*

   After the first nervous days on the ground, during which the three turbaned young hijackers went perilously close to the edges of insanity, screaming into the desert night you bastards, come and get us, or, alternatively, o god o god they're going to send in the fucking commandos, the motherfucking Americans, yaar, the sisterfucking British, – moments during which the remaining hostages closed their eyes and prayed, because they were always most afraid when the hijackers showed signs of weakness, – everything settled down into what began to feel like normality. Twice a day a solitary vehicle carried food and drink to Bostan and left it on the tarmac. The hostages had to bring in the cartons while the hijackers watched them from the safety of the plane. Apart from this daily visit there was no contact with the outside world. The radio had gone dead. It was as if the incident had been forgotten, as if it were so embarrassing that it had simply been erased from the record. The bastards are leaving us to rot,’ screamed Man Singh, and the hostages joined in with a will. ‘Hijras! Chootias! Shits!’
   They were wrapped in heat and silence and now the spectres began to shimmer out of the corners of their eyes. The most highly strung of the hostages, a young man with a goatee beard and close-cropped curly hair, awoke at dawn, shrieking with fear because he had seen a skeleton riding a camel across the dunes. Other hostages saw coloured globes hanging in the sky, or heard the beating of gigantic wings. The three male hijackers fell into a deep, fatalistic gloom. One day Tavleen summoned them to a conference at the far end of the plane; the hostages heard angry voices. ‘She's telling them they have to issue an ultimatum,’ Gibreel Farishta said to Chamcha. ‘One of us has to die, or such.’ But when the men returned Tavleen wasn't with them and the dejection in their eyes was tinged, now, with shame. ‘They lost their guts,’ Gibreel whispered. ‘No can do. Now what is left for our Tavleen bibi? Zero. Story funtoosh.’
   What she did:
   In order to prove to her captives, and also to her fellow-captors, that the idea of failure, or surrender, would never weaken her resolve, she emerged from her momentary retreat in the first-class cocktail lounge to stand before them like a stewardess demonstrating safety procedures. But instead of putting on a lifejacket and holding up blow-tube whistle etcetera, she quickly lifted the loose black djellabah that was her only garment and stood before them stark naked, so that they could all see the arsenal of her body, the grenades like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage, the gelignite taped around her thighs, just the way it had been in Chamcha's dream. Then she slipped her robe back on and spoke in her faint oceanic voice. ‘When a great idea comes into the world, a great cause, certain crucial questions are asked of it,’ she murmured. ‘History asks us: what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising, absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise, trim and yield?’ Her body had provided her answer.
   The days continued to pass. The enclosed, boiling circumstances of his captivity, at once intimate and distant, made Saladin Chamcha want to argue with the woman, unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it can be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last. But he didn't say anything, of course, he fell into the torpor of the days. Gibreel Farishta discovered in the seat pocket in front of him a pamphlet written by the departed Dumsday. By this time Chamcha had noticed the determination with which the movie star resisted the onset of sleep, so it wasn't surprising to see him reciting and memorizing the lines of the creationist's leaflet, while his already heavy eyelids drooped lower and lower until he forced them to open wide again. The leaflet argued that even the scientists were busily re-inventing God, that once they had proved the existence of a single unified force of which electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics were all merely aspects, avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would we have but the oldest thing of all, a supreme entity controlling all creation... ‘You see, what our friend says is, if you have to choose between some type of disembodied force-field and the actual living God, which one would you go for? Good point, na? You can't pray to an electric current. No point asking a wave-form for the key to Paradise.’ He closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. ‘All bloody bunk,’ he said fiercely. ‘Makes me sick.’
   After the first days Chamcha no longer noticed Gibreel's bad breath, because nobody in that world of sweat and apprehension was smelling any better. But his face was impossible to ignore, as the great purple welts of his wakefulness spread outwards like oil-slicks from his eyes. Then at last his resistance ended and he collapsed on to Saladin's shoulder and slept for four days without waking once.
   When he returned to his senses he found that Chamcha, with the help of the mouse-like, goateed hostage, a certain Jalandri, had moved him to an empty row of seats in the centre block. He went to the toilet to urinate for eleven minutes and returned with a look of real terror in his eyes. He sat down by Chamcha again, but wouldn't say a word. Two nights later, Chamcha heard him fighting, once again, against the onset of sleep. Or, as it turned out: of dreams.
   ‘Tenth highest peak in the world,’ Chamcha heard him mutter, ‘is Xixabangma Feng, eight oh one three metres. An-napurna ninth, eighty seventy-eight.’ Or he would begin at the other end: ‘One, Chomolungma, eight eight four eight. Two, K2, eighty-six eleven. Kanchenjunga, eighty-five ninety-eight, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu. Nanga Parbat, metres eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six.’
   ‘You count eight thousand metre peaks to fall asleep?’ Chamcha asked him. Bigger than sheep, but not so numerous.
   Gibreel Farishta glared at him; then bowed his head; came to a decision. ‘Not to sleep, my friend. To stay awake.’

*
   That was when Saladin Chamcha found out why Gibreel Farishta had begun to fear sleep. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and Gibreel had spoken to nobody about what had happened after he ate the unclean pigs. The dreams had begun that very night. In these visions he was always present, not as himself but as his namesake, and I don't mean interpreting a role, Spoono, I am him, he is me, I am the bloody archangel, Gibreel himself, large as bloody life.
   Spoono. Like Zeenat Vakil, Gibreel had reacted with mirth to Saladin's abbreviated name. ‘Bhai, wow. I'm tickled, truly. Tickled pink. So if you are an English chamcha these days, let it be. Mr Sally Spoon. It will be our little joke.’ Gibreel Farishta had a way of failing to notice when he made people angry. Spoon, Spoono, my old Chumch: Saladin hated them all. But could do nothing. Except hate.
   Maybe it was because of the nicknames, maybe not, but Saladin found Gibreel's revelations pathetic, anticlimactic, what was so strange if his dreams characterized him as the angel, dreams do every damn thing, did it really display more than a banal kind of egomania? But Gibreel was sweating from fear: ‘Point is, Spoono,’ he pleaded, ‘every time I go to sleep the dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the same place. As if somebody just paused the video while I went out of the room. Or, or. As if he's the guy who's awake and this is the bloody nightmare. His bloody dream: us. Here. All of it.’ Chamcha stared at him. ‘Crazy, right,’ he said. ‘Who knows if angels even sleep, never mind dream. I sound crazy. Am I right or what?’
   ‘Yes. You sound crazy.’
   ‘Then what the hell,’ he wailed, ‘is going on in my head?’


