The Satanic Verses

a miracle, in a way. So you will have done very much.’
    He held his breath.
    ‘I must think,’ Ayesha said.
    ‘Think, think,’ Saeed encouraged her happily. ‘Ask your archangel. If he agrees, it must be right.’

    Mirza Saeed Akhtar knew that when Ayesha announced that the Archangel Gibreel had accepted his offer her power would be destroyed forever, because the villagers would perceive her fraudulence and her desperation, too. – But how could she turn him down? – What choice did she really have? ‘Revenge is sweet,’ he told himself. Once the woman was discredited, he would certainly take Mishal to Mecca, if that were still her wish.
    The butterflies of Titlipur had not entered the mosque. They lined its exterior walls and onion dome, glowing greenly in the dark.
    Ayesha in the night: stalking the shadows, lying down, rising to go on the prowl again. There was an uncertainty about her; then the slowness came, and she seemed to dissolve into the shadows of the mosque. She returned at dawn.
    After the morning prayer she asked the pilgrims if she might address them; and they, doubtfully, agreed.
    ‘Last night the angel did not sing,’ she said. ‘He told me, instead, about doubt, and how the Devil makes use of it. I said, but they doubt me, what can I do? He answered: only proof can silence doubt.’
    She had their full attention. Next she told them what Mirza Saeed had suggested in the night. ‘He told me to go and ask myangel, but I know better,’ she cried. ‘How could I choose between you? It is all of us, or none.’
    ‘Why should we follow you,’ the Sarpanch asked, ‘after all the dying, the baby, and all?’
    ‘Because when the waters part, you will be saved. You will enter into the Glory of the Most High.’
    ‘What waters?’ Mirza Saeed yelled. ‘How will they divide?’
    ‘Follow me,’ Ayesha concluded, ‘and judge me by their parting.’
    His offer had contained an old question:
What kind of idea are you
? And she, in turn, had offered him an old answer.
I was tempted, but am renewed; am uncompromising; absolute; pure
.

    The tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside the Holiday Inn, whose windows were full of the mistresses of film stars using their new Polaroid cameras, – when the pilgrims felt the city’s asphalt turn gritty and soften into sand, – when they found themselves walking through a thick mulch of rotting coconuts abandoned cigarette packets pony turds non-degradable bottles fruit peelings jellyfish and paper, – on to the mid-brown sand overhung by high leaning coco-palms and the balconies of luxury sea-view apartment blocks, – past the teams of young men whose muscles were so well-honed that they looked like deformities, and who were performing gymnastic contortions of all sorts, in unison, like a murderous army of ballet dancers, – and through the beachcombers, clubmen and families who had come to take the air or make business contacts or scavenge a living from the sand, – and gazed, for the first time in their lives, upon the Arabian Sea.
    Mirza Saeed saw Mishal, who was being supported by two of the village men, because she was no longer strong enough to stand up by herself. Ayesha was beside her, and Saeed had the idea that the prophetess had somehow stepped out of the dying woman, that all the brightness of Mishal had hopped out of her body and taken this mythological shape, leaving a husk behind to die. Thenhe was angry with himself for allowing Ayesha’s supernaturalism to infect him, too.
    The villagers of Titlipur had agreed to follow Ayesha after a long discussion in which they had asked her not to take part. Their common sense told them that it would be foolish to turn back when they had come so far and were in sight of their first goal; but the new doubts in their minds sapped their strength. It was as if they were emerging from some Shangri-La of Ayesha’s making, because now that they were simply walking behind her rather than following her in the true sense, they seemed to age and sicken with every step they took. By the time they saw the sea they were a lame, tottering, rheumy, feverish, red-eyed bunch, and Mirza Saeed wondered how many of them would manage the final few yards to the water’s edge.
    The butterflies were with them, high over their heads.
    ‘What now, Ayesha?’ Saeed called out to her, filled with the horrible notion that his beloved wife might die here under the hoofs of ponies for rent