Saitanic verses II. Mahound

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 94 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, enor_mouse_, 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 heilbelow 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 95 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, eaglenose, 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 96 reactions, hold-yourtongue caution. Up through the thorn-bushes and opobalsam trees he comes, scrabbling on boulders, this is a fit man, no softbellied 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 MocHammered; 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, prophetmotivated 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. 97 -- 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 watercarriers 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 98 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 99 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 SilverHaired 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 100 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 qasidah, 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 101 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." Baa! 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 J ahilia. 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." 102 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 eagleform! 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 103 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. Hat, 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 are 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, Baa! 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 104 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 scif-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 ear. "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." Baa!, 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 Baa! 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 105 your masterpieces." Baa! 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. 106 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 cara-- vanserais prospered. The produce of the world came up from Zafar to Sheba, and thence tojahilia 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, 107 coo, 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! 108 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 109 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 110 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 111 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, alljahilia's souls will be ours." 112 "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 threehundred-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 113 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 comes. 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 business-man, 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, eck, 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 114 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 Gibreel, 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. 115 Today, as well as the overwhelming intensity of Mahound, Gibreel 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. Does 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 116 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 lshvar 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. Gibreel 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 water-carriers. 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 notsicep, 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. 117 _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." 118 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. 119 "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; J ahilians 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. 120 "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. 121 On that night of the desolating triumph of the businessman in the tent of the unbelievers, there take place certain murders for which the first lady of Jahilia will wait years to take her terrible revenge. The Prophet's uncle Hamza has been walking home alone, his head bowed and grey in the twilight of that melancholy victory, when he hears a roar and looks up, to see a gigantic scarlet lion poised to leap at him from the high battlements of the city. He knows this beast, this fable. _The iridescence of its scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through its nostrils it exhales the horror of the lonely places of the earth. It spits out pestilence, and when armies venture into the desert, it consumes them utterly_. Through the blue last light of evening he shouts at the beast, preparing, unarmed as he is, to meet his death. "Jump, you bastard, manticore. I've strangled big cats with my bare hands, in my time." When I was younger. When I was young. There is laughter behind him, and distant laughter echoing, or so it seems, from the battlements. He looks around him; the manticore has vanished from the ramparts. He is surrounded by a group of Jahilians in fancy dress, returning from the fair and giggling. "Now that these mystics have embraced our Lat, they are seeing new gods round every corner, no?" Hamza, understanding that the night will be full of terrors, returns home and calls for his battle sword. "More than anything in the world," he growls at the papery valet who has served him in war and peace for forty-four years, "I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. Damn sight better to kill the bastards, I've always thought. Neatest bloody solution." The sword has remained sheathed in its leather scabbard since the day of his conversion by his nephew, but tonight, he confides to the valet, "The lion is loose. Peace will have to wait." It is the last night of the festival of Ibrahim. Jahilia is masquerade and madness. The oiled fatty bodies of the wrestlers have completed their 122 writhings and the seven poems have been nailed to the walls of the House of the Black Stone. Now singing whores replace the poets, and dancing whores, also with oiled bodies, are at work as well; night- wrestling replaces the daytime variety. The courtesans dance and sing in golden, bird-beaked masks, and the gold is reflected in their clients' shining eyes. Gold, gold everywhere, in the palms of the profiteering Jahilians and their libidinous guests, in the flaming sand--braziers, in the glowing walls of the night city. Hamza walks dolorously through the streets of gold, past pilgrims who lie unconscious while cutpurses earn their living. He hears the wine--blurred carousing through every golden-gleaming doorway, and feels the song and howling laughter and coin-chinkings hurting him like mortal insults. But he doesn't find what he's looking for, not here, so he moves away from the illuminated revelry of gold and begins to stalk the shadows, hunting the apparition of the lion. And finds, after hours of searching, what he knew would be waiting, in a dark corner of the city's outer walls, the thing of his vision, the red manticore with the triple row of teeth. The manticorc has blue eyes and a mannish face and its voice is half-- trumpet and half-flute. It is fast as the wind, its nails are corkscrew talons and its tail hurls poisone& quills. It loves to feed on human flesh ... a brawl is taking place. Knives hissing in the silence, at times the clash of metal against metal. Hamza recognizes the men under attack: Khalid, Salman, Bilal. A lion himself now, Hamza draws his sword, roars the silence into shreds, runs forward as fast as sixty--year--old legs will go. His friends' assailants are unrecognizable behind their masks. It has been a night of masks. Walking the debauched Jahilian streets, his heart full of bile, Hamza has seen men and women in the guise of eagles, jackals, horses, gryphons, salamanders, wart-- hogs, rocs; welling up from the murk of the alleys have come two-headed amphisbaenae and the winged bulls known as Assyrian sphinxes. Djinns, houris, 123 demons populate the city on this night of phantasmagoria and lust. But only now, in this dark place, does he see the red masks he's been looking for. The manlion masks: he rushes towards his fate. In the grip of a self-destructive unhappiness the three disciples had started drinking, and owing to their unfamiliarity with alcohol they were soon not just intoxicated but stupid-drunk. They stood in a small piazza and started abusing the passers--by, and after a while the water- carrier Khalid brandished his water-- skin, boasting. He could destroy the city, he carried the ultimate weapon. Water: it would cleanse Jahilia the filthy, wash it away, so that a new start could be made from the purified white sand. That was when the lion--men started chasing them, and after a long pursuit they were cornered, the booziness draining out of them on account of their fear, they were staring into the red masks of death when Hamza arrived just in time. . . . Gibreel floats above the city watching the fight. It's quickly over once Hamza gets to the scene. Two masked assailants run away, two lie dead. Bilal, Khalid and Salman have been cut, but not too badly. Graver than their wounds is the news behind the lion--masks of the dead. "Hind's brothers," Hamza recognizes. "Things are finishing for us now." Slayers of manticores, water-terrorists, the followers of Mahound sit and weep in the shadow of the city wall. As for him, Prophet Messenger Businessman: his eyes are open now. He paces the inner courtyard of his house, his wife's house, and will not go in to her. She is almost seventy and feels these days more like a mother than a. She, the rich woman, who employed him to manage her caravans 124 long ago. His management skills were the first things she liked about him. And after a time, they were in love. It isn't easy to be a brilliant, successful woman in a city where the gods are female but the females are merely goods. Men had either been afraid of her, or had thought her so strong that she didn't need their consideration. He hadn't been afraid, and had given her the feeling of constancy she needed. While he, the orphan, found in her many women in one: mother sister lover sibyl friend. When he thought himself crazy she was the one who believed in his visions. "It is the archangel," she told him, "not some fog out of your head. It is Gibreel, and you are the Messenger of God." He can't won't see her now. She watches him through a stonelatticed window. He can't stop walking, moves around the courtyard in a random sequence of unconscious geometries, his footsteps tracing out a series of ellipses, trapeziums, rhomboids, ovals, rings. While she remembers how he would return from the caravan trails full of stories heard at wayside oases. A prophet, Isa, born to a woman named Maryam, born of no man under a palm--tree in the desert. Stories that made his eyes shine, then fade into a distantness. She recalls his excitability: the passion with which he'd argue, all night if necessary, that the old nomadic times had been better than this city of gold where people exposed their baby daughters in the wilderness. In the old tribes even the poorest orphan would be cared for. God is in the desert, he'd say, not here in this miscarriage of a place. And she'd reply, Nobody's arguing, my love, it's late, and tomorrow there are the accounts. She has long ears; has already heard what he said about Lat, Uzza, Manat. So what? In the old days he wanted to protect the baby daughters of Jahilia; why shouldn't he take the daughters of Allah under his wing as well? But after asking herself this question she shakes her head and leans heavily on the cool wall beside her stone-screened window. While below her, her husband walks in pentagons, parallelograms, six--pointed stars, and then in abstract and increasingly 125 labyrinthine patterns for which there are no names, as though unable to find a simple line. When she looks into the courtyard some moments later, however, he has gone. The Prophet wakes between silk sheets, with a bursting headache, in a room he has never seen. Outside the window the sun is near its savage zenith, and silhouetted against the whiteness is a tall figure in a black hooded cloak, singing softly in a strong, low voice. The song is one that the women of Jahilia chorus as they drum the men to war. _Advance and we embrace you_, _embrace you, embrace you_, _advance and we embrace you_ _and soft carpets spread_. _Turn back and we desert you_, _we leave you, desert you_, _retreat and we'll not love you_, _not in love's bed_. He recognizes Hind's voice, sits up, and finds himself naked beneath the creamy sheet. He calls to her: "Was I attacked?" Hind turns to him, smiling her Hind smile. "Attacked?" she mimics him, and claps her hands for