1In Nishapur, the city of the Tentmaker, there lived a hundred years after him an old man who kept a druggist's shop. He sold rose water and rhubarb and remedies for the stomach. People called him Attar, which means the perfumer, the seller of drugs. He had another work, and did it between customers: he made poems, long ones, about the road of the soul to God, for he was a lover of God and a man of the Sufi way.
2In his old age a terror came out of the east. Riders from the grass country, the Mongols, were breaking the cities of Asia one after another, and those who could flee fled west ahead of them.
3One evening a caravan of such people came into Nishapur and camped in the yard of the inn beside Attar's shop. They were some hundreds, from the city of Balkh and the towns around it. They were led by a preacher of Balkh, a learned and stern man, who had with him his wife and his young son.
4They were not a happy company. They had been two months on the road. They were of a dozen towns and they did not like one another. That night in the inn yard they quarrelled over whether to stop or go on. A weaver said he would not walk another step behind a saddler. Two families nearly came to knives over a place by the well.
5The old druggist heard it through his wall. He came out with a lamp and a tray of sugared almonds, and sat down on the well-curb in the middle of them, and said, "I will tell you a story. It is long. If you do not like it, you may go back to shouting afterward."
6They were quiet out of surprise. The preacher's son, a boy of ten or twelve with wide dark eyes, came and sat at the old man's feet. And Attar told them the tale that he had made into a poem, the tale of the conference of the birds. It is told here as he told it.
7Once all the birds of the world came together, the known and the unknown. And they said: "There is no country without a king. How is it that we alone have none? Let us seek one, for a people without a king is without order."
8Then the hoopoe came forward, trembling with eagerness. She wore a crown of feathers on her head, for she had been the messenger of Solomon and knew the roads of the world. "I know our King," she said. "His name is the Simurgh. He dwells behind the mountain called Qaf, at the end of the earth. He is close to us, but we are far from Him. The road to Him is long, with deep seas and dry lands, and one needs the heart of a lion to walk it. Yet it is shame to live without Him."
9"How do you know there is such a King?" they asked.
10"Once," said the hoopoe, "in the middle of the night, He flew over China and let fall a single feather. All the lands were filled with the fame of it. Each one who saw it drew its picture in his heart. Every beauty you have ever loved is a trace of that feather."
11Then all the birds burned to set out. But when they considered how long the road was, each one found a reason.
12The nightingale said, "I am in love with the rose. I sing for her all night and she opens for me. What do I want with a King? The rose is enough." The hoopoe said, "The rose blooms for a week and is gone. She does not smile at you. She laughs at you. Love what does not fade."
13The parrot said, "I have been shut in a cage. I ask only to be free and to drink from the spring that gives long life." The peacock said, "I was once in the garden of paradise, and was driven out. I wish only to find my way back to that garden." The hoopoe said, "You ask for the palace. Ask for the King. What is a garden beside the one who made it?"
14The heron would not leave the edge of the sea, though he never dared drink from it. The owl would not leave her ruin, where she believed a treasure lay buried. And last came the sparrow, shaking, and said, "I am weak as a hair. I have no strength. How should such a one as I reach the Simurgh? I will die on the first day."
15The hoopoe answered each of them. To the sparrow she said, "This is not humility. It is another kind of pride. Set out. If you die on the road, it is better than dying in the nest."
16So they were ashamed, and they made ready. They cast lots to choose who should lead them, and the lot fell on the hoopoe. They set a crown on her head. And a hundred thousand birds rose up together, so that the sky was dark with them.
17But when they came to the beginning of the road, and saw it stretch away with no end, in a silence where nothing moved, a great fear fell on them. They pressed together. "Why is the road so empty?" one asked. And the hoopoe said, "Because of the greatness of the King."
18She told them that seven valleys lay between them and the mountain. The first was the Valley of the Quest. There a bird must give up all it has, and labour for years, and wait, and be tried, and not turn aside.
19The second was the Valley of Love. There is fire in that valley. The one who enters it must be fire, and not count the cost, nor ask what comes after. In that valley reason is like smoke.
20The third was the Valley of Understanding. There each one goes by a different path, for no two are made alike, and each sees by the light it is able to bear. The gnat cannot fly at the pace of the elephant. Yet the road is opened to each according to its strength.
21The fourth was the Valley of Needing Nothing. A cold wind blows there, so mighty that it lays waste a whole country in a moment. There the seven seas are a puddle and the seven stars a spark. All that a bird ever wished to own, or to be, becomes as light as a straw.
22The fifth was the Valley of Oneness. There all that seemed many is seen to be one. However many heads you see there, there is one neck. There is no I and you in that valley.
23The sixth was the Valley of Bewilderment. There is pain there, and sighing. The one who enters it forgets all it ever knew. If you ask it, "Are you, or are you not?" it will answer, "I know nothing. I am in love, and I do not know with whom."
24The seventh was the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness, and of that valley it is not possible to speak. It is the drop going into the sea.
25They flew. They flew for years. They flew for most of their lives.
