt in his feelings.
Iwang said, 'You could have got us all killed. Sayyed Abdul would command it without a second thought. If it weren't for Nadir Devanbegi, it might have happened. You should have talked to me. To Bahram here, and to me. We could have helped you.'
' Why were you in such trouble, anyway?' asked Bahram, embold ened by Iwang's reproaches. 'Surely the works here make a lot of money for you.'
Khalid sighed, ran his stump over his balding head. He got up and went to a locked cabinet, unlocked it and drew out a book and a box.
'This came from the Hindu caravanserai two years ago,' he told them, showing them the book's old pages. 'It's the work of Mary the Jewess, a very great alchemist. Very ancient. Her formula for projection was very convincing, I thought. I needed only the right furnaces, and a lot of sulphur and mercury. So I paid a lot for the book, and for the preparations. And once in debt to the Armenians, it only got worse. After that, I needed the gold to pay for the gold.' He shrugged with disgust.
'You should have said so,' Iwang repeated, glancing through the old book.
'You should always let me do the trading at the caravanserai,' Bahram added. 'They know you really want things, while I am ignorant, and so trade from the strength of indifference.'
Khalid frowned.
Iwang tapped the book. 'This is just warmed over Aristotle. You can't trust him to tell you anything useful. I've read the translations out of Baghdad and Sevilla, and I judge he's wrong more often than he's right.'
'What do you mean?' Khalid cried indignantly. Even Bahram knew Aristotle was the wisest of the ancients, the supreme authority for all alchemists.
'Where is he not wrong?' Iwang said dismissively. 'The least country doctor in China can do more for you than Aristotle can. He thought the heart did the thinking, he didn't know it pumped the blood he has no idea of the spleen or the meridian lines, and he never says a word about the pulse or the tongue. He did some fair dissections of animals, but never dissected a human as far as I can tell. Come with me to the bazaar and I can show you five things he got wrong, any Friday you like.'
Khalid was frowning. 'Have you read Al Farudi's "Harmony Between Aristotle and Plato"?'
'Yes, but that is a harmony that can't be made. Al Farudi only made the attempt because he didn't have Aristotle's "Biology". If he knew that work, he would see that for Aristotle it all remains material. His four elements all try to reach their levels, and as they try, our world results. Obviously it's not that simple.' He gestured around at the bright dusty day and the clangour of Khalid's shop, the mills, the waterworks powering the big blast furnaces, the noise and movement. 'The Platonists knew that. They know it is all mathematical. Things happen by number. They should be called Pythagoreans, to be accurate. They are like Buddhists, in that for them the world is alive. As is obviously the case. A great creature of creatures. For Aristotle and Ibn Rashd, it's more like a broken clock.'
Khalid grumbled at this, but he was not in a good position to argue. His philosophy had been cut off with his hand.
He was often in some pain, and smoked hashish and drank Iwang's opiated potions to dull the pain, which also dulled his wits, which dulled his spirits. He could not leap in to teach the boys the proper uses of the machinery; he could not shake people's hands, or cat with others, having only his unclean hand left to him; he was permanently unclean. That was part of the punishment.
The realization of this, and the shattering of all his philosophical and alchemical inquiries, finally caught up with him, and cast him into a melancholia. He left his sleeping quarters late in the mornings, and moped around the works watching all the activity like a ghost of himself. There everything continued much as it had before. The great mills wheeled on the river's current, powering the ore stamps and the bellows of the blast furnaces. The crews of workers came in directly after the morning prayers, making their marks on the sheets that kept record of their work hours, then scattering through the compound to shovel salt or sift saltpetre, or perform any other of the hundred activities that Khalid's enterprises demanded, under the supervision of the group of old artisans who had helped Khalid to organize the various works.
But all this was known, accomplished, routinized, and meant nothing to Khalid any more. Wandering around aimlessly or sitting in his study, surrounded by his collections like a magpie in its nest with a broken wing, he would stare at nothing for hours, or else page through his manuscripts, Al Razid and jildaki and jami, looking at who knew what. He would flick a finger against the objects of wonder that used to fascinate him so – a chunk of pitted coral, a unicorn horn, ancient Indian coins, nested polygons of ivory and horn, a goblet made of a rhinoceros horn chased with gold leaf, stone shells, a tiger legbone, a gold tiger statue, a laughing Buddha made of some unidentified black material, Nipponese netsuke, forks and crucifixes from the lost civilization of Frengistan – all these objects, which used to give him such delight, and which he would discuss for hours in a manner that grew tedious to his regulars, now only seemed to irritate him. He sat amid his treasures and he was no longer on the hunt, as Bahram used to think of it, seeking resemblances, making conjectures and speculations. Bahram had not understood before how important this was to him.
