"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

strewn with fresh flowers.
Ibn Battuta is now forty-five. Perhaps unnerved
by the plague, he decides to return home to Tangier
after twenty-five years on the road. For a while, the
seasoned traveller outruns the horror, but it soon
catches up with him again. When he reaches Tangier at
last, the Death has come and gone. His father has been
dead for fifteen years. But the plague has killed his
aged mother. He misses her by mere months.
The havoc is unspeakable, beyond imagination.
The Plague will return again in t

he next generation,
and the next again, emptying cities and annihilating
dynasties. The very landscape will change: irrigation
canals will silt up, grass will grow over the trade-
roads, forests will grow in old villages. It is
Apocalypse.
Life will, nevertheless, go on. Civilization,
pruned back bloodily and scourged by God Himself,
refuses to collapse. History lurches under the blow,
changes course--and moves on. A century of horror will
fade, and, unguessed by anyone, a Renaissance beckons
. . .
Ibn Battuta will meet a young Muslim poet from
Spain, named Ibn Juzayy. Together they will compose a
formal rihla of his travels. He works from memory--a
vivid and well-trained memory, for Ibn Battuta, as a
scholar of repute, can recite the entire Koran
unaided, as well as many canons of the sacred law.
Nevertheless, some poetic license will be taken, some
episodes distorted, mis-remembered, or confused, some
outright lies told. The great traveller will be
regarded by many as a charlatan, or as a mere
entertainer, a spinner of fantastic tales.
His Rihla will be little known until the
nineteenth century, when European scholars discover it
with astonishment and wonder.