For it all, however, longitude was the most vital unknown. Many attempts had been made to find a way to fix longitude, but nothing ever worked. Seamen found the only real solution to the problem was "latitude sailing," a time-consuming and expensive procedure whereby a captain would sail north or south to the approximate latitude of his destination and then sail due east or west, rather than trying to sail on the diagonal. King Philip III of Spain had offered a fortune to the first man who discovered how to tell longitude at sea.
Hawksworth spent days poring through the piles of tables, many of which were strewn about the floor of the room and damaged from mildew and rot. Next he carefully copied the symbols off the walls of the circular building and matched these with those on several of the charts. Were these the names of the major stars, or constellations of the zodiac, or . . . what? The number was twenty-eight.
And then it came to him: they were the daily stations of the moon.
As he continued to sift through the documents, he realized that the scholar who wrote them had predicted eclipses of the moon for many years in advance. Then he found a book, obviously old, with charts that seemed to provide geometric corrections for the distortion caused by the atmosphere when sighting stars near the horizon, something that always had been troublesome for navigators.
He also found other writings. New. Some appeared to be verses, and others, tables of names and numbers. Sums of
money were written next to some of the names. But none of it meant anything without the Persian, which he could not read. And Shirin had never returned to the observatory, at least not when he was there.
At the observatory that morning the sky had been a perfect ice blue, the garden and orchard still, the air dry and exhilarating. No workmen were splashing in the moat beyond the wall that day. Only the buzz of gnats intruded on the silence. He had brought a bottle of dry Persian wine to make the work go faster, finding he was growing accustomed to its taste. And he had brought his lute, as always, in hope Shirin would come again.
He was in the stone hut, cleaning and sorting pages of manuscript, when she appeared silently in the doorway. He looked up and felt a sudden rush in his chest.