Answer

My name is Sayid al-Latīf al-Bāgdadī. I am a physician by profession, though more generally I am a scientist. Throughout my life I have devoted myself almost exclusively to acquiring knowledge; my profession has granted me access to countless libraries belonging to caliphs, sages, governors, and temples; it has allowed me to travel through every region in which scientific knowledge exists and to meet all manner of people with a great variety of beliefs and customs. Every action I take, every manner in which I proceed, always has the purpose of acquiring new knowledge. I have never had a family, I have not wasted time making friends; I have devoted all my efforts to wisdom. I am learned in theology and the Qur’an, grammar, the arts of administration, poetry, philosophy and logic, medicine, the mathematical sciences of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, mechanics, surveying, agriculture, botany and zoology, ethnology, history and jurisprudence, alchemy, geomancy, ‛ilm al-raml, and the other occult sciences. I know by heart the medical texts of Hippocrates and Galen; I have studied the most distinguished authors, such as Democritus, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Anatolius, Aristobulus, Philo the Jew, Pythagoras, Virgil, Euclid, Varro, and Columella, and countless other scientists and philosophers from every part of the vast earth, in every language used for science. In addition to Arabic, I command Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic. I have visited a great number of libraries, studied every sort of book, held in my hands ancient Egyptian papyri on the verge of turning to dust, consulted mouldering parchment gnawed by insects, studied substantial volumes belonging to kings, their bindings set with jewels or plated in silver; I have read large and small books, ancient and modern, rich and poor, books carefully and devoutly secluded in the bright, clean chambers of temples and palaces, as well as forbidden, misunderstood, untranslatable, or forgotten books in filthy corners, far from light and fresh air. I have held long conversations with sages, scientists, and scholars; I have consulted astrologers, magicians, oracles, and alchemists in every corner of the world. All my inquiries, all my studies, have had one aim: to find a single answer, the answer to one thing that obsessed me from my youth, an obsession that even in old age continued to give me the strength to go on: the search for immortality. What is the way to make oneself immortal?

Over the course of my years and my journeys, I have encountered countless legends, tales, and myths; rites and potions; methods and techniques for acquiring the longed-for immortality. The incubation of demons, the practice of human sacrifice, formulas of impossible alchemy, the search for non-existent stones that must be drawn from the deepest caverns to make talismans, or for plants that no one has ever seen and that must be used to prepare a draught; the hunting of mythological beasts, the precise alignment of the stars to summon forgotten gods. None of it works; none of it is of use; no one has yet attained immortality, except perhaps the men of the City of the Immortals. In every culture, in documents from every age, over so many years I managed to find clues that always pointed to the existence of an ancient city of stone inhabited by immortal men: a city described by the few eyes that had seen it as immense, entirely of stone, dark and cold, a labyrinthine city in which men shut themselves away and were able to acquire immortality. In no text and in no legend told by an old man did I find an exact reference to how they achieved immortality, what sort of cult or rigorous discipline allowed them to obtain it, but the first key had to be finding their city, and that was what I set out to do over many years. Some place the city near Persia, others in Egypt; several say near Chaldea. After so many years following clues, so much study and so many interviews, so much wandering through the world in search of information, I finally obtained enough evidence to approximate its location. Thanks to descriptions found in the most obscure writings, the positions of the constellations cited by authors, distances and triangulations on which some agreed, and with the help of the astrolabe, solar spheres, a navigational device, and various instruments, I managed to establish the approximate location of the City of the Immortals. I set out for it carrying only my staff, the clothes on my back, and a bag containing my notebooks and maps. I left everything behind, abandoned everything, to ride through the frozen nights of the deserts and shelter during their incandescent days, travelling like a wanderer, living as a vagrant, obtaining resources along the way by making translations, curing people of their ailments in exchange for food or lodging, ever closer, confirming the clues as I advanced, following on without pause despite the exhaustion of body and mind, continuing despite the decline of my old body, nearer each time.

