The Satanic Verses

elasticated maroon pantaloons and loose jacket – she disliked clothes that revealed the contours of her body – and that was the beginning of the sexual marathon that left them both sore, happy and exhausted when it finally ground to a halt.
    He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father’s faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. ‘Okay,’ she said, exhaling. ‘I’ll buy it. Just don’t tell my mother, all right?’ The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut’s movie
L’Argent du Poche
… She focused her thoughts. ‘Sometimes,’ she decided to say, ‘wonderful things happen to me, too.’
    She told him then what she had never told any living being: about the visions on Everest, the angels and the ice-city. ‘It wasn’tonly on Everest, either,’ she said, and continued after a hesitation. When she got back to London, she went for a walk along the Embankment to try and get him, as well as the mountain, out of her blood. It was early in the morning and there was the ghost of a mist and the thick snow made everything vague. Then the icebergs came.
    There were ten of them, moving in stately single file upriver. The mist was thicker around them, so it wasn’t until they sailed right up to her that she understood their shapes, the precisely miniaturized configurations of the ten highest mountains in the world, in ascending order, with her mountain,
the
mountain bringing up the rear. She was trying to work out how the icebergs had managed to pass under the bridges across the river when the mist thickened, and then, a few instants later, dissolved entirely, taking the icebergs with it. ‘But they were there,’ she insisted to Gibreel. ‘Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri, Xixabangma Feng.’ He didn’t argue. ‘If you say it, then I know it truly was so.’
    An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land’s attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated – nearly – into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. Her apartment was full of Himalayas. Representations of Everest in cork, in plastic, in tile, stone, acrylics, brick jostled for space; there was even one sculpted entirely out of ice, a tiny berg which she kept in the freezer and brought out from time to time to show off to friends. Why so many?
Because –
no other possible answer –
they were there
. ‘Look,’ she said, stretching out a hand without leaving the bed and picking up, from her bedside table, her newest acquisition, a simple Everest in weathered pine. ‘A gift from the sherpas of Namche Bazar.’ Gibreel took it, turned it in his hands. Pemba had offered it to her shyly when they said goodbye, insisting it was from all the sherpas as a group, although it was evident that he’d whittled it himself. It was a detailed model, complete with the ice fall and the Hillary Step that is the last great obstacle on the way to the top, and the route they hadtaken to the summit was scored deeply into the wood. When Gibreel turned it upside down he found a message, scratched into the base in painstaking English.
To Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again
.
    What Allie did not tell Gibreel was that the sherpa’s prohibition had scared her, convincing her that if she ever set her foot again upon the goddess-mountain, she would surely die, because it is not permitted to mortals to look more than once upon the face of the divine; but the mountain was diabolic as well as transcendent, or, rather, its diabolism and its transcendence were one, so that even the contemplation of Pemba’s ban made her feel a pang of need so deep that it made her groan aloud, as if in sexual ecstasy or despair. ‘The Himalayas,’ she told Gibreel so as not to say what was really on her mind, ‘are emotional