As his mood grew blacker, Bahram went to the sufi ribat in the Registan, and asked Ali, the sufi master in charge of the place, about it. 'Mowlana, he has been punished worse than he thought at first. He's no longer the same man.'
'He is the same soul,' said Ali. 'You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculating in it. "God loves you" is the only possible sentence! So it's love you must follow to the heart of your father in law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave. Do you understand?'
'I think so.'
'You must be sincere and open, your love must be bright as the lightning flash itself! Then his inner consciousness might see it, and be snatched from itself in a twinkling. Go, feel the love course through you, and out to him.'
Bahram tried this strategy. Waking in his bed with Esmerine, he felt the love rising in him, for his wife and her beautiful body, the child after all of the mutilated old man he regarded so fondly. Full of love, he would make his way through the workshops or into town, feeling the cool of the springtime air on his skin, and the trees around the pools would gleam dustily, like great living jewels, and the intense white clouds would accentuate the deep blue of the sky, echoed underneath by the turquoise and cobalt tiles of the mosque domes.
Beautiful town on a beautiful morning, at the very centre of the world and the bazaar its usual massed chaos of noise and colour, all human intercourse there to be seen at once, and yet pointless as an anthill, unless it was infused with love. Everyone did what they did for love of the people in their lives, day after day – or so it seemed to Bahram on those mornings, as he took on more of Khalid's old assignments at the compound – and in the nights too, as Esmerine enfolded him.
But he could not seem to convey this apprehension to Khalid. The old man snarled at any expression of high spirits, much less love, and became irritated at any gesture of affection, not just from Bahram but from his wife Fedwa, or Esmerine, or Bahram and Esmerine's children, Fazi and Laila, or anyone else. The bustle of the workshops would surround them in the sunlight with their clangour and stink, all the protocols of metalworking and gunpowder making that Khalid had formulated going on before them as if in a giant loud dance, and Bahram would make a gesture encompassing it all and say, 'Love fills all this so full!' and Khalid would snarl, 'Shut up! Don't be a fool!'
One day he slammed out of his study with his single hand holding two of his old alchemical texts, and threw them into the door of a blazing athanor. 'Complete nonsense,' he replied bitterly when Bahram cried out for him to stop. 'Get out of my way, I'm burning them all.'
'But why?' Bahram cried. 'Those are your books! Why, why, why?'
Khalid took a lump of dusty cinnabar in his one hand, and shook it before Bahram. 'Why? I'll tell you why! Look at this! All the great alchemists, from jabir to al Razi to Ibn Sina, all agree that all the metals are various combinations of sulphur and mercury. Iwang says the Chinese and Hindu alchemists agree on this matter. But when we combine sulphur and mercury, as pure as we can make them, we get exactly this: cinnabar! What does that mean? The alchemists who actually speak to this problem, who are very few I might add, say that when they talk about sulphur and mercury, they don't really mean the substances we usually call sulphur and mercury, but rather purer elements of dryness and moisture, that are like sulphur and mercury, but finer! Well!' He threw the chunk of cinnabar across the yard at the river. 'What use is that? Why even call them that? Why believe anything they say?' He waved his stump at his study and alchemical workshop, and all the apparatus littering the yard outside. 'It's all so much junk. We don't know anything. They never knew what they were talking about.'
'All right, Father, maybe so, but don't burn the books! There may be something useful in some of them, you need to make distinctions. And besides, they were expensive.'
Khalid only snarled and made the sound of spitting.
Bahram told Iwang about this incident the next time he was in town. 'He burned a lot of books. I couldn't talk him out of it. I try to get him to see the love filling everything, but he doesn't see it.'
The big Tibetan blew air through his lips like a camel. 'That approach will never work with Khalid,' he said. 'It's easy for you to be full of love, being young and whole. Khalid is old and one handed. He is out of balance, yin and yang are disarranged. Love has nothing to do with it.' Iwang was no sufi.
Bahram sighed. 'Well, I don't know what to do then. You need to help me, Iwang. He's going to burn all his books and destroy all his apparatus, and then who knows what will happen to him.'
Iwang grumbled something inaudible.
'what?'
'I'll think it over. Give me some time.'
'There isn't much time. He'll break all the apparatus next.'
