ABSTRACT
It is related that a handsome and studious young man once lived in a certain city, where every branch of knowledge was freely taught. He had a great desire to be for ever learning something fresh, that his life might lack no happiness. One day a travelling merchant told him that there existed, in a far country, a sage who was the holiest man of Islam and who, though wiser than the sum of all others at that time, practised the simple trade of a blacksmith, as his father and grandfather had done before him. Straightway the young man took his sandals, his foodbag and his stick, and journeyed towards that far country, hoping that he might learn a little of the blacksmith’s wisdom. After forty days and
forty nights of danger and fatigue, he came to the city which he sought, and was directed to the smith’s shop. He kissed the hem of the saint’s robe and then stood before him in silence. ‘What do you desire, my son?’ asked the smith, who was an old man with a benign face. ‘Learning,’ answered the youth. Without a word the smith put the cord of the bellows into his hand and bade him pull it. The new disciple pulled the cord of the bellows until sunset. On the morrow he did the same thing; for weeks, for months, and finally for a whole year, he worked the bellows, without receiving a word from the master or the many disciples who were engaged in various kinds of the like hard and simple toil. Five years passed before the young man dared to open his lips, and say: ‘Master!’ The smith paused in his work and the other disciples ceased their occupations to look on anxiously. The master turned to the young man in the silence of the forge, and asked: ‘What do you wish?’ ‘Learning,’ answered the youth, and the smith said, as he turned back to the fire: ‘Pull the cord.’ Another five years passed, during which the disciple pulled the cord of the bellows from morning to night, without rest and without having a word addressed to him. When any of the disciples needed guidance, he was allowed to write his question on paper and hand it to the master when he entered the forge in the morning. The smith, who never read these writings, sometimes threw them into the fire and sometimes placed them in the folds of his turban. By throwing the question into the fire he showed that it was not worth an answer; but, if he placed it in his turban, the disciple would find an answer in the evening, written in gold characters upon the wall of his cell.
