The Geographer's Library

THE ALEMBIC
Is not our universe itself little more than an alembic on the shelf of the Creator?
By practicing this our science of transformation in our modest little vessels,
are not we then doing God’s work in miniature? To say so aloud would
surely be to allow ourselves to be mistaken for blasphemers, when in fact we are
the most adept and dedicated followers of God, and this our mission most
holy, and our experiments nothing other than prayers most divine, howsoever
unsanctioned by any church save our own.
—sanoplus of alexandria, On Natural Practices
Early in the spring of 1154, when frost no longer edged the wild sage and
the palace gardeners could remove the cloth coverings from the royal lemon,
orange, and olive trees, King Roger II of Sicily summoned his geographer to
the court at Palermo. The geographer was the renowned cartographer, herbalist,
medic, composer, oudist, illustrator, and philosopher Yussef Hadras ibn
Azzam Abd Salih Jafar Khalid Idris, known to history as al-Idrisi, wandering
librarian of Baghdad. His early life and origins remain a mystery: some
chroniclers claim he was born to a wealthy merchant family in Tunis; others,
that he spent his adolescence as a beggar in Aleppo, cursed with a piercing
voice and the dubious gift of inaccurate foresight; still others, less believably,
that he was the son of Solomon ben Avram, sightless rabbi of Merv.
Al-Idrisi first gained fame as a scribe, later illustrator, later vizier to
Haroun Ali Haroun in the city of Yazd, whose labyrinthine streets permit a
cooling circulation of air even in the midday desert sun. From Yazd he
traveled to Baghdad at the caliph’s request, and there he created the thirty-six
14