Prologue ‘In the whole of the world, I could not think of another like him’ One Friday morning in the spring of 1135, a visitor to the city of Nishāpūr in north-east Persia made his way slowly among the orchards to the south of the city’s walls. A guide led him to his destination and the two men exchanged few words. The stranger, in his scholar’s long mantle and high conical hat, was preoccupied. He had asked to be taken to the cemetery of Heira, the burial ground of Nishāpūr’s powerful and noble. Eventually the two men reached the graveyard and the guide led his employer inside towards a corner, where a neighbouring orchard marked the end of the enclosure. Two large trees of apricot and pear spread their branches over the wall. One of them had shed so much blossom over the ground that the tombstone could not be seen. The guide pointed to a spot under the petals. The visitor bowed his head and began to sob. He later wrote in his diary: ‘In the whole of the world, I could not think of another like him.’ The visitor was Nizāmi Arūzi Samarqandi (Nizāmi ‘the Prosodist’ of Samarkand) who would gain fame later for a book of mini-biographies on the scientists and poets of his time. The tomb was of his former employer, Dr Omar Khayyāmi, the great astronomer, physician, freethinker and the occasional writer of philosophical quatrains or rubāis. Four years after Khayyāmi’s death, Nizāmi had come to Nishāpūr to research his life. In his diary he recalled that, as he stood in front of the grave, the memory of a particularly happy day came to his mind. Some twenty-three years earlier, he had accompanied Khayyām to lunch at a nobleman’s home in the city of Balkh and there, as the wine flowed and the fine china tinkled, ‘my lord Omar said he had chosen a spot for his grave where every spring would shed blossoms over him twice’. Nizāmi had been puzzled. But now he saw he ought not to have been. Pear and apricot trees blossomed at different times of spring. The old man continued to entertain his friends beyond the grave. *** ‘I shall never know or meet his like upon earth’ On the afternoon of Tuesday, 19 June 1883, when the meadows and parklands of Suffolk in East Anglia basked in the glory of an English summer, a small group of elderly men removed a coffin from a horse-drawn carriage and slowly carried it on their shoulders to a little parish church hidden behind trees. This was the hamlet of Boulge and the dead man, known to local children as ‘Dotty’ for his unkempt appearance, was one of England’s most accomplished sons. Edward FitzGerald, poet and patron of the arts, shy recluse and toast of learned academies, the man who had translated the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām into English verse, had died at the age of seventy-four, finally at peace with England. There was no memorial service to honour him at Westminster Abbey. Too many years spent in rejection of London society had made certain of that. But Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who would probably have not climbed the heights without years of secret funding by the dead man, wrote a long poem in his memory. Another friend, Frederick Spalding, expressed the pain of his loss more privately in his diary. He wrote: ‘I shall never know or meet his like upon earth . . .’ *** ‘A heavy-weight champion wrestler, with big bones and a very large head’ On May 18, 1962, which was, by coincidence, Khayyām’s 914th birthday, his tomb in the ruins of old Nishāpūr was opened for the first time since his burial there on December 5, 1131, to remove his remains to a new mausoleum that the Shah of Iran had built for him. As his fame had spread throughout the world in recent times due to the success of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of his poems, his grave attracted a constant stream of foreign visitors and Iran wanted to be seen honouring him. The problem was that, after Khayyām’s death, the mausoleum of a later Muslim saint had grown to incorporate his. The poet could not be honoured with dishonouring the saint. So a new monument was erected for him a hundred meters away.The man chosen to descend into the tomb to lift the remains was a local youth aged twenty. Many years later, after he had written a history of Nishāpūr, Dr Freydūn Gerāyeli wrote: ‘The tomb looked like a cistern, an underground water store, and it was very deep, at least 2m deep . . . They had not poured earth over the body, as is the [Muslim] custom. They had just laid it on the floor of the chamber and then built an arch over it . . . The skeleton was completely undamaged . . . I kissed the skull as I picked it up and they photographed it all. I had imagined Khayyām to be the intellectual type, a small man with a thin body. Not so. We found a heavy-weight champion wrestler with big bones and a very large head. The circumference of his skull was 61 or 62cm. . . . The tomb had very strong brick walls.’ But why was Khayyām buried in defiance of Muslim custom? *** ‘Omar and Edward would have understood’ On August 2, 1996, yet another foreign visitor asked local farmers in Suffolk for direction to Boulge churchyard and, yes, he sought the grave of Edward FitzGerald. When he found it, he sat on the dry earth of the churchyard beside the tombstone and fell silent for a long time in harmony with the empty countryside. The only sounds were the cooing of oriental collar doves in the trees and the gentle rustle of leaves in the breeze. A familiar wild rose spread its branches over the grave. A plaque said its seed had been brought over from the graveside of Khayyām in Nishāpūr, grown at Kew Gardens in London and planted there, in Boulge, by the Omar Khayyām Club of Great Britain. The visitor eventually moved over to the modest church and pushed the door open. Inside, he found a memorial book placed beside the altar. Pilgrims from all over the world, particularly the US and Canada, had written movingly of their sentiments for both FitzGerald and Khayyām. Khayyām’s fellow countryman similarly signed his name. In the column for nationality, he wrote ‘Stateless’. Then he added: ‘Omar and Edward would have understood!’ He thought of telling their story, one day.