Aristotle was Wrong
The very next day Khalid ordered the blacksmith apprentices to move everything in the alchemical shops out into the yard to be destroyed. He had a black and wild look as he watched it all shed dust in the sunlight. Sand baths, water baths, descensory furnaces, stills, cucurbits, flasks, alumbixes, alembics with double or even triple spouts; all stood in a haze of antique dust. The largest battery alembic had last been used for distilling rose water, and seeing it Khalid snorted. 'That's the only thing we could make work. All this stuff, and we made rose water.'
Mortars and pestles, phials, flasks, basins and beakers, glass crystallizing dishes, jugs, casseroles, candle lamps, naphtha lamps, braziers, spatulas, tongs, ladles, shears, hammers, aludels, funnels, miscellaneous lenses, filters of hair, cloth and linen: finally everything was out in the sun. Khalid waved it all away. 'Burn it all, or if it won't burn, break it up and throw it in the river.'
But just then Iwang arrived, carrying a small glass and silver mechanism. He frowned when he saw the display. 'Some of this you could at least sell,' he said to Khalid. 'Don't you still have debts?'
'I don't care,' Khalid said. 'I won't sell lies.'
'It's not the apparatus that lies,' Iwang said. 'Some of this stuff could prove very useful.'
Khalid glared at him blackly. Iwang decided to change the subject, and raised his device to Khalid's attention. 'I brought you a toy that refutes all Aristotle.'
Surprised, Khalid examined the thing. Two iron balls sat in an arna ture that looked to Bahram like one of the waterwheel triphammers in miniature.
'Water poured here will weight the rocker, here, and the two doors are one, and open at the same time. One side can't open before the other, see?'
'Of course.'
'Yes, obvious, but consider, Aristotle says that a heavier mass will fall faster than a lighter mass, because it has more of the predilection to join the Earth. But look. Here are the two iron balls, one big and one small, heavy and light. Place them on the doors, set the device level, using a bubble level, high on your outside wall, where there is a good distance to fall. A minaret would be better, the Tower of Death would be better yet, but even from your wall it will work.'
They did as he suggested, Khalid climbing the ladder slowly to inspect the arrangement.
'Now, pour water in the funnel, and watch.'
The water filled the lower basin until the doors suddenly fell open. The two balls fell. They hit the ground at the same time.
'Ho,' Khalid said, and clambered down the ladder to retrieve the balls and try it again, after hefting them, and even weighing them precisely on one of his scales.
'You see?' Iwang said. 'You can do it with balls of unequal size or the same size, it doesn't matter. Everything falls at the same rate, except if it is so light and broad, like a feather, that it floats down on the air.'
Khalid tried it again.
Iwang said, 'So much for Aristotle.'
'Well,' said Khalid, looking at the balls, then lofting them in his left hand. 'He could be wrong about this and right about other things.'
'No doubt. But everything he says has to be tested, if you ask me, and also compared with what Hsing Ho and Al Razi say, and the Hindus. Demonstrated to be true or false, in the full light of day.'
Khalid was nodding. 'I would have some questions, I admit.'
Iwang gestured at the alchemical equipment in the yard. 'It's the same for all this – you could test them, see what's useful and what's not.'
Khalid frowned. Iwang returned his attention to the falling balls. The two men dropped a number of different items from the device, chattering away all the while.
'Look, something has to be bringing them down,' Khalid said at one point. 'Bringing them, forcing them, drawing them, what have you.'
'Of course,' said Iwang. 'Things happen by causes. An attraction must be caused by an agent, acting according to certain laws. What the agent might be, however…'
'But this is true of everything,' Khalid said, muttering. 'We know nothing, that's what it comes down to. We live in darkness.'
'Too many conjoined factors,' Iwang said.
Khalid nodded, hefting a carved block of ironwood in his hand. 'I'm tired of it, though.'
'So we try things. You do something, you get something else. It looks like a causal chain. Describable as a logical sequence, even as a mathematical operation. So that you might say, reality manifests itself thus. Without worrying too much about defining what force it is.'
'Perhaps love is the force,' Bahram offered. 'The same attraction as of persons to persons, extended between things in a general way.'
'It would explain how one's member rises away from the Earth,' Iwang said with a smile.
Bahram laughed, but Khalid said only, 'A joke. What I am speaking of could not be less like love. It is as constant as the stars in their places, a physical force.'
'The sufis say that love is a force, filling everything, impelling everything.'
'The sufis,' Khalid said scornfully. 'Those are the last people on Earth I would consult if I wanted to know how the world works. They moon about love and drink lots of wine and spin themselves. Bah! Islam was an intellectual discipline before the sufis came along, studying the world as it is, we had Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd and Ibn Khaldun and all the rest, and then the sufis appeared and there hasn't been a single Muslim philosopher or scholar since then who has advanced our understanding of things by a single whit.'
