Samarkand

Thither from alien seas and skies Comes the far-questioned merchandise, Wrought silks of Broussa, Mocha's ware, Brown-tinted, fragrant, and the rare Thin perfumes that the rose's breath Has sought immortal in her death: Gold, gems, and spice, and haply still The red rough largess of the hill Which takes the sun and bears the vines Among the haunted Apennines.

And he who treads the cobbled street To-day in the cold north may meet, Come month, come year, the dusky east, And share the Caliph's secret feast: Or in the toil of wind and sun Bear pilgrim staff, forlorn, fordone, Till o'er the steppe, athwart the sand, Gleam the far gates of Samarkand.

The ringing quay, the weathered face, Fair skies, dusk hands, the ocean race, The palm-girt isle, the frosty shore, Gale and hot suns, the wide world o'er, Grey north, red south, and burnished west, The goals of the old tireless quest Leap in the smoke, immortal, free, Where shine yon morning fringe of sea.

I turn, and lo! the moorlands high Lie still and frigid to the sky.

I was a little surprised at his eloquence, especially when he seemed to remember himself and stopped all of a sudden.

But for the next week, I got no peace with his questions.

I told him all I knew of Balkara and Samarkand and Tashkent and Yarkand.

I showed him the passes in the Primers and the Hindu Kush.

okay.

And there's Samarkand as well, isn't there? We've got some...

We've got athletes in both, actually.

Look at us.

Yeah.

But we'll tune into that.

Samarkand looks nice, doesn't it? Have you seen the water there?

Yeah, beautiful.

hast trod the sands of Seistan, and seen the river of Helmund, and the lake of Zirah, and the aged Zal himself has often stroked thy neck and given thee food.

on a golden platter soaked with wine, and said, O Raksh, bear Rustram well, but I have never known my grandsire's furrowed face, nor seen his lofty house in Saistan, nor slaked my thirst at the clear Helmand stream, but lodged among my father's foes, and seen Afrasiab cities only, Samarkand, Bokhara, and Lone Kiva in the waste, and the Black Turkman tents, and only drunk the desert rivers, Morgab, and Tijand, Kohik, and where the Kalmaks feed their sheep, the northern seer, and this great oxus stream, the yellow oxus by whose brink I die.

Then with a heavy groan, Rustrum bewailed, O that its waves were flowing over me, O that I saw its grains of yellow silt roll, tumbling in the current over my head.

But with a grave, mild voice, Sothrab replied, Desire not that, my father, thou must live, for some are born to do great deeds and live, as some are born to be obscured and die.

Go to Indochina and visit its gigantic Angkor Vat.

Call it Damascus, Baghdad, and Samarkand.

What sorrowful lack of ambition many such a community shows in thus discarding such high-class construction.

And I say again that so will youth grow dormant and hold this big, throbbing world back if no champion backs it up, thus providing it with an opportunity to show its ability for looking forward and improving unsatisfactory conditions.

We'll be back next week to debrief all things WCS.

There's also, like, there's Challenge Samarkand this weekend.

There's Ironman Wales this weekend.

There's others.

Exactly.

That's what we want to see.

Natalie Vancouver in his race in Samarkand.

I want to see her do well.

He put a puppet khan on the throne and ruled in his own name as emir, as commander, and he built his real power out of something that didn't require anybody's permission at all, the loyalty of an army that had followed him campaign after campaign for 30 straight years.

And by 1400, that army had marched almost everywhere, into Delhi at the end of 1398, where they'd sacked the city for three days, killed and enslaved a number of people that no chronicle can actually verify, and marched its stonemasons and carpenters and tile cutters north to Samarkand in chains.

Into Damascus, a year or two later, where the same pattern repeated itself almost exactly.

A siege, a sack, craftsmen taken away by force, except that this time, a historian happened to be inside the walls when it started.

It's also, as far as the earliest surviving evidence goes, probably not what happened, or at least not proven to have happened.

The closest witness we have is Ibn Arab Shah, and his testimony matters here for a reason that has almost nothing to do with the battle itself.

He was a damascene, a young scholar swept up as a captive during the very sack of Damascus we mentioned a few minutes ago, and marched to Samarkand exactly like the craftsmen taken from that same city.

He had every personal reason to hate the man he was writing about, and his biography of Timur is, by any honest measure, the harshest contemporary account that survives from anyone close to these events.