In the year A.H. 506 (A.D. 1112-1113) Khwája Imám 'Umar Khayyám*

and Khwája Imám Mudhaffar-i-Isfizárí had alighted in the city of Balkh, in the street of the Slave-sellers, in the house of Amír Abú Sa'd,*

and I had joined that assembly. In the midst of our convivial gathering I heard that Argument of Truth (Ḥujjatu'l-Ḥaqq) 'Umar say, “My grave will be in a spot where the trees will shed their blossoms on me twice in each year.” This thing seemed to me impossible, though I knew that one such as he would not speak idle words.

When I arrived at Níshápúr in the year A.H. 530 (A.D. 1135-6), it being then some years since that great man had veiled his countenance in the dust, and this lower world had been bereaved of him, I went to visit his grave on the eve of a Friday (seeing that he had the claim of a master on me), taking with me a guide to point out to me his tomb. So he brought me out to the Ḥíra*

Cemetery; I turned to the left, and his tomb lay at the foot of a garden-wall, over which pear-trees and peach-trees thrust their heads, and on his grave had fallen so many flower-leaves that his dust was hidden beneath the flowers. Then I remembered that saying which I had heard from him in the city of Balkh, and I fell to weeping, because on the face of the earth, and in all the regions of the habitable globe, I nowhere saw one like unto him. May God (blessed and exalted is He) have mercy upon him,*

by His Grace and His Favour! Yet although I witnessed this prognos­tication on the part of that Proof of the Truth 'Umar, I did not observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions; nor have I seen or heard of any of the great [scientists] who had such belief.*