Grasses glazed with frost, cheesewheel moon perched high on sailing clouds, and winter descends softly over the quiet town of montgomery, new jersey. in the i night i walk out with only a flashlight and a camera to lance away the dark. in the spaces between where dead oaks clawed out like the fingers of skeletons ressurected in the moonlight for the stars. the shiver of beetles glossed in midwinter frost. on the rarest nights foxes would float between the shadows of the woods and with a careful eye you could catch the flame of their bodies as they melted between worlds, as they froze and blinked back at you, into the waters of your soul. other nights phantom birds wheeled above the chimneys in arcs of silver, shards of moon footloose in the wind. once near the end of october i watched a whole herd of deer flow down the street and away into the gloom like a river outpouring, liquid and vague, the vein of something vast, dreaming. my vantage though was always the same: the forest to my left; the neighborhood to my right.

The vast muslim world was wonderful for the growth of knowledge. the greeks had developed a level of practical experience and technical understanding a thousand years more advanced than anyone else nearby. the muslims began to translate some of these ancient greek texts. from india, muslims learned of the zero, which allowed them to invent what we still call "arabic” numerals. and because the koran, the sacred book of islam, is written in arabic, scholars throughout the muslim world learned to read arabic and to share their knowledge. the muslims swept past jundi shapur and learned the secrets of sugar. as they conquered lands around the mediterranean sea, they spread word of how to grow, mill, and refine the sweet reed. how do the details in the passage support the central idea? the details describe the important role muslims played in spreading knowledge throughout the world. the details clarify the role jundi shapur played in spreading the secrets of sugar to the rest of the world. the details describe how muslims used knowledge from only the greeks to make innovations. the details reveal how important the koran was in muslims conquer other lands