The Satanic Verses

Rehana the Jew, and the beautiful Mary the Copt
. Silently, they remain on their knees. Their wishes are made known to him without words.
What is an archangel but a puppet? Kathputli, marionette. The faithful bend us to their will. We are forces of nature and they, our masters. Mistresses, too
. The heaviness in his limbs, the heat, and in his ears a buzzing like bees on summer afternoons. It would be easy to faint.
    He does not faint.
    He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.
    And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to his lips, his unquiet horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.

    After the stream of fire has emerged from the mouth of his golden trumpet and consumed the approaching men, wrapping them in a cocoon of flame, unmaking them so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling on the sidewalk, Gibreel understands.
    He is walking again, leaving behind him the gratitude of the whores, heading in the direction of the borough of Brickhall, Azraeel once more in his capacious pocket. Things are becoming clear.
    He is the Archangel Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, with the power of revelation in his hands. He can reach into the breasts of men and women, pick out the desires of their inmost hearts, and make them real. He is the quencher of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He is the genie of the lamp, and his master is the Roc.
    What desires, what imperatives are in the midnight air? He breathes them in. – And nods, so be it, yes. – Let it be fire. This is a city that has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.
    Fire, falling fire. ‘This is the judgment of God in his wrath,’ Gibreel Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, ‘that men be granted their heart’s desires, and that they be by them consumed.’
    Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him.
Nigger eat white man’s shit
, suggest the unoriginal walls. The buildings have names: ‘Isandhlwana’, ‘Rorke’s Drift’. But a revisionist enterprise is underway, for two of the four towers have been renamed, and bear, now, the names ‘Mandela’ and ‘Toussaint l’Ouverture’. – The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken doors, dolls’ legs, vegetable refuse extracted from plastic disposal bags by hungry cats and dogs, fastfoodpackets, rolling cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. He stands motionless while small groups of residents rush past in different directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All of the groups contain white youngsters as well as black. He raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to play.
    Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a silver rose. – And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.
    But here, there is no beauty, sleeping within. There is Gibreel Farishta, walking in a world of fire. In the High Street he sees houses built of flame, with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains hanging at the windows. – And there are men and women with fiery skins strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The street has become red hot, molten, a river the colour of blood. – All, all is ablaze as he toots his merry horn,
giving the people what they want
, the hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns,