Lassitude

Langour; weariness (n.)

Al Farib was a cartographer of little repute that worked for a large firm of Islamic scientists in Baghdad at the turn of the century. Overworked, underpaid, treated as an intellectual subordinate by the alchemists, engineers, and doctors in his firm, Al Farib was actually the hardest working map-maker in the Empire. After everyone left for the day to go home to their families, Farib looked over his shoulder, closed the hatch door of his windowless office and worked on a project that he kept hidden from everyone: he was making the first map of the entire world. No one that he knew of had attempted it, and his firm had maps of all kinds, journals donated by explorers that had used their navigation equipment, coordinates brought back from expeditions and battles in the fartheset reaches of Islamic power. Farib was not married, he lived alone, had few hobbies other than walking by himself in the fragrant gardens of Baghdad, watching the children run with one another and the old men discussing matters of politics and temperance and the Prophet. He hid from them, keeping his eyes down, his words to himself, thinking about the geographical relations of disparate countries, new ways to draw them together on pieces of pulpy paper, wishing passionately for the entire world to appear before him while his smallness of self prevented him from entering it.
Some nights he didn't go home, and he'd keep a cup of tea leaves and hot water beside him. He could think clearly in the dead of night, when no other humans were awake, and he would fall asleep in his research. His colleagues would come in for their morning prayers and find him sleeping there among the latitudes and longitudes, the stained papers with miniscule notes scribbled all over them, ink staining his face, and they would chuckle to themselves and call him a weary fool.