Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

‘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 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 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 KNOWand 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, post-revelatory 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, no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps 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 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.