The Satanic Verses

good deal of shouting and a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by numbers, as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients, terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores had been up to, also remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody would have found out if the poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to the walls of the city jail.
    Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and pimps, whose numbers had increased considerably during the two years in which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired that many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town riff-raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution under the new immorality laws, in order to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those painted ladies whom they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the suitors at their barred gates. On the third day, however, there appeared among these lovelorn fools a peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and pantaloons, with dark skin that was beginning to look decidedly blotchy. Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when he began to sing his verses the sniggering stopped at once. Jahilians had always been connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of the odes being sung by the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal sang his love poems, and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who allowed Baal to speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible to see for the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went forward to nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes running with tears, made no move to stop him.
    Every evening after that, the strange fellow would reappear and recite a new poem, and each set of verses sounded lovelier than the last. It was perhaps this surfeit of loveliness which prevented anybody from noticing, until the twelfth evening, when he completed his twelfth and final set of verses, each of which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of his twelve ‘wives’ were the same as those of another group of twelve.
    But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that had taken to gathering to hear Baal read changed its mood. Feelings of outrage replaced those of exaltation, and Baal was surrounded by angry men demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults. At this point Baal tookoff his absurd turban. ‘I am Baal,’ he announced. ‘I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen Muses.’
    Guards seized him.
    The General, Khalid, had wanted to have Baal executed at once, but Mahound asked that the poet be brought to trial immediately following the whores. So when Baal’s twelve wives, who had divorced stone to marry him, had been sentenced to death by stoning to punish them for the immorality of their lives, Baal stood face to face with the Prophet, mirror facing image, dark facing light. Khalid, sitting at Mahound’s right hand, offered Baal a last chance to explain his vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay at The Curtain, using the simplest language, concealing nothing, not even his final cowardice, for which everything he had done since had been an attempt at reparation. But now an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed into that tent of judgment, knowing that this was after all the famous satirist Baal, in his day the owner of the sharpest tongue and keenest wit in Jahilia, began (no matter how hard it tried not to) to laugh. The more honestly and simply Baal described his marriages to the twelve ‘wives of the Prophet’, the more uncontrollable became the horrified mirth of the audience. By the end of his speech the good folk of Jahilia were literally weeping with laughter, unable to restrain themselves even when soldiers with bullwhips and scimitars threatened them with instant death.
    ‘I’m not kidding!’ Baal screeched at the crowd, which hooted yelled slapped its thighs in response. ‘It’s no joke!’ Ha ha ha. Until, at last, silence returned; the Prophet had risen to his feet.
    ‘In the old days you mocked the Recitation,’ Mahound said in the hush. ‘Then, too, these people