*

   The longer he spent without going to sleep the more talkative he became, he began to regale the hostages, the hijackers, as well as the dilapidated crew of Flight 420, those formerly scornful stewardesses and shining flight-deck personnel who were now looking mournfully moth-eaten in a corner of the plane and even losing their earlier enthusiasm for endless games of rummy, – with his increasingly eccentric reincarnation theories, comparing their sojourn on that airstrip by the oasis of Al-Zamzam to a second period of gestation, telling everybody that they were all dead to the world and in the process of being regenerated, made anew. This idea seemed to cheer him up somewhat, even though it made many of the hostages want to string him up, and he leapt up on to a seat to explain that the day of their release would be the day of their rebirth, a piece of optimism that calmed his audience down. ‘Strange but true!’ he cried. ‘That will be day zero, and because we will all share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age from that day on, for the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty kids come out of the same mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!’
   Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield many notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, the resurrection of Christ, the transmigration, at the instant of death, of the soul of the Dalai Lama into the body of a new-born child... such matters got mixed up with the avatars of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated Vishnu by adopting the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the progress of human beings through successive cycles of life, now as cockroaches, now as kings, towards the bliss of no-more-returns. To be born again, first you have to die. Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. ‘The old must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be whatnot.’
   Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on Chamcha's shoulder, while Saladin – prolonged captivity erodes certain reluctances among the captives – would stroke his face and kiss the top of his head, There, there, there. On other occasions Chamcha's irritation would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that's what's happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying to be born into your flesh.

*

   ‘You want to hear something really crazy?’ Gibreel after a hundred and one days offered Chamcha more confidences. ‘You want to know why I'm here?’ And told him anyway: ‘For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody love of my bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point five. Doesn't that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch.’
   And: ‘How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long do you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, the has-to-be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother-fucking sparks, yaar, believe don't believe, she said it was static electricity in the carpet but I've kissed chicks in hotel rooms before and this was a definite first, a definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump back with pain.’
   He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express how it had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet and she had become its meaning. ‘You don't see,’ he gave up. ‘Maybe you never met a person for whom you'd cross the world, for whom you'd leave everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the top. You think I can't get on a jumbo-jet for a woman like that?’
   The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the mountain-climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the memory of Pamela, but she wouldn't come. At first it would be Zeeny who visited him, her shade, and then after a time there was nobody at all. Gibreel's passion began to drive Chamcha wild with anger and frustration, but Farishta didn't notice it, slapped him on the back, cheer up, Spoono, won't be long now.


*

   On the hundred and tenth day Tavleen walked up to the little goateed hostage, Jalandri, and motioned with her finger. Our patience has been exhausted, she announced, we have sent repeated ultimatums with no response, it is time for the first sacrifice. She used that word: sacrifice. She looked straight into Jalandri's eyes and pronounced his death sentence. ‘You first. Apostate traitor bastard.’ She ordered the crew to prepare for take-off, she wasn't going to risk a storming of the plane after the execution, and with the point of her gun she pushed Jalandri towards the open door at the front, while he screamed and begged for mercy. ‘She's got sharp eyes,’ Gibreel said to Chamcha. ‘He's a cut-sird.’ Jalandri had become the first target because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his hair, which made him a traitor to his faith, a shorn Sirdarji. Cut-Sird. A seven-letter condemnation; no appeal.
   Jalandri had fallen to his knees, stains were spreading on the seat of his trousers, she was dragging him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved. Dara Buta Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was kneeling with his back to the open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the head, and he toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door.
   Man Singh, youngest and jumpiest of the quartet, screamed at her: ‘Now where do we go? In any damn place they'll send the commandos in for sure. We're gone geese now.’
   ‘Martyrdom is a privilege,’ she said softly. ‘We shall be like stars; like the sun.’


*

   Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps, France, the coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened meadowlands. Mr. Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The world had rediscovered Flight AI-420, the Boeing 747 Bostan. Radar tracked it; radio messages crackled. Do you want permission to land? But no permission was requested. Bostan circled over England's shore like a gigantic sea-bird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero.
   When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this time the three male hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there were no fierce whispers about the fuel about what the fuck you're doing but just a mute stand-off, they wouldn't even talk to one another, as if they had given up hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her. The hostages watched the fight to the death, unable to feel involved, because a curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a kind of inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. They fell to the floor and her knife went up through his stomach. That was all, the brevity of it adding to its seeming unimportance. Then in the instant when she rose up it was as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really meant business, she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her hand the wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down.
   No, not death: birth.

II. Mahound

   Gibreel when he submits to the inevitable, when he slides heavy-lidded towards visions of his angeling, passes his loving mother who has a different name for him, Shaitan, she calls him, just like Shaitan, same to same, because he has been fooling around with the tiffins to be carried into the city for the office workers’ lunch, mischeevious imp, she slices the air with her hand, rascal has been putting Muslim meat compartments into Hindu non-veg tiffin-carriers, customers are up in arms. Little devil, she scolds, but then folds him in her arms, my little farishta, boys will be boys, and he falls past her into sleep, growing bigger as he falls and the falling begins to feel like flight, his mother's voice wafts distantly up to him, baba, look how you grew, enormouse, wah-wah, applause. He is gigantic, wingless, standing with his feet upon the horizon and his arms around the sun. In the early dreams he sees beginnings, Shaitan cast down from the sky, making a grab for a branch of the highest Thing, the lote-tree of the uttermost end that stands beneath the Throne, Shaitan missing, plummeting, splat. But he lived on, was not couldn't be dead, sang from hellbelow his soft seductive verses. O the sweet songs that he knew. With his daughters as his fiendish backing group, yes, the three of them, Lat Manat Uzza, motherless girls laughing with their Abba, giggling behind their hands at Gibreel, what a trick we got in store for you, they giggle, for you and for that businessman on the hill. But before the businessman there are other stories, here he is, Archangel Gibreel, revealing the spring of Zamzam to Hagar the Egyptian so that, abandoned by the prophet Ibrahim with their child in the desert, she might drink the cool spring waters and so live. And later, after the Jurhum filled up Zamzam with mud and golden gazelles, so that it was lost for a time, here he is again, pointing it out to that one, Muttalib of the scarlet tents, father of the child with the silver hair who fathered, in turn, the businessman. The businessman: here he comes.
   Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes aware, without the dream, of himself sleeping, of himself dreaming his own awareness of his dream, and then a panic begins, O God, he cries out, O allgood allahgod, I've had my bloody chips, me. Got bugs in the brain, full mad, a looney tune and a gone baboon. Just as he, the businessman, felt when he first saw the archangel: thought he was cracked, wanted to throw himself down from a rock, from a high rock, from a rock on which there grew a stunted lote-tree, a rock as high as the roof of the world.
   He's coming: making his way up Cone Mountain to the cave. Happy birthday: he's forty-four today. But though the city behind and below him throngs with festival, up he climbs, alone. No new birthday suit for him, neatly pressed and folded at the foot of his bed. A man of ascetic tastes. (What strange manner of businessman is this?)
   Question: What is the opposite of faith?
   Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
   Doubt.
   The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, of the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behind-their-own eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.
   I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.
   Me?

