Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

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.

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 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.