The journey was possible in only one direction; returning was decidedly impossible. I understood this at the point of no return, the point in the middle of the immense desert where I had to decide whether to turn back and save my life, or continue into the unknown, go on knowing that I would be left abandoned in the desert with only a tiny chance of reaching the city. Once one had crossed the immensity of mountains and deserts required to reach the city beyond the point of no return, it would be impossible to have the water, food, or strength needed to make the journey back. Besides, travellers’ horses are destined to die along the way, which would make any return even slower and more difficult. My will was implacable. I continued. Days later I thought I had failed, thought everything was lost, when by a miracle I caught sight of the wall of the City of the Immortals. Surely, I thought, men arrive here and become immortals who live in the city, or they arrive here and die; there is no way for them to return to the world. The wall is difficult to see. There is something in those stones that makes them invisible: their colour is the same as the sand’s; it would be easy to lose them in the distance, to mistake them for dunes. They make the city invisible. It was fortunate that I managed to see them through my telescope. I had already resigned myself to dying in that hell of a desert. My last drop of water had run out almost two days earlier; it had been more days since I had eaten. Yet I had managed to continue, to keep walking, crawling if necessary, because my ultimate purpose was to reach the city and discover its mystery. My body was old and weak, but my will was firm and my mind still as nimble as a young man’s; I could not stop after a lifetime spent pursuing the answer. Lying there on the sand, certain that I had failed, I made one last attempt to take to my death at least some idea of how close I was to finding the city. I took the telescope from my bag and began inspecting the horizon in different directions until at last I saw the wall. As I have said, the stones from which the city is built blend with the sand, so I should not have been able to see it. Yet a mark in the distance caught my attention; it looked like a shadow, the shadow cast by the angle of two invisible walls according to the sun’s position at that moment. That shadow could not be projected onto nothing, I thought, and that was when I knew I was seeing walls without being able to see them. I sensed that it had to be a construction made with the same sand-coloured stone I had seen used in their crude caves by the inhabitants of the last villages I encountered before losing myself in the immensity of that desert. I gathered the scant strength remaining in my old body and used all the will I had left to stand and walk until I reached the wall. I put my hand on the stones and felt their texture; I felt the sand the wind embedded in them, felt the radiation of the heat caused by the newly risen morning sun. My brief joy soon turned to horror when I realised I had seen no door in the wall. In despair I understood that I would have to continue walking along it in search of an entrance, as though at that stage it were not impossible for me to take a single step more. With a weariness I doubt other men could have mastered, I set about circling the wall, slow but anxious, my skin cracked from thirst and the sun. Thus I walked for long hours around the enormous city that seemed endless. Since its wall was a perfect circle, I could have gone around it for all eternity without knowing when I had returned to my starting point; there was no landmark anywhere around it, only sand. It was the position of the sun that let me guide myself, and I also took the precaution of counting my steps. When I returned to the starting point, I had found no door, but because I had measured the circumference with my steps I could calculate the city’s extent. It was immense, perhaps half the size of Pasargadae. I estimated that a city of the extent I had calculated should contain some five thousand men. Around the wall I saw neither doors nor windows, no sign of life; outside the city there were no flocks or orchards, only inert sand. How could the inhabitants of the city live in such seclusion? Exhausted, I sat to think, roasting beneath the late-afternoon sun that was near to setting, desperate for a drop of water. I was faced with a riddle: how could one penetrate a wall with no doors? Could there perhaps be access through a tunnel? I thought for a long time, recalling precisely everything I had seen when I walked around the wall. The wall was exactly alike all the way around except at one point. It was merely a smooth wall, but at a point I had seen shortly before arriving at where I was sitting—the very place where I began my exploration—there was a sort of indentation in it, like an opening about two cubits wide and one cubit deep. Naturally, when I found the indentation I inspected it to make certain it was not a door, and I certainly found no door. But now, remembering it and thinking more carefully, I conceived what its purpose was. I began walking in the direction opposite to my original circuit to find the indentation, and indeed I found it shortly before the sun set. Examining it carefully, I discovered my theory had to be right: this indentation in the wall served as a kind of stairway. Inspecting its inner, lateral surfaces, I found one completely smooth, while the other had a small hollow every two handspans. The first hollow was at the outer end of the indentation, the second two handspans higher at the inner end, the third two handspans higher at the outer end, and so on. I inferred that the way to climb was to stand inside the indentation with one’s back against the smooth side and put one’s feet into the hollows on the opposite side. The dimensions seemed to confirm it: the indentation’s two cubits of width were enough for someone to fit with bent legs while climbing, and the two handspans’ vertical distance between hollows was enough to place one foot after another in each hollow. Now that I had deciphered the hidden means of entry in this irregularity of the wall, I faced the horror of reality: how could my old bones climb that distance of roughly four fathoms to the top of the wall? I supposed that all of it was a test. After all, immortality should not be granted to just anyone. Whoever sought it had to be worthy; they had to have sufficient wisdom to locate the city, sufficient strength to cross the desert, sufficient intelligence to find the entrance, and, I supposed, enough vigour to climb the wall. I sat facing the wall, feeling defeated. My fatigue was such that climbing it seemed an impossible undertaking. Yet there is something