   The businessman: looks as he should, high forehead, caglenose, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the hip. Average height, brooding, dressed in two pieces of plain cloth, each four ells in length, one draped around his body, the other over his shoulder. Large eyes; long lashes like a girl's. His strides can seem too long for his legs, but he's a light-footed man. Orphans learn to be moving targets, develop a rapid walk, quick reactions, hold-your-tongue caution. Up through the thorn-bushes and opobalsam trees he comes, scrabbling on boulders, this is a fit man, no soft-bellied usurer he. And yes, to state it again: takes an odd sort of business wallah to cut off into the wilds, up Mount Cone, sometimes for a month at a stretch, just to be alone.
   His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it means he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won't answer to that here; nor, though he's well aware of what they call him, to his nickname in Jahilia down below – he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-Coney. Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammcred; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil's synonym: Mahound.
   That's him. Mahound the businessman, climbing his hot mountain in the Hijaz. The mirage of a city shines below him in the sun.

*

   The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, – the very stuff of inconstancy, – the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, – and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence. These people are a mere three or four generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home.
   – Whereas the migrant can do without the journey altogether; it's no more than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive. —
   Quite recently, then, and like the shrewd businessmen they were, the Jahilians settled down at the intersection-point of the routes of the great caravans, and yoked the dunes to their will. Now the sand serves the mighty urban merchants. Beaten into cobbles, it paves Jahilia's tortuous streets; by night, golden flames blaze out from braziers of burnished sand. There is glass in the windows, in the long, slitlike windows set in the infinitely high sand-walls of the merchant palaces; in the alleys of Jahilia, donkey-carts roll forward on smooth silicon wheels. I, in my wickedness, sometimes imagine the coming of a great wave, a high wall of foaming water roaring across the desert, a liquid catastrophe full of snapping boats and drowning arms, a tidal wave that would reduce these vain sandcastles to the nothingness, to the grains from which they came. But there are no waves here. Water is the enemy in Jahilia. Carried in earthen pots, it must never be spilled (the penal code deals fiercely with offenders), for where it drops the city erodes alarmingly. Holes appear in roads, houses tilt and sway. The water-carriers of Jahilia are loathed necessities, pariahs who cannot be ignored and therefore can never be forgiven. It never rains in Jahilia; there are no fountains in the silicon gardens. A few palms stand in enclosed courtyards, their roots travelling far and wide below the earth in search of moisture. The city's water comes from underground streams and springs, one such being the fabled Zamzam, at the heart of the concentric sand-city, next to the House of the Black Stone. Here, at Zamzam, is a beheshti, a despised water-carrier, drawing up the vital, dangerous fluid. He has a name: Khalid.
   A city of businessmen, Jahilia. The name of the tribe is Shark.
   In this city, the businessman-turned-prophet, Mahound, is founding one of the world's great religions; and has arrived, on this day, his birthday, at the crisis of his life. There is a voice whispering in his ear: What kind of idea are you? Man-or-mouse?
   We know that voice. We've heard it once before.