26And they died on that road in their thousands. Some were drowned in the sea. Some died of thirst on the high peaks. Some had their wings burned by the sun and their hearts dried up. Some were eaten by the lions and panthers of the way. Some went mad in the desert, and fought to the death over a single grain. Some stopped to wonder at the marvels of the road, and stayed, and forgot why they had come. Some simply grew tired, and settled where they were, and said it was far enough.
27Out of all that host, a few came through to the far side of the seventh valley. They were without feathers and without strength. Their bodies were broken and their hearts were worn through. When they counted themselves, there were thirty.
28Thirty birds, out of a hundred thousand, at the gate of the King.
29They saw a Presence there beyond the reach of thought, before which the sun is a speck. Then a herald of the court came out to them. "Who are you?" he said. "Where have you come from? What do you want here, you handful of dust and bones?"
30"We have come," they said, "that the Simurgh may be our King. We have crossed the valleys for it. We were many. We are thirty."
31"Go back," said the herald. "Whether you are or are not, the King is King for ever. A hundred thousand worlds of creatures are an ant at His door. He does not need you. Go back, you poor ones."
32At that, hope died in them. Yet they did not go. "We will not turn back," they said. "Is the moth turned back from the lamp? Let us be burned, then. It is what we came for."
33And when they had become wholly without hope, and wanted nothing any longer, the door was opened. A hundred curtains were drawn back, one behind another. They were brought in and seated on the seat of nearness.
34A writing was put before each of them, and they were told to read it. And as they read, they found written there all that they had ever done, and all they had left undone. They read it as the brothers of Joseph read, long afterward in Egypt, the bill of sale by which they had sold their own brother into a pit. Shame went through them, and they were ground down by it into dust.
35And then, when they were quite emptied, and washed of all that they had been, they were given new life from the light of that Presence. They lifted their heads. They looked upon the Simurgh.
36Now you must know, said Attar, that in our Persian tongue si is thirty, and murgh is a bird. Si murgh: thirty birds.
37They looked at the Simurgh, and what they saw was thirty birds. They looked at themselves, the thirty birds, and what they saw was the Simurgh. They looked at both together, and there was one Simurgh, no more. This one was that one, and that one was this. No one in the world had ever heard of such a thing.
38They were drowned in wonder. Without tongues they asked what this secret might be. And without a tongue the answer came to them:
39This Presence is a mirror, bright as the sun. Whoever comes to it sees himself in it. You came as thirty birds, and you see thirty. If forty had come, or fifty, they would have seen as many. You have come a long road, and what you have seen is yourselves. For no eye can see Us as We are. How should the eye of an ant take in the stars? All the valleys you crossed, you crossed within Our doing. Be lost now in Us, and in Us you will find yourselves again.
40So they were lost in Him at last, as a shadow is lost in the sun. And that is all that can be told.
41The old druggist stopped. The lamp had burned low. In the inn yard no one spoke. The saddler was sitting beside the weaver, and neither of them seemed to have noticed.
42Understand what Attar meant by his tale, for it is his, and it should not be taken from him. He was a man of faith. To him the Simurgh was God, and the road was the road of the soul, which must lose itself to find its Lord. That is how his own people have read it for eight hundred years, and they read it rightly.
43But a good tale is a well, and more than one traveller may drink from it. Hear what the frightened people in the inn yard took from it that night.
44A woman of Balkh said, "They went looking for a king to rule them. And there was no king sitting apart on a throne. There was only all of them, come through together."
45"Not all," said the saddler. "Thirty. The rest stopped by the way. For a rose. For a jewel. For a quarrel over a grain." He did not look at the weaver.
46The preacher's son spoke last. He asked the old man, "The ones who died on the road, were they nothing, then? They flew too."
47Attar looked at the boy a long while. "Who told the thirty that the sea could be crossed?" he said. "The ones who drowned a little farther out than the ones before. The thirty were carried on a hundred thousand backs. When they looked in the mirror, do you think they saw only thirty?"
48In the morning the caravan did not break up. It went out together by the western gate, the weaver behind the saddler, and it did not stop until it had crossed the whole of Persia.
49It is told that before they left, the old druggist put a book into the hands of the preacher's son: one of his own poems, copied fair. And it is told that he said to the father, as the boy walked off behind him, that this son would soon set fire to all the lovers of the world. So it is told. It may not have happened. The boy grew up to believe it had, and that is a kind of happening too.
50The boy's name was Jalal al-Din. Keep it in your mind.
51As for Nishapur, the riders came. It was a year or two after. They took the city in the spring, and it is said that not a living thing was left in the streets.
52The old druggist died in that slaughter, or so his people have always said. No one knows the manner of it for certain. His shop burned, with its jars of rose water.
53But his poem of the birds had been copied many times by then. It had gone out of the city by the western gate, and the southern, in saddlebags, year after year. It was in Shiraz, and in Baghdad, and on the road to Rum. When the riders pulled down the walls of Nishapur they were already too late. They could kill the one who had made the mirror. They could not find the mirror, for by then it was in thirty places.
54Now hear what came after, and what the boy did with his book.