in the cold wind of the desert that puts men on alert—perhaps the nearness of death, perhaps the agonising suffering that its sound is in the dark. Whatever it was, that same wind gave me strength, or perhaps the strength came from discovering my good fortune when I realised that the full moon cast its brightness upon the wall of the indentation, allowing sufficient visibility to climb it even at night. The only way to climb would be to abandon my bag with my notebooks and instruments, along with my staff; otherwise the weight would prevent me from carrying out the difficult task. With all my strength I wished that there would be something on the other side of the wall, because I thought it would be impossible for me to climb back down. I began to climb using what will remained to me. I tried to distract and encourage myself by recalling that I had been a strong man in my life, recalling the few moments of pleasure and victory I had managed to taste. I recalled when that scoundrel of a merchant in Damascus tried to rob me by offering scrolls that he claimed had belonged to the collection of the Library of Alexandria, which I quickly discovered were false. They were written in Bohairic, whereas if they had been part of that collection they would more likely have been written in Sahidic. I gave the charlatan a good lesson. I remembered his laments as I beat him, his pleas before I smashed his head with a stone. I also remembered the woman who gave me shelter in her house for a few coins when I was in Cádiz, the city founded by the Phoenicians, searching for a collection of books I had traced there. I remembered seeing her wash with a jar of water, her dark skin gleaming wet in the sun, her large, beautiful breasts, her sex an abyss. I remembered tending sheep in the mountains as a child, when the world seemed infinite and mysterious. I remembered memorising the Qur’an when I was young, al-Qur'ān al-Karīm, memorising every surah with discipline and devotion, bismi l-lāhi r-rahmāni r-rahīm. Amid the distraction of my memories and the icy assaults of the wind, I reached the top of the wall. Under the magical light of the full moon, which turns golden daytime dunes silver at night, the City of the Immortals lay before me. There were no roofs; it was all a series of labyrinthine walls of the same four-fathom height as the outer wall. The walls stretched in every direction in capricious shapes, forming narrow passageways. It was impossible to see open spaces; the whole city seemed to be a maze of tight spaces between tall stone walls. Perhaps that was why, in the few descriptions of the city I had heard in legends told by old men, it was described as cold and dark: because of the sun’s position during the day and the walls’ height, one must walk through the city’s alleys always in shade, a cool shade from which it was possible to see the sky but never the horizon. There were only walls, only labyrinth; it was impossible to see constructions, houses, buildings, palaces. There was no sign of life, no murmur of inhabitants, no fire lit anywhere, nothing but the most ominous silence, broken only by the blowing wind. As I feared, the way to descend the other side of the wall was the same as the way up: there was an identical indentation, with hollows on one side for the feet while one’s back rested on the opposite side. I supposed the descent, though exhausting, would be less difficult than the ascent; yet the terror of falling was greater. Going up, one looks at the sky; going down, one looks at the ground. I descended the wall as best I could, slowly and carefully. I was too near to fulfilling my purpose to fall at that moment and split my head in two. Once I was on the ground, I found that the darkness produced by the walls’ height was almost total. I had not realised that I had made the second half of the descent by touch, accustomed to lowering each foot and feeling for the next hollow to support it. At least on this side of the wall the wind did not strike me, protected as I was by the walls. I had neither torch nor means of locating myself in this darkness. I could not see where the moon was, but neither did I want to lose more time waiting for daylight. I knew I was spending my last breaths; I was close to death and had to find immortality. I had come this far. I wandered for long hours in the dark, arms outstretched, groping. My eyes, which had grown used to the darkness, distinguished nothing but shadow upon shadow; not a sign of life, nobody to answer my calls. I tried to walk in a straight line towards the city’s centre. Despite the labyrinthine deviations of the walls, my sense of direction made me think that I could always recover my course. I also took the precaution of counting my steps, which allowed me to know when I had reached the centre of the City of the Immortals, since I had had the opportunity to measure its circumference when I circled the wall. Nothing: not a single sign of life, no immortal, no variation in the pattern of walls that always ended at right angles and seemed never to end, narrow alleys where barely one man could fit. Only the stars bore witness that there was at least one man in this deserted city, in this labyrinth abandoned who knows how many centuries ago. Exhausted and without hope, I sat with my back against one wall and my knees against the wall opposite because of the narrowness of the alley. What had become of the immortals? I asked myself. Perhaps they had died out hundreds of years ago; perhaps they had finally died; perhaps they had never existed; perhaps I was imagining all this; perhaps this cold, dark labyrinth existed only in my mind; perhaps I had died in the desert and this was hell. But no, I knew I had not died yet, because I was just beginning to feel the process. Yes, it is possible to feel when one is dying. I had failed. Finding the City of the Immortals had been of no use if I had come to die in it. A wasted life, a life devoted to the sole purpose of getting here for nothing. The woman in Cádiz: perhaps I should have remained in her bed for the rest of my days instead of torturing myself as I had until then, only to find myself dying in this forgotten place, far from all men, just as I had lived. Perhaps it is better this way. Perhaps we are not made to be immortal. What would immortality be good for? If one is immortal, one is eternal, and in eternity all things happen; therefore, if one is immortal, one will suffer every evil, endure every illness, experience every pain, live through every disappointment, have every disillusionment, eventually know everything, and have nothing left to know—only an eternal, solitary tedium. Perhaps it is better this way; it is better to die. Perhaps this is the answer. This is the answer I always wanted to find.