*

   While Mahound climbs Coney, Jahilia celebrates a different anniversary. In ancient time the patriarch Ibrahim came into this valley with Hagar and Ismail, their son. Here, in this waterless wilderness, he abandoned her. She asked him, can this be God's will? He replied, it is. And left, the bastard. From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me. – But I'll keep to the point; Hagar wasn't a witch. She was trusting: then surely He will not let me perish. After Ibrahim left her, she fed the baby at her breast until her milk ran out. Then she climbed two hills, first Safa then Marwah, running from one to the other in her desperation, trying to sight a tent, a camel, a human being. She saw nothing. That was when he came to her, Gibreel, and showed her the waters of Zamzam. So Hagar survived; but why now do the pilgrims congregate? To celebrate her survival? No, no. They are celebrating the honour done the valley by the visit of, you've guessed it, Ibrahim. In that loving consort's name, they gather, worship and, above all, spend.
   Jahilia today is all perfume. The scents of Araby, of Arabia Odorifera, hang in the air: balsam, cassia, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh. The pilgrims drink the wine of the date-palm and wander in the great fair of the feast of Ibrahim. And, among them, one wanders whose furrowed brow sets him apart from the cheerful crowd: a tall man in loose white robes, he'd stand almost a full head higher than Mahound. His beard is shaped close to his slanting, high-boned face; his gait contains the lilt, the deadly elegance of power. What's he called? – The vision yields his name eventually; it, too, is changed by the dream. Here he is, Karim Abu Simbel, Grandee of Jahilia, husband to the ferocious, beautiful Hind. Head of the ruling council of the city, rich beyond numbering, owner of the lucrative temples at the city gates, wealthy in camels, comptroller of caravans, his wife the greatest beauty in the land: what could shake the certainties of such a man? And yet, for Abu Simbel, too, a crisis is approaching. A name gnaws at him, and you can guess what it is, Mahound Mahound Mahound.
   O the splendour of the fairgrounds of Jahilia! Here in vast scented tents are arrays of spices, of senna leaves, of fragrant woods; here the perfume vendors can be found, competing for the pilgrims’ noses, and for their wallets, too. Abu Simbel pushes his way through the crowds. Merchants, Jewish, Monophysite, Nabataean, buy and sell pieces of silver and gold, weighing them, biting coins with knowing teeth. There is linen from Egypt and silk from China; from Basra, arms and grain. There is gambling, and drinking, and dance. There are slaves for sale, Nubian, Anatolian, Aethiop. The four factions of the tribe of Shark control separate zones of the fair, the scents and spices in the Scarlet Tents, while in the Black Tents the cloth and leather. The Silver-Haired grouping is in charge of precious metals and swords. Entertainment – dice, belly-dancers, palm-wine, the smoking of hashish and afeem – is the prerogative of the fourth quarter of the tribe, the Owners of the Dappled Camels, who also run the slave trade. Abu Simbel looks into a dance tent. Pilgrims sit clutching money-bags in their left hands; every so often a coin is moved from bag to right-hand palm. The dancers shake and sweat, and their eyes never leave the pilgrims’ fingertips; when the coin transfer ceases, the dance also ends. The great man makes a face and lets the tent-flap fall.
   Jahilia has been built in a series of rough circles, its houses spreading outwards from the House of the Black Stone, approximately in order of wealth and rank. Abu Simbel's palace is in the first circle, the innermost ring; he makes his way down one of the rambling, windy radial roads, past the city's many seers who, in return for pilgrim money, are chirping, cooing, hissing, possessed variously by djinnis of birds, beasts, snakes. A sorceress, failing for a moment to look up, squats in his path: ‘Want to capture a girlie's heart, my dear? Want an enemy under your thumb? Try me out; try my little knots!’ And raises, dangles a knotty rope, ensnarer of human lives – but, seeing now to whom she speaks, lets fall her disappointed arm and slinks away, mumbling, into sand.
   Everywhere, noise and elbows. Poets stand on boxes and declaim while pilgrims throw coins at their feet. Some bards speak rajaz verses, their four-syllable metre suggested, according to legend, by the walking pace of the camel; others speak the qas-idah, poems of wayward mistresses, desert adventure, the hunting of the onager. In a day or so it will be time for the annual poetry competition, after which the seven best verses will be nailed up on the walls of the House of the Black Stone. The poets are getting into shape for their big day; Abu Simbel laughs at minstrels singing vicious satires, vitriolic odes commissioned by one chief against another, by one tribe against its neighbour. And nods in recognition as one of the poets falls into step beside him, a sharp narrow youth with frenzied fingers. This young lampoonist already has the most feared tongue in all Jahilia, but to Abu Simbel he is almost deferential. ‘Why so preoccupied, Grandee? If you were not losing your hair I'd tell you to let it down.’ Abu Simbel grins his sloping grin. ‘Such a reputation,’ he muses. ‘Such fame, even before your milk-teeth have fallen out. Look out or we'll have to draw those teeth for you.’ He is teasing, speaking lightly, but even this lightness is laced with menace, because of the extent of his power. The boy is unabashed. Matching Abu Simbel stride for stride, he replies: ‘For every one you pull out, a stronger one will grow, biting deeper, drawing hotter spurts of blood.’ The Grandee, vaguely, nods. ‘You like the taste of blood,’ he says. The boy shrugs. ‘A poet's work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist, Baal.
   A curtained litter passes by; some fine lady of the city, out to see the fair, borne on the shoulders of eight Anatolian slaves. Abu Simbel takes the young Baal by the elbow, under the pretext of steering him out of the road; murmurs, ‘I hoped to find you; if you will, a word.’ Baal marvels at the skill of the Grandee. Searching for a man, he can make his quarry think he has hunted the hunter. Abu Simbel's grip tightens; by the elbow, he steers his companion towards the holy of holies at the centre of the town.
   ‘I have a commission for you,’ the Grandee says. ‘A literary matter. I know my limitations; the skills of rhymed malice, the arts of metrical slander, are quite beyond my powers. You understand.’
   But Baal, the proud, arrogant fellow, stiffens, stands on his dignity. ‘It isn't right for the artist to become the servant of the state.’ Simbel's voice falls lower, acquires silkier rhythms. ‘Ah, yes. Whereas to place yourself at the disposal of assassins is an entirely honourable thing.’ A cult of the dead has been raging in Jahilia. When a man dies, paid mourners beat themselves, scratch their breasts, tear hair. A hamstrung camel is left on the grave to die. And if the man has been murdered his closest relative takes ascetic vows and pursues the murderer until the blood has been avenged by blood; whereupon it is customary to compose a poem of celebration, but few revengers are gifted in rhyme. Many poets make a living by writing assassination songs, and there is general agreement that the finest of these blood-praising versifiers is the precocious polemicist, Baal. Whose professional pride prevents him from being bruised, now, by the Grandee's little taunt. ‘That is a cultural matter,’ he replies Abu Simbel sinks deeper still into silkiness. ‘Maybe so,’ he whispers at the gates of the House of the Black Stone, ‘but, Baal, concede: don't I have some small claim upon you? We both serve, or so I thought, the same mistress.’
   Now the blood leaves Baal's cheeks; his confidence cracks, falls from him like a shell. The Grandee, seemingly oblivious to the alteration, sweeps the satirist forward into the House.
   They say in Jahilia that this valley is the navel of the earth; that the planet, when it was being made, went spinning round this point. Adam came here and saw a miracle: four emerald pillars bearing aloft a giant glowing ruby, and beneath this canopy a huge white stone, also glowing with its own light, like a vision of his soul. He built strong walls around the vision to bind it forever to the earth. This was the first House. It was rebuilt many times – once by Ibrahim, after Hagar's and Ismail's angel-assisted survival – and gradually the countless touchings of the white stone by the pilgrims of the centuries darkened its colour to black. Then the time of the idols began; by the time of Mahound, three hundred and sixty stone gods clustered around God's own stone.
   What would old Adam have thought? His own sons are here now: the colossus of Hubal, sent by the Amalekites from Hit, stands above the treasury well, Hubal the shepherd, the waxing crescent moon; also, glowering, dangerous Kain. He is the waning crescent, blacksmith and musician; he, too, has his devotees.
   Hubal and Kain look down on Grandee and poet as they stroll. And the Nabataean proto-Dionysus, He-Of-Shara; the morning star, Astarte, and saturnine Nakruh. Here is the sun god, Manaf! Look, there flaps the giant Nasr, the god in eagle-form! See Quzah, who holds the rainbow ... is this not a glut of gods, a stone flood, to feed the glutton hunger of the pilgrims, to quench their unholy thirst. The deities, to entice the travellers, come – like the pilgrims – from far and wide. The idols, too, are delegates to a kind of international fair.
   There is a god here called Allah (means simply, the god). Ask the Jahilians and they'll acknowledge that this fellow has some sort of overall authority, but he isn't very popular: an all-rounder in an age of specialist statues.
   Abu Simbel and newly perspiring Baal have arrived at the shrines, placed side by side, of the three best-beloved goddesses in Jahilia. They bow before all three: Uzza of the radiant visage, goddess of beauty and love; dark, obscure Manat, her face averted, her purposes mysterious, sifting sand between her fingers – she's in charge of destiny – she's Fate; and lastly the highest of the three, the mother-goddess, whom the Greeks called Lato. Llat, they call her here, or, more frequently, Al-Lat. The goddess. Even her name makes her Allah's opposite and equal. Lat the omnipotent. His face showing sudden relief, Baal flings himself to the ground and prostrates himself before her. Abu Simbel stays on his feet.
   The family of the Grandee, Abu Simbel – or, to be more precise, of his wife Hind – controls the famous temple of Lat at the city's southern gate. (They also draw the revenues from the Manat temple at the east gate, and the temple of Uzza in the north.) These concessions arc the foundations of the Grandee's wealth, so he is of course, Baal understands, the servant of Lat. And the satirist's devotion to this goddess is well known throughout Jahilia. So that was all he meant! Trembling with relief, Baal remains prostrate, giving thanks to his patron Lady. Who looks upon him benignly; but a goddess's expresson is not to be relied upon. Baal has made a serious mistake.
   Without warning, the Grandee kicks the poet in the kidney. Attacked just when he has decided he's safe, Baal squeals, rolls over, and Abu Simbel follows him, continuing to kick. There is the sound of a cracking rib. ‘Runt,’ the Grandee remarks, his voice remaining low and good natured. ‘High-voiced pimp with small testicles. Did you think that the master of Lat's temple would claim comradeship with you just because of your adolescent passion for her?’ And more kicks, regular, methodical. Baal weeps at Abu Simbel's feet. The House of the Black Stone is far from empty, but who would come between the Grandee and his wrath? Abruptly, Baal's tormentor squats down, grabs the poet by the hair, jerks his head up, whispers into his ear: ‘Baal, she wasn't the mistress I meant,’ and then Baal lets out a howl of hideous self-pity, because he knows his life is about to end, to end when he has so much still to achieve, the poor guy. The Grandee's lips brush his car. ‘Shit of a frightened camel,’ Abu Simbel breathes, ‘I know you fuck my wife.’ He observes, with interest, that Baal has acquired a prominent erection, an ironic monument to his fear.
   Abu Simbel, the cuckolded Grandee, stands up, commands, ‘On your feet’, and Baal, bewildered, follows him outside.
   The graves of Ismail and his mother Hagar the Egyptian lie by the north-west face of the House of the Black Stone, in an enclosure surrounded by a low wall. Abu Simbel approaches this area, halts a little way off. In the enclosure is a small group of men. The water-carrier Khalid is there, and some sort of bum from Persia by the outlandish name of Salman, and to complete this trinity of scum there is the slave Bilal, the one Mahound freed, an enormous black monster, this one, with a voice to match his size. The three idlers sit on the enclosure wall. ‘That bunch of riff-raff,’ Abu Simbel says. ‘Those are your targets. Write about them; and their leader, too.’ Baal, for all his terror, cannot conceal his disbelief. ‘Grandee, those goons– those fucking clowns? You don't have to worry about them. What do you think? That Mahound's one God will bankrupt your temples? Three-sixty versus one, and the one wins? Can't happen.’ He giggles, close to hysteria. Abu Simbel remains calm: ‘Keep your insults for your verses.’ Giggling Baal can't stop. ‘A revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves... wow, Grandee. I'm really scared.’ Abu Simbel looks carefully at the tittering poet. ‘Yes,’ he answers, ‘that's right, you should be afraid. Get writing, please, and I expect these verses to be your masterpieces.’ Baal crumples, whines. ‘But they are a waste of my, my small talent...’ He sees that he has said too much.
   ‘Do as you're told,’ are Abu Simbel's last words to him. ‘You have no choice.’

