The ancient city of Samarkand exhales its first breath of dusk, releasing the heat it has been holding throughout the blistering afternoon. On the horizon, a lone wagon pulled by camels, the ships of the desert, meanders toward town.  A trader sits at the helm, unbothered by the heat. He carries trade from the west: bronze goods, metal work and coins from Constantinople. From Venice he brings Murano glass, wool cloth and salt. As he approaches with his cargo the entire city, it seems, pours forth all its aromas in welcome.  The inns are busy feeding hungry travelers, the mosques are calling to evening prayer, frankincense and myrrh rise in ancient devotion, and the animals are being fed and put up. This is an orgy of scent. This is Serge Lutens’ Ambre Sultan; a journey through time.

The sheer magnitude of the city’s odors never fails to impress upon the merchant the sheer variety of his world.  The urban olfactory profile washes over him as a soft, silky, and slightly indolic flood. The warmth of amber and the medicinal sharpness of bay leaf, coriander and oregano are simultaneous, not sequential. There is vanilla there too, holding back the medicinal edge of the spices, and the indole soon shifts from something animalic to something more floral. Something he notes in his conscious mind.

As the city gates swallow the merchant the herbaceous character dissolves into a sacred warmth. Once within the gates, patchouli grounds the entire city in earthiness, like mortar and pestle. The spices become not muted, though, or dark, but full of warmth, with a resinous, balsamic quality that would otherwise be too heavy were it not for the coriander and a smoky accord which provides cleanliness and lift respectively. Sandalwood too, is there. Felt as texture, like silk: smooth and soft, but warm also, silk as undergarment, not a cool, raw cut of fabric. And while the business of everyday life carries on about him, the merchant can’t help but realize the irony of the sacred within the profane, and how, even in the most earthly things, something of the holy remains. The merchant understands the timelessness of his goods, goods that are nearly as old as civilization itself. Deep down, he feels the magnitude of his place in time and history, though small it might be on the grand scale. And he wonders at the power with which scent moves his spirit.

“The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.” (Revelation 18:12-14)

The herbaceousness of the city never quite disappears. Or does it? The builder constructed this city so seamlessly that the shift from herbal to resinous barely registers with the merchant; the air is warm now, almost sweet. The proximity of the temples at the heart of the city, certainly, are responsible for this. They’ve been burning their sacred woods and ambers, their incense, for thousands of years. And there is wonder in that, too. By nightfall, the bustle of the market recedes, trade has nearly stopped, the merchant has found his bed, and the city no longer speaks with such volume. What remains is what the day has left on him — vanilla and sandalwood, close and warm as a second skin; the merchant breathes the city in, and sleeps.

This is Ambre Sultan. The nose, Christopher Sheldrake, built a road that goes exactly where it says it goes — to an ancient time and place that somehow seems infinitely present. Every note performs its role. The three notes in the base, sandalwood, vanilla and benzoin, like the idea of the Christian trinity, somehow act as one.  They are all present on their own, but somehow create a single note or accord that is not any one of the three.  The journey is real, the destination is beautiful, and ten hours later something of Samarkand still clings to the skin like a merchant who has been somewhere extraordinary and cannot quite leave it behind. Ambre Sultan somehow looks into the past with something other than a pair of eyes.