Chapter 4
Across the valley in al-Bayyazin, Ali heard the last of his guests staggering out of the street door. The sunset prayer must have been called a while before; twilight had spun webs of gloom in the corners of his laboratory. For the first time that year, Ali realized the evenings were drawing in. He touched a taper to the glowing coals in the brazier, then lit the lamp that stood on the shelf above his work bench. There was nothing else to do but wait a little till the solution dried. He went back to his other task, that of committing the final version of the Remedy to verse.
It had been a brilliant idea of his, to conceal it in the veil of poetry. The details of the Remedy were too precise, too dangerous, for memory alone. To write them out in naked prose would have been madnes