*

   The Grandee lolls in his bedroom while concubines attend to his needs. Coconut-oil for his thinning hair, wine for his palate, tongues for his delight. The boy was right. Why do I fear Mahound? He begins, idly, to count the concubines, gives up at fifteen with a flap of his hand. The boy. Hind will go on seeing him, obviously; what chance does he have against her will? It is a weakness in him, he knows, that he sees too much, tolerates too much. He has his appetites, why should she not have hers? As long as she is discreet; and as long as he knows. He must know; knowledge is his narcotic, his addiction. He cannot tolerate what he does not know and for that reason, if for no other, Mahound is his enemy, Mahound with his raggle-taggle gang, the boy was right to laugh. He, the Grandee, laughs less easily. Like his opponent he is a cautious man, he walks on the balls of his feet. He remembers the big one, the slave, Bilal: how his master asked him, outside the Lat temple, to enumerate the gods. ‘One,’ he answered in that huge musical voice. Blasphemy, punishable by death. They stretched him out in the fairground with a boulder on his chest. How many did you say? One, he repeated, one. A second boulder was added to the first. One one one. Mahound paid his owner a large price and set him free.
   No, Abu Simbel reflects, the boy Baal was wrong, these men are worth our time. Why do I fear Mahound? For that: one one one, his terrifying singularity. Whereas I am always divided, always two or three or fifteen. I can even see his point of view; he is as wealthy and successful as any of us, as any of the councillors, but because he lacks the right sort of family connections, we haven't offered him a place amongst our group. Excluded by his orphaning from the mercantile elite, he feels he has been cheated, he has not had his due. He always was an ambitious fellow. Ambitious, but also solitary. You don't rise to the top by climbing up a hill all by yourself. Unless, maybe, you meet an angel there... yes, that's it. I see what he's up to. He wouldn't understand me, though. What kind of idea am I? I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive. That is why I won't accuse Hind of adultery. We are a good pair, ice and fire. Her family shield, the fabled red lion, the many-toothed manticore. Let her play with her satirist; between us it was never sex. I'll finish him when she's finished with. Here's a great lie, thinks the Grandee of Jahilia drifting into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword.


*

   The fortunes of the city of Jahilia were built on the supremacy of sand over water. In the old days it had been thought safer to transport goods across the desert than over the seas, where monsoons could strike at any time. In those days before meteorology such matters were impossible to predict. For this reason the caravanserais prospered. The produce of the world came up from Zafar to Sheba, and thence to Jahilia and the oasis of Yathrib and on to Midian where Moses lived; thence to Aqabah and Egypt. From Jahilia other trails began: to the east and north-east, towards Mesopotamia and the great Persian empire. To Petra and to Palmyra, where once Solomon loved the Queen of Sheba. Those were fatted days. But now the fleets plying the waters around the peninsula have grown hardier, their crews more skilful, their navigational instruments more accurate. The camel trains are losing business to the boats. Desert-ship and sea-ship, the old rivalry, sees a tilt in the balance of power. Jahilia's rulers fret, but there is little they can do. Sometimes Abu Simbel suspects that only the pilgrimage stands between the city and its ruin. The council searches the world for statues of alien gods, to attract new pilgrims to the city of sand; but in this, too, they have competitors. Down in Sheba a great temple has been built, a shrine to rival the House of the Black Stone. Many pilgrims have been tempted south, and the numbers at the Jahilia fairgrounds are falling.
   At the recommendation of Abu Simbel, the rulers of Jahilia have added to their religious practices the tempting spices of profanity. The city has become famous for its licentiousness, as a gambling den, a whorehouse, a place of bawdy songs and wild, loud music. On one occasion some members of the tribe of Shark went too far in their greed for pilgrim money. The gatekeepers at the House began demanding bribes from weary voyagers; four of them, piqued at receiving no more than a pittance, pushed two travellers to their deaths down the great, steep flight of stairs. This practice backfired, discouraging return visits...Today, female pilgrims are often kidnapped for ransom, or sold into concubinage. Gangs of young Sharks patrol the city, keeping their own kind of law. It is said that Abu Simbel meets secretly with the gangleaders and organizes them all. This is the world into which Mahound has brought his message: one one one. Amid such multiplicity, it sounds like a dangerous word.
   The Grandee sits up and at once concubines approach to resume their oilings and smoothings. He waves them away, claps his hands. The eunuch enters. ‘Send a messenger to the house of the kahin Mahound,’ Abu Simbel commands. We will set him a little test. A fair contest: three against one.