breakfast. Minions enter, bring, serve, remove, scurry off. Mahound is helped into a silken robe of black and gold; Hind, exaggeratedly, averts her eyes. "My head," he asks again. "Was I 126 struck?" She stands at the window, her head hung low, playing the demure maid. "Oh, Messenger, Messenger," she mocks him. "What an ungallant Messenger it is. Couldn't you have come to my room consciously, of your own will? No, of course not, I repel you, I'm sure." He will not play her game. "Am I a prisoner?" he asks, and again she laughs at him. "Don't be a fool." And then, shrugging, relents: "I was walking the city streets last night, masked, to see the festivities, and what should I stumble over but your unconscious body? Like a drunk in the gutter, Mahound. I sent my servants for a litter and brought you home. Say thank you." "Thank you." "I don't think you were recognized," she says. "Or you'd be dead, maybe. You know how the city was last night. People overdo it. My own brothers haven't come home yet." It comes back to him now, his wild anguished walk in the corrupt city, staring at the souls he had supposedly saved, looking at the simurgh- effigies, the devil-masks, the behemoths and hippogriffs. The fatigue of that long day on which he climbed down from Mount Cone, walked to the town, underwent the strain of the events in the poetry marquee, -- and afterwards, the anger of the disciples, the doubt, -- the whole of it had overwhelmed him. "I fainted," he remembers. She comes and sits close to him on the bed, extends a finger, finds the gap in his robe, strokes his chest. "Fainted," she murmurs. "That's weakness, Mahound. Are you becoming weak?" She places the stroking finger over his lips before he can reply. "Don't say anything, Mahound. I am the Grandee's wife, and neither of us is your friend. My husband, however, is a weak man. In Jahilia they think he's cunning, but I know better. He knows I take lovers and he does nothing about it, because the temples are in my family's care. Lat's, 127 Uzza's, Manat's. The -- shall I call them _mosques?_ -- of your new angels." She offers him melon cubes from a dish, tries to feed him with her fingers. He will not let her put the fruit into his mouth, takes the pieces with his own hand, eats. She goes on. "My last lover was the boy, Baal." She sees the rage on his face. "Yes," she says contentedly. "I heard he had got under your skin. But he doesn't matter. Neither he nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I am." "I must go," he says. "Soon enough," she replies, returning to the window. At the perimeter of the city they are packing away the tents, the long camel--trains are preparing to depart, convoys of carts are already heading away across the desert; the carnival is over. She turns to him again. "I am your equal," she repeats, "and also your opposite. I don't want you to become weak. You shouldn't have done what you did." "But you will profit," Mahound replies bitterly. "There's no threat now to your temple revenues." "You miss the point," she says softly, coming closer to him, bringing her face very close to his. "If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she doesn't believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce. And what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn't the slightest wish to be his daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours. Ask Baal: he knows her. As he knows me." "So the Grandee will betray his pledge," Mahound says. "Who knows?" scoffs Hind. "He doesn't even know himself. He has to work out the odds. Weak, as I told you. But you know I'm telling the truth. Between Allah and the Three there can be no peace. I don't want 128 it. I want the fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?" "You are sand and I am water," Mahound says. "Water washes sand away." "And the desert soaks up water," Hind answers him. "Look around you." Soon after his departure the wounded men arrive at the Grandee's palace, having screwed up their courage to inform Hind that old Hamza has killed her brothers. But by then the Messenger is nowhere to be found; is heading, once again, slowly towards Mount Cone. Gibreel, when he's tired, wants to murder his mother for giving him such a damn fool nickname, _angel_, what a word, he begs _what? whom?_ to be spared the dream--city of crumbling sandcastles and lions with three-tiered teeth, no more heart—washing of prophets or instructions to recite or promises of paradise, let there be an end to revelations, finito, khattam-shud. What he longs for: black, dreamless sleep. Mother-fucking dreams, cause of all the trouble in the human race, movies, too, if I was God I'd cut the imagination right out of people and then maybe poor bastards like me could get a good night's rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his eyes to stay open, unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas and sends him blind, but he's only human, in the end he falls down the rabbit-hole and there he is again, in Wonderland, up the mountain, and the businessman is waking up, and once again his wanting, his need, goes to work, not on my jaws and voice this time, but on my whole body; he diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards him, his gravitational field is unbelievable, as powerful as a goddamn megastar . . . and then Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over and over, in the 129 cave of the fine white sand that rises around them like a veil. _As if he's learning me, searching me, as if I'm the one undergoing the test_. In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you he's getting in _everywhere_, his tongue in my ear his fist around my balls, there was never a person with such a rage in him, he has to has to know he has to K N OW and I have nothing to tell him, he's twice as physically fit as I am and four times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught ourselves by listening a lot but as is plaintosee he's even a better listener than me; so we roll kick scratch, he's getting cut up quite a bit but of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can't snag an angel on a bloody thorn-bush, you can't bruise him on a rock. And they have an audience, there are djinns and afreets and all sorts of spooks sitting on the boulders to watch the fight, and in the sky are the three winged creatures, looking like herons or swans or just women depending on the tricks of the light . . . Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight. After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down beneath the angel, it's what he wanted, it was his will filling me up and giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels can't lose such fights, it wouldn't be right, it's only devils who get beaten in such circs, so the moment I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out of me once again, made it pour all over him, like sick. At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the Prophet Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, postrevelatory sleep, but on this occasion he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes to his senses in that high wilderness there is nobody to be seen, 130 no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and hejumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news. "It was the Devil," he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. "The last time, it was Shaitan." This is what he has _heard_ in his _listening_, that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that's a bit of a problem here, namely that _it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me_. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked. "First it was the Devil," Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. "But this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground." The disciples stop him in the ravines near the foot of Mount Cone to warn him of the fury of Hind, who is wearing white mourning garments and has loosened her black hair, letting it fly about her like a storm, or trail in the dust, erasing her footsteps so that she seems like an incarnation of the spirit of vengeance itself. They have all fled the city, and Hamza, too, is lying low; but the word is that Abu Simbel has not, as yet, acceded to his wife's pleas for the blood that washes away blood. He is still calculating the odds in the matter of Mahound and the goddesses Mahound, against his followers' advice, returns to Jahilia, going straight to the House of the Black Stone. The disciples follow him in spite of their fear. A crowd gathers in the hope of further 131 scandal or dismemberment or some such entertainment. Mahound does not disappoint them. He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces the abrogation of the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses are banished from the true recitation, _al-qur"an_. New verses are thundered in their place. "Shall He have daughters and you sons?" Mahound recites. "That would be a fine division! "These are but names you have dreamed of, you and your fathers. Allah vests no authority in them." He leaves the dumbfounded House before it occurs to anybody to pick up, or throw, the first stone. After the repudiation of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Mahound returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him. A kind of vengeance -- whose? Light or dark? Goodguy badguy? -- wrought, as is not unusual, upon the innocent. The Prophet's wife, seventy years old, sits by the foot of a stone--latticed window, sits upright with her back to the wall, dead. Mahound in the grip of his misery keeps himself to himself, hardly says a word for weeks. The Grandee of Jahilia institutes a policy of persecution that advances too slowly for Hind. The name of the new religion is _Submission_; now Abu Simbel decrees that its adherents must submit to being sequestered in the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city; to a curfew; to a ban on employment. And there are many physical assaults, women spat upon in shops, the manhandling of the faithful by the gangs of young turks whom the Grandee secretly controls, fire thrown at night through a window to land amongst 132 unwary sleepers. And, by one of the familiar paradoxes of history, the numbers of the faithful multiply, like a crop that miraculously flourishes as conditions of soil and climate grow worse and worse. An offer is received, from the citizens of the oasis--settlement of Yathrib to the north: Yathrib will shelter those--who-submit, if they wish to leave Jahilia. Hamza is of the opinion that they must go. "You'll never finish your Message here, nephew, take my word. Hind won't be happy till she's ripped out your tongue, to say nothing of my balls, excuse me." Mahound, alone and full of echoes in the house of his bereavement, gives his consent, and the faithful depart to make their plans. Khalid the water-carrier hangs back and the hollow-eyed Prophet waits for him to speak. Awkwardly, he says: "Messenger, I doubted you. But you were wiser than we knew. First we said, Mahound will never compromise, and you compromised. Then we said, Mahound has betrayed us, but you were bringing us a deeper truth. You brought us the Devil himself, so that we could witness the workings of the Evil One, and his overthrow by the Right. You have enriched our faith. I am sorry for what I thought." Mahound moves away from the sunlight falling through the window. "Yes." Bitterness, cynicism. "It was a wonderful thing I did. Deeper truth. Bringing you the Devil. Yes, that sounds like me." From the peak of Mount Cone, Gibreel watches the faithful escaping Jahilia, leaving the city of aridity for the place of cool palms and water, water, water. In small groups, almost empty-- handed, they move across the empire of the sun, on this first day of the first year at the new beginning of Time, which has itself been born again, as the old dies behind them and the new waits ahead. And one day Mahound himself slips away. When his escape is discovered, Baal composes a valedictory ode: 133 _What kind of idea_ _does "Submission" seem today?_ _One full of fear_. _An idea that runs away_. Mahound has reached his oasis; Gibreel is not so lucky. Often, now, he finds himself alone on the summit of Mount Cone, washed by the cold, falling stars, and then they fall upon him from the night sky, the three winged creatures, Lat Uzza Manat, flapping around his head, clawing at his eyes, biting, whipping him with their hair, their wings. He puts up his hands to protect himself, but their revenge is tireless, continuing whenever he rests, whenever he drops his guard. He struggles against them, but they are faster, nimbler, winged. He has no devil to repudiate. Dreaming, he cannot wish them away.