The Satanic Verses

the heart, and his torso jerked.
Watch it or I’ll really let you have it. Doomboombadoom
. Yet: this was Hell, all right. The city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim.
    Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren’t they the ones with the pitchforks?
    Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter’s cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds.
    The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha slept.
    Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth’s face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited itself into medusas, and the strange triangularity of her profile, which sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more prominent, and her body as long as a child’s stick-figure drawing. At the same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath, on her lips … revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in the violent throes of sexual congress? … The city thickened around them like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair. ‘No light can get in here,’ she whispered to him. ‘It’s black; all black.’ She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but he shouted, ‘Quick, the church,’ and plunged into an unprepossessing box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however, the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless blue two-piece suits, false pearls, and little pill-box hats decked out with bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly,
Fix me, Jesus;
until they saw Chamcha, quit their spiritualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual manner,
Satan, the Goat, the Goat
, and suchlike stuff. Now it became clearthat the Hyacinth with whom he’d entered was looking at him with new eyes, just the way he’d looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip.
‘Hubshees,’
he cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers and savages, he called them. ‘I feel sorry for you,’ he pronounced. ‘Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back; the darkness: the stain, the proof that you’re the lowest of the low.’ They rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a woman-like-them, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized that his assailants’ fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to his full height, spread