*

   Water-carrier immigrant slave: Mahound's three disciples are washing at the well of Zamzam. In the sand-city, their obsession with water makes them freakish. Ablutions, always ablutions, the legs up to the knees, the arms down to the elbows, the head down to the neck. Dry-torsoed, wet-limbed and damp-headed, what eccentrics they look! Splish, splosh, washing and praying. On their knees, pushing arms, legs, heads back into the ubiquitous sand, and then beginning again the cycle of water and prayer. These are easy targets for Baal's pen. Their water-loving is a treason of a sort; the people of Jahilia accept the omnipotence of sand. It lodges between their fingers and toes, cakes their lashes and hair, clogs their pores. They open themselves to the desert: come, sand, wash us in aridity. That is the Jahilian way from the highest citizen to the lowest of the low. They are people of silicon, and water-lovers have come among them.
   Baal circles them from a safe distance – Bilal is not a man to trifle with – and yells gibes. ‘If Mahound's ideas were worth anything, do you think they'd only be popular with trash like you?’ Salman restrains Bilal: ‘We should be honoured that the mighty Baal has chosen to attack us,’ he smiles, and Bilal relaxes, subsides. Khalid the water-carrier is jumpy, and when he sees the heavy figure of Mahound's uncle Hamza approaching he runs towards him anxiously. Hamza at sixty is still the city's most renowned fighter and lion-hunter. Though the truth is less glorious than the eulogies: Hamza has many times been defeated in combat, saved by friends or lucky chances, rescued from lions’ jaws. He has the money to keep such items out of the news. And age, and survival, bestow a sort of validation upon a martial legend. Bilal and Salman, forgetting Baal, follow Khalid. All three are nervous, young.
   He's still not home, Hamza reports. And Khalid, worried: But it's been hours, what is that bastard doing to him, torture, thumbscrews, whips? Salman, once again, is the calmest: That isn't Simbel's style, he says, it's something sneaky, depend upon it. And Bilal bellows loyally: Sneaky or not, I have faith in him, in the Prophet. He won't break. Hamza offers only a gentle rebuke: Oh, Bilal, how many times must he tell you? Keep your faith for God. The Messenger is only a man. The tension bursts out of Khalid: he squares up to old Hamza, demands, Are you saying that the Messenger is weak? You may be his uncle... Hamza clouts the water-carrier on the side of the head. Don't let him see your fear, he says, not even when you're scared half to death.
   The four of them are washing once more when Mahound arrives; they cluster around him, whowhatwhy. Hamza stands back. ‘Nephew, this is no damn good,’ he snaps in his soldier's bark. ‘When you come down from Coney there's a brightness on you. Today it's something dark.’
   Mahound sits on the edge of the well and grins. ‘I've been offered a deal.’ By Abu Simbel? Khalid shouts. Unthinkable. Refuse. Faithful Bilal admonishes him: Do not lecture the Messenger. Of course, he has refused. Salman the Persian asks: What sort of deal. Mahound smiles again. ‘At least one of you wants to know.’
   ‘It's a small matter,’ he begins again. ‘A grain of sand. Abu Simbel asks Allah to grant him one little favour.’ Hamza sees the exhaustion in him. As if he had been wrestling with a demon. The water-carrier is shouting: ‘Nothing! Not a jot!’ Hamza shuts him up.
   ‘If our great God could find it in his heart to concede– he used that word, concede – that three, only three of the three hundred and sixty idols in the house are worthy of worship...’
   ‘There is no god but God!’ Bilal shouts. And his fellows join in: ‘Ya Allah!’ Mahound looks angry. ‘Will the faithful hear the Messenger?’ They fall silent, scuffing their feet in the dust.
   ‘He asks for Allah's approval of Lat, Uzza and Manat. In return, he gives his guarantee that we will be tolerated, even officially recognized; as a mark of which, I am to be elected to the council of Jahilia. That's the offer.’
   Salman the Persian says: ‘It's a trap. If you go up Coney and come down with such a Message, he'll ask, how could you make Gibreel provide just the right revelation? He'll be able to call you a charlatan, a fake.’ Mahound shakes his head. ‘You know, Salman, that I have learned how to listen. This listening is not of the ordinary kind; it's also a kind of asking. Often, when Gibreel comes, it's as if he knows what's in my heart. It feels to me, most times, as if he comes from within my heart: from within my deepest places, from my soul.’
   ‘Or it's a different trap,’ Salman persists. ‘How long have we been reciting the creed you brought us? There is no god but God. What are we if we abandon it now? This weakens us, renders us absurd. We cease to be dangerous. Nobody will ever take us seriously again.’
   Mahound laughs, genuinely amused. ‘Maybe you haven't been here long enough,’ he says kindly. ‘Haven't you noticed? The people do not take us seriously. Never more than fifty in the audience when I speak, and half of those are tourists. Don't you read the lampoons that Baal pins up all over town?’ He recites:


Messenger, do please lend a careful ear. Your monophilia, your one one one, ain't for Jahilia. Return to sender.


