The Satanic Verses

of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to Jahilia after an exile of a quarter-century. He belched violently – an affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the body, a slow congealment of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a figure quite unlike his quick young self. Sometimes he felt that the air itself had thickened, resisting him, so that even a shortish walk could leave him panting, with an ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest … and Mahound must have changed, too, returning as he was in splendour and omnipotence to the place whence he fled empty-handed, without so much as a wife. Mahound at sixty-five. Our names meet, separate, and meet again, Baal thought, but the people going by the names do not remain the same. He left Al-Lat to emerge into bright sunlight, and heard from behind his back a little snickering laugh. He turned, weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of a robe vanishing around a corner. These days, down-at-heel Baal often made strangers giggle in the street. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted at the top of his voice, scandalizing the other worshippers in the House. Baal, thedecrepit poet, behaving badly again. He shrugged and headed for home.
    The city of Jahilia was no longer built of sand. That is to say, the passage of the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon, the forgetfulness of the people and the inevitability of progress had hardened the town, so that it had lost its old, shifting, provisional quality of a mirage in which men could live, and become a prosaic place, quotidian and (like its poets) poor. Mahound’s arm had grown long; his power had encircled Jahilia, cutting off its life-blood, its pilgrims and caravans. The fairs of Jahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold.
    Even the Grandee himself had acquired a threadbare look, his white hair as full of gaps as his teeth. His concubines were dying of old age, and he lacked the energy – or, so the rumours murmured in the desultory alleys of the city, the need – to replace them. Some days he forgot to shave, which added to his look of dilapidation and defeat. Only Hind was the same as ever.
    She had always had something of a reputation as a witch, who could wish illnesses upon you if you failed to bow down before her litter as it passed, an occultist with the power of transforming men into desert snakes when she had had her fill of them, and then catching them by the tail and having them cooked in their skins for her evening meal. Now that she had reached sixty the legend of her necromancy was being given new substantiation by her extraordinary and unnatural failure to age. While all around her hardened into stagnation, while the old gangs of Sharks grew middle-aged and squatted on street corners playing cards and rolling dice, while the old knot-witches and contortionists starved to death in the gullies, while a generation grew up whose conservatism and unquestioning worship of the material world was born of their knowledge of the probability of unemployment and penury, while the great city lost its sense of itself and even the cult of the dead declined in popularity to the relief of the camels of Jahilia, whose dislike of being left with severed hamstrings on human graves was easy to comprehend … while Jahilia decayed, in short, Hind remained unwrinkled, her body as firm as anyyoung woman’s, her hair as black as crow feathers, her eyes sparkling like knives, her bearing still haughty, her voice still brooking no opposition. Hind, not Simbel, ruled the city now; or so she undeniably believed.
    As the Grandee grew into a soft and pursy old age, Hind took to writing a series of admonitory and hortatory epistles or
bulls
to the people of the city. These were pasted up on every street in town. So it was that Hind and not Abu Simbel came to be thought of by Jahilians as the embodiment of the city, its living avatar, because they found in her physical unchangingness and in the unflinching resolve of her proclamations a description of themselves far more palatable than the picture they saw in the mirror of Simbel’s crumbling face. Hind’s posters were more influential than any poet’s verses. She was still sexually voracious, and had slept with every writer in the city (though it was a long time