'They have too,' Bahram said. 'They've made it clear how important love is in the world.'
'Love, oh yes, all is love, God is love, but if everything is love and all is one with Allah, then why do they have to get so drunk every day?'
Iwang laughed. Bahram said, 'They don't really, you know.'
'They do! And the good fellowship halls fill up with good fellows looking for a good time, and the madressas grow emptier, and the khans give them less, and here we are in the year 1020 arguing over the ideas of the ancient Frengis, without a single idea why things act the way they do. We know nothing! Nothing!'
'We have to start small,' Iwang said.
'We can't start small! Everything is all tied together!'
'Well, then we need to isolate one set of actions that we can see and control, and then study that, and see if we can understand it. Then work onwards from there. Something like this falling, just the simplest movement. If we understood movement, we could study its manifestations in other things.'
Khalid thought about that. He had finally stopped dropping things through the device.
'Come here with me,' Iwang said. 'Let me show you something that makes me curious.'
They followed him towards the shop containing the big furnaces. 'See how you obtain such hot fires now. Your waterworks drive the bellows faster than any number of puffers ever could, and the heat of the fire is accordingly higher. Now, Aristotle says fire is trapped in wood, and released by heat. Fair enough, but why does more air inake the fire burn hotter? Why does wind drive a wildfire so? Does it mean air is essential to fire? Could we find out? If we built a chamber in which the air was pulled out by the bellows rather than pushed in, would the fire burn less?'
'Suck air out of a chamber?' Khalid said.
'Yes. Arrange a valve that lets air out but won't let it back in. Pump out what's there, and then hold any replacement air out.'
'Interesting! But what would remain in the chamber then?'
Iwang shrugged. 'I don't know. A void? A piece of the original void, perhaps? Ask the lamas about that, or your sufis. Or Aristotle. Or just make a glass chamber, and look in it.'
' I will,' Khalid said.
'And motion is easiest of all to study,' Iwang said. 'We can try all manner of things with motion. We can time this attraction of things to the Earth. We can see if the speed is the same up in the hills and down in the valleys. Things speed up as they fall, and this might be measurable too. Light itself might be measurable. Certainly the angles of refraction are constant, I've measured those already.'
Khalid was nodding. 'First this reverse bellows, to empty a chamber. Although surely it cannot be a true void that results. Nothingness is not possible in this world, I think. There will be something in there, thinner than air.'
'That is more Aristotle,' Iwang said. Natureabhors the void." But what if it doesn't? We will only know when we try.'
Khalid nodded. If he had had two hands he would have been rubbing them together.
The three of them walked out to the waterworks. Here a canal brought a hard flow from the river, its gliding surface gleaming in the morning light. The water powered a mill, which geared out to axles turning a bank of heavy metal working hammers and stamps, and finally the rotating bellows handles that powered the blast furnaces. It was a noisy place, filled with sounds of falling water, smashed rock, roaring fire, singed air; all the elements raging with transmutation, hurting their cars and leaving a burnt smell in the air. Khalid stood watching the waterworks for a while. This was his achievement, he was the one who had organized all the artisans' skills into this enormous articulated machine, so much more powerful than people or horses had ever been. They were the most powerful people in all the history of the world, Bahram thought, because of Khalid's enterprise; but with a wave Khalid dismissed it all. He wanted to understand why it worked.
He led the other two back to the shop. 'We'll need your glassblowing, and my leather and iron workers,' he said. 'The valve you mention could perhaps be made of sheep intestines.'
'It might have to be stronger than that,' said Iwang. 'A metal gate of some sort, pressed into a leather gasket by the suck of the void.'
'Yes.'
No Jinn in This Bottle
Khalid set his artisans to the task, and Iwang did the glassblowing, and after a few weeks they had a two part mechanism: a thick glass globe to be emptied, and a powerful pump to empty it. There were any number of collapses, leaks and valve failures, but the old mechanists of the compound were ingenious, and attacking the points of failure, they ended up with five very similar versions of the device, all very heavy. The pump was massive and lathed to newly precise fits of plunger, tube and valves; the glass globes were thick flasks, with necks even thicker, and knobs on the inside surfaces from which objects could be hung, to see what would happen to them when the air in the globe was evacu ated. When they solved the leakage problems, they had to build a rackand pinion device to exert enough force on the pump to evacuate the final traces of air from the globe. Iwang advised them not to create such a perfect void that they ended up sucking in the pump, the compound, or perchance the whole world, like jinni returning to their confinement; and as always, Iwang's stone face did not give them any clue as to whether he was joking or serious.