   ‘They mock us everywhere, and you call us dangerous,’ he cried.
   Now Hamza looks worried. ‘You never worried about their opinions before. Why now? Why after speaking to Simbel?’
   Mahound shakes his head. ‘Sometimes I think I must make it easier for the people to believe.’
   An uneasy silence covers the disciples; they exchange looks, shift their weight. Mahound cries out again. ‘You all know what has been happening. Our failure to win converts. The people will not give up their gods. They will not, not.’ He stands up, strides away from them, washes by himself on the far side of the Zamzam well, kneels to pray.
   ‘The people are sunk in darkness,’ says Bilal, unhappily. ‘But they will see. They will hear. God is one.’ Misery infects the four of them; even Hamza is brought low. Mahound has been shaken, and his followers quake.
   He stands, bows, sighs, comes round to rejoin them. ‘Listen to me, all of you,’ he says, putting one arm around Bilal's shoulders, the other around his uncle's. ‘Listen: it is an interesting offer.’
   Unembraced Khalid interrupts bitterly: ‘It is a tempting deal.’ The others look horrified. Hamza speaks very gently to the water-carrier. ‘Wasn't it you, Khalid, who wanted to fight me just now because you wrongly assumed that, when I called the Messenger a man, I was really calling him a weakling? Now what? Is it my turn to challenge you to a fight?’
   Mahound begs for peace. ‘If we quarrel, there's no hope.’ He tries to raise the discussion to the theological level. ‘It is not suggested that Allah accept the three as his equals. Not even Lat. Only that they be given some sort of intermediary, lesser status.’
   ‘Like devils,’ Bilal bursts out.
   ‘No,’ Salman the Persian gets the point. ‘Like archangels. The Grandee's a clever man.’
   ‘Angels and devils,’ Mahound says. ‘Shaitan and Gibreel. We all, already, accept their existence, halfway between God and man. Abu Simbel asks that we admit just three more to this great company. Just three, and, he indicates, all Jahilia's souls will be ours.’
   ‘And the House will be cleansed of statues?’ Salman asks. Mahound replies that this was not specified. Salman shakes his head. ‘This is being done to destroy you.’ And Bilal adds: ‘God cannot be four.’ And Khalid, close to tears: ‘Messenger, what are you saying? Lat, Manat, Uzza – they're all females! For pity's sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old cranes, herons, hags?’
   Misery strain fatigue, etched deeply into the Prophet's face. Which Hamza, like a soldier on a battlefield comforting a wounded friend, cups between his hands. ‘We can't sort this out for you, nephew,’ he says. ‘Climb the mountain. Go ask Gibreel.’

*

   Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he's floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he's swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he'll try a dolly shot, tracking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand-held with the help of a steadicam he'll probe the secrets of the Grandee's bedchamber. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises, but there aren't enough girls for a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn songs? They should have built up that fairground scene, maybe a cameo role for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent, wiggling her famous bazooms.
   And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: ‘Go ask Gibreel,’ and he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me? I'm supposed to know the answers here? I'm sitting here watching this picture and now this actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the bloody audience of a ‘theological’ to solve the bloody plot? – But as the dream shifts, it's always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for taking too many roles: yes, yes, he's not just playing the archangel but also him, the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he conies. Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of them can never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to the imagined incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the missing vision, with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the help of a travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.
   He has understood: that he is afraid of the other, the businessman, isn't it crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It's true, but: the kind of fear you feel when you're on a film set for the very first time and there, about to make his entrance, is one of the living legends of the cinema; you think, I'll disgrace myself, I'll dry, I'll corpse, you want like mad to be worthy. You will be sucked along in the slipstream of his genius, he can make you look good, like a high flier, but you will know if you aren't pulling your weight and even worse so will he ... Gibreel's fear, the fear of the self his dream creates, makes him struggle against Mahound's arrival, to try and put it off, but he's coming now, no quesch, and the archangel holds his breath.
   Those dreams of being pushed out on stage when you've no business being there, you don't know the story haven't learned any lines, but there's a full house watching, watching: feels like that. Or the true story of the white actress playing a black woman in Shakespeare. She went on stage and then realized she still had her glasses on, eek, but she had forgotten to blacken her hands so she couldn't reach up to take the specs off, double eek: like that also. Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help.


*

   To reach Mount Cone from Jahilia one must walk into dark ravines where the sand is not white, not the pure sand filtered long ago through the bodies of sea-cucumbers, but black and dour, sucking light from the sun. Coney crouches over you like an imaginary beast. You ascend along its spine. Leaving behind the last trees, white-flowered with thick, milky leaves, you climb among the boulders, which get larger as you get higher, until they resemble huge walls and start blotting out the sun. The lizards arc blue as shadows. Then you are on the peak, Jahilia behind you, the featureless desert ahead. You descend on the desert side, and about five hundred feet down you reach the cave, which is high enough to stand upright in, and whose floor is covered in miraculous albino sand. As you climb you hear the desert doves calling your name, and the rocks greet you, too, in your own language, crying Mahound, Mahound. When you reach the cave you are tired, you lie down, you fall asleep.

*

   But when he has rested he enters a different sort of sleep, a sort of not-sleep, the condition that he calls his listening, and he feels a dragging pain in the gut, like something trying to be born, and now Gibrcel, who has been hovering-above-looking-down, feels a confusion, who am I, in these moments it begins to seem that the archangel is actually inside the Prophet, I am the dragging in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from the sleeper's navel, I emerge, Gibreel Farishta, while my other self, Mahound, lies listening, entranced, I am bound to him, navel to navel, by a shining cord of light, not possible to say which of us is dreaming the other. We flow in both directions along the umbilical cord.
   Today, as well as the overwhelming intensity of Mahound, Gibrcel feels his despair: his doubts. Also, that he is in great need, but Gibreel still doesn't know his lines ... he listens to the listening-which-is-also-an-asking. Mahound asks: They were shown miracles but they didn't believe. They saw you come to me, in full view of the city, and open my breast, they saw you wash my heart in the waters of Zamzam and replace it inside my body. Many of them saw this, but still they worship stones. And when you came at night and flew me to Jerusalem and I hovered above the holy city, didn't I return and describe it exactly as it is, accurate down to the last detail? So that there could be no doubting the miracle, and still they went to Lat. Haven't I already done my best to make things simple for them? When you carried me up to the Throne itself, and Allah laid upon the faithful the great burden of forty prayers a day. On the return journey I met Moses and he said, the burden is too heavy, go back and plead for less. Four times I went back, four times Moses said, still too many, go back again. But by the fourth time Allah had reduced the duty to five prayers and I refused to return. I felt ashamed to beg any more. In his bounty he asks for five instead of forty, and still they love Manat, they want Uzza. What can I do? What shall I recite?
   Gibreel remains silent, empty of answers, for Pete's sake, bhai, don't go asking me. Mahound's anguish is awful. He asks: is it possible that they are angels? Lat, Manat, Uzza... can I call them angelic? Gibreel, have you got sisters? Are these the daughters of God? And he castigates himself, O my vanity, I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a dream of power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this sensible and wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don't even know if the Grandee is sincere. Docs he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he's strong, the offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to gain. The souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels? Is Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human race? – I don't know anything. – Should God be proud or humble, majestic or simple, yielding or un-? What kind of idea is he? What kind am I?


