Thinking In Numbers: How Maths Illuminates Our Lives - Plot & Excerpts
Or rather, they thought of it as an all-enveloping and all-enfeebling mist, without clear shape or pattern. Only the bright stars overhead pricked the pervasive gloom, helping the nomads to anticipate rain and decide when to take their animals to pasture. To make sense of their lives, the men sang songs, and the songs they sang told of distant earthquakes and battles. It was the sole history that they knew. The Prophet’s birth, to believe tradition, coincided with one of these battles: the so-called ‘Event of the Elephant’ (occurring in the latter half of the sixth century of the Christian Era), when Mecca fell under the siege of a foreign king’s army with a white elephant at its helm. According to a tale later told in the Koran, God sent a cloud of birds to pelt the attackers with stones until they fled. Alongside Muhammad’s revelation of a new religion came his revelation of time. Gone now was the idea of life as constituted by a flux of vague, discontinuous and casual moments.
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