When they had the mechanisms working fairly reliably (occasionally one would still crack its glass, or break a valve), they set one on a wooden frame, and Khalid began a sequence of trials, inserting things in the glass globes, pumping out the air, and seeing what resulted. All philosophical questions on the nature of what remained inside the globe after the air was removed, he now refused to address. 'Let's just see what happens,' he said. 'It is what it is.' He kept big blank paged books on the table beside the apparatus, and he or his clerks recorded every detail of the trials, timing them on his best clock.
After a few weeks of learning the apparatus and trying things, he asked Iwang and Bahram to arrange a small party, inviting several of the qadi and teachers from the madressas in the Registan, particularly the mathematicians and astronomers of Sher Dor Madressa, who were already involved in discussions of ancient Greek and classical caliphate notions of physical reality. On the appointed day, when all those invited had gathered in the open walled workshop next to Khalid's study, Khalid introduced the apparatus to them, describing how it worked and indicating what they could all see, that he had hung an alarm clock from a knob inside the glass globe, so that it swung freely at the end of a short length of silk thread. Khalid cranked the piston of the rack and pinion down twenty times, working hard with his left arm. He explained that the alarm clock was set to go off at the sixth hour of the afternoon, shortly after the evening prayers would be sung from Samarqand's northernmost minaret.
'To be sure the alarm is truly sounding,' Khalid said, 'we have exposed the clapper, so that you can see it hitting the bells. I will also introduce air back into the globe little by little, after we have seen the first results, so you can hear for yourself the effect.'
He was gruff and direct. Bahram saw that he wanted to distance himself from the portentous, magical style he had affected during his alchemical transmutations. He made no claims, spoke no incantations. The memory of his last disastrous demonstration – his fraud must have been in his mind, as it was in everyone else's. But he merely gestured with his hand at the clock, which advanced steadily towards six.
Then the clock began to spin on its thread, and the clapper was visibly smashing back and forth between the little brass bells. But there was no sound coming from the glass. Khalid gestured: 'You might think that the glass itself is stopping the sound, but when the air is let back into the flask, you will see that it isn't so. First I invite you to put your car to the glass, so you can confirm that there is no sound at all.'
They did so one by one. Then Khalid unscrewed a stopcock that released a valve set in the side of the flask, and a brief penetrating hiss was joined by the muted banging of the alarm, which grew louder quickly, until it sounded much like an alarm heard from an adjoining room.
'It seems there is no sound without air to convey it,' Khalid commented.
The visitors from the madressa were eager to inspect the apparatus, and to discuss its uses in trials of various sorts, and to speculate about what, if anything, remained in the globe when the air was pumped out. Khalid was adamant in his refusal to discuss this question, preferring to talk about what the demonstration seemed to be indicating about the nature of sound and its transmission.
'Echoes might elucidate this matter in another way,' one of the qadis said. He and all the other visiting witnesses were bright eyed, pleased, intrigued. 'Something strikes air, pushes it, and the sound is a shock moving through the air, like waves across water. They bounce back, like waves in water bounce when they strike a wall. It takes time for this movement to cross the intervening space, and thus echoes.'
Bahram said, 'With the aid of an echoing cliff we could perhaps time the speed of sound.'
'The speed of sound!' Iwang said. 'Very nice!'
'A capital idea, Bahram,' Khalid said. He checked to make sure his clerk was noting all done or said. He unscrewed the stopcock all the way and removed it, so that they all heard the noisy clanging of the alarm as he reached into the flask to turn off the device. It was strange that the clapper should have been so silent before. He rubbed his scalp with his right wrist. 'I wonder,' he said, 'if we could establish a speed for light too, using the same principle.'
'How would it echo?' Bahram asked.
'Well, if it were aimed at a distant mirror, say… a lantern unveiled, a distant mirror, a clock that one could read very precisely, or start and stop, even better…'
Iwang was shaking his head. 'The mirror might have to be very far away to give the recorder time to determine an interval, and then the lantern flash would not be visible unless the mirror were perfectly angled.'
'Make a person the mirror,' Bahram suggested. 'When the person on the far hill sees the first lantern light, he reveals his, and a person next to the first person times the appearance of the second light.'
'Very good,' several people said at once. Iwang added, 'It may still be too fast.'
'It remains to be seen,' Khalid said cheerfully. 'A demonstration will clarify the issue.'
With that Esmerine and Fedwa wheeled in the ice tray and its 'demonstration of sherbets' as Iwang termed it, and the crowd fell to, talking happily, Iwang speaking of the thin sound of goraks in the high Himalaya where the air itself was thin, and so on.