*

   Halfway into sleep, or halfway back to wakefulness, Gibreel Farishta is often filled with resentment by the non-appearance, in his persecuting visions, of the One who is supposed to have the answers, He never turns up, the one who kept away when I was dying, when I needed needed him. The one it's all about, Allah Ishvar God. Absent as ever while we writhe and suffer in his name.
   The Supreme Being keeps away; what keeps returning is this scene, the entranced Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring-up. And both of them scared out of their minds by the transcendence of it. Gibrcel feels paralysed by the presence of the Prophet, by his greatness, thinks I can't make a sound I'd seem such a goddamn fool. Hamza's advice: never show your fear: archangels need such advice as well as watercarriers. An archangel must look composed, what would the Prophet think if God's Exalted began to gibber with stage fright?
   It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsleep, becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre. No, no, nothing like an epileptic fit, it can't be explained away that easily; what epileptic fit ever caused day to turn to night, caused clouds to mass overhead, caused the air to thicken into soup while an angel hung, scared silly, in the sky above the sufferer, held up like a kite on a golden thread? The dragging again the dragging and now the miracle starts in his my our guts, he is straining with all his might at something, forcing something, and Gibreel begins to feel that strength that force, here it is at my own jaw working it, opening shutting; and the power, starting within Mahound, reaching up to my vocal cords and the voice comes.
   Not my voice I'd never know such words I'm no classy speaker never was never will be but this isn't my voice it's a Voice.
   Mahound's eyes open wide, he's seeing some kind of vision, staring at it, oh, that's right, Gibreel remembers, me. He's seeing me. My lips moving, being moved by. What, whom? Don't know, can't say. Nevertheless, here they are, coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words.
   Being God's postman is no fun, yaar.
   Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.
   God knows whose postman I've been.

*

   In Jahilia they are waiting for Mahound by the well. Khalid the water-carrier, as ever the most impatient, runs off to the city gate to keep a look-out. Hamza, like all old soldiers accustomed to keeping his own company, squats down in the dust and plays a game with pebbles. There is no sense of urgency; sometimes he is away for days, even weeks. And today the city is all but deserted; everybody has gone to the great tents at the fairground to hear the poets compete. In the silence, there is only the noise of Hamza's pebbles, and the gurgles of a pair of rock-doves, visitors from Mount Cone. Then they hear the running feet.
   Khalid arrives, out of breath, looking unhappy. The Messenger has returned, but he isn't coming to Zamzam. Now they are all on their feet, perplexed by this departure from established practice. Those who have been waiting with palm-fronds and steles ask Hamza: Then there will be no Message? But Khalid, still catching his breath, shakes his head. ‘I think there will be. He looks the way he does when the Word has been given. But he didn't speak to me and walked towards the fairground instead.’
   Hamza takes command, forestalling discussion, and leads the way. The disciples – about twenty have gathered – follow him to the fleshpots of the city, wearing expressions of pious disgust, Hamza alone seems to be looking forward to the fair.
   Outside the tents of the Owners of the Dappled Camels they find Mahound, standing with his eyes closed, steeling himself to the task. They ask anxious questions; he doesn't answer. After a few moments, he enters the poetry tent.


*

   Inside the tent, the audience reacts to the arrival of the unpopular Prophet and his wretched followers with derision. But as Mahound walks forward, his eyes firmly closed, the boos and catcalls die away and a silence falls. Mahound does not open his eyes for an instant, but his steps are sure, and he reaches the stage without stumblings or collisions. He climbs the few steps up into the light; still his eyes stay shut. The assembled lyric poets, composers of assassination eulogies, narrative versifiers and satirists – Baal is here, of course – gaze with amusement, but also with a little unease, at the sleepwalking Mahound. In the crowd his disciples jostle for room. The scribes fight to be near him, to take down whatever he might say.
   The Grandee Abu Simbel rests against bolsters on a silken carpet positioned beside the stage. With him, resplendent in golden Egyptian neckwear, is his wife Hind, that famous Grecian profile with the black hair that is as long as her body. Abu Simbel rises and calls to Mahound, ‘Welcome.’ He is all urbanity. ‘Welcome, Mahound, the seer, the kahin.’ It's a public declaration of respect, and it impresses the assembled crowd. The Prophet's disciples are no longer shoved aside, but allowed to pass. Bewildered, half-pleased, they come to the front. Mahound speaks without opening his eyes.
   ‘This is a gathering of many poets,’ he says clearly, ‘and I cannot claim to be one of them. But I am the Messenger, and I bring verses from a greater One than any here assembled.’
   The audience is losing patience. Religion is for the temple; Jahilians and pilgrims alike are here for entertainment. Silence the fellow! Throw him out! – But Abu Simbel speaks again. ‘If your God has really spoken to you,’ he says, ‘then all the world must hear it.’ And in an instant the silence in the great tent is complete,
   ‘The Star,’ Mahound cries out, and the scribes begin to write.
   ‘In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!
   ‘By the Pleiades when they set: Your companion is not in error; neither is he deviating.
   ‘Nor does he speak from his own desires. It is a revelation that has been revealed: one mighty in power has taught him.
   ‘He stood on the high horizon: the lord of strength. Then he came close, closer than the length of two bows, and revealed to his servant that which is revealed.
   ‘The servant's heart was true when seeing what he saw. Do you, then, dare to question what was seen?
   ‘I saw him also at the lote-tree of the uttermost end, near which lies the Garden of Repose. When that tree was covered by its covering, my eye was not averted, neither did my gaze wander; and I saw some of the greatest signs of the Lord.’
   At this point, without any trace of hesitation or doubt, he recites two further verses.
   ‘Have you thought upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?’ – After the first verse, Hind gets to her feet; the Grandee of Jahilia is already standing very straight. And Mahound, with silenced eyes, recites: ‘They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.’
   As the noise – shouts, cheers, scandal, cries of devotion to the goddess Al-Lat – swells and bursts within the marquee, the already astonished congregation beholds the doubly sensational spectacle of the Grandee Abu Simbel placing his thumbs upon the lobes of his ears, fanning out the fingers of both hands and uttering in a loud voice the formula: ‘Allahu Akbar.’ After which he falls to his knees and presses a deliberate forehead to the ground. His wife, Hind, immediately follows his lead.
   The water-carrier Khalid has remained by the open tent-flap throughout these events. Now he stares in horror as everyone gathered there, both the crowd in the tent and the overflow of men and women outside it, begins to kneel, row by row, the movement rippling outwards from Hind and the Grandee as though they were pebbles thrown into a lake; until the entire gathering, outside the tent as well as in, kneels bottom-in-air before the shuteye Prophet who has recognized the patron deities of the town. The Messenger himself remains standing, as if loth to join the assembly in its devotions. Bursting into tears, the water-carrier flees into the empty heart of the city of the sands. His teardrops, as he runs, burn holes in the earth, as if they contain some harsh corrosive acid.
   Mahound remains motionless. No trace of moisture can be detected on the lashes of his unopened eyes.