The Satanic Verses

consideration. He hadn’t been afraid, and had given her the feeling of constancy she needed. While he, the orphan, found in her many women in one: mother sister lover sibyl friend. When he thought himself crazy she was the one who believed in his visions. ‘It is the archangel,’ she told him, ‘not some fog out of your head. It is Gibreel, and you are the Messenger of God.’
    He can’t won’t see her now. She watches him through a stone-latticed window. He can’t stop walking, moves around the courtyard in a random sequence of unconscious geometries, hisfootsteps tracing out a series of ellipses, trapeziums, rhomboids, ovals, rings. While she remembers how he would return from the caravan trails full of stories heard at wayside oases. A prophet, Isa, born to a woman named Maryam, born of no man under a palm-tree in the desert. Stories that made his eyes shine, then fade into a distantness. She recalls his excitability: the passion with which he’d argue, all night if necessary, that the old nomadic times had been better than this city of gold where people exposed their baby daughters in the wilderness. In the old tribes even the poorest orphan would be cared for. God is in the desert, he’d say, not here in this miscarriage of a place. And she’d reply, Nobody’s arguing, my love, it’s late, and tomorrow there are the accounts.
    She has long ears; has already heard what he said about Lat, Uzza, Manat. So what? In the old days he wanted to protect the baby daughters of Jahilia; why shouldn’t he take the daughters of Allah under his wing as well? But after asking herself this question she shakes her head and leans heavily on the cool wall beside her stone-screened window. While below her, her husband walks in pentagons, parallelograms, six-pointed stars, and then in abstract and increasingly labyrinthine patterns for which there are no names, as though unable to find a simple line.
    When she looks into the courtyard some moments later, however, he has gone.

    The Prophet wakes between silk sheets, with a bursting headache, in a room he has never seen. Outside the window the sun is near its savage zenith, and silhouetted against the whiteness is a tall figure in a black hooded cloak, singing softly in a strong, low voice. The song is one that the women of Jahilia chorus as they drum the men to war.
    Advance and we embrace you
,
embrace you, embrace you
,
advance and we embrace you

and soft carpets spread
.
Turn back and we desert you
,
we leave you, desert you
,
retreat and we’ll not love you
,
not in love’s bed
.

    He recognizes Hind’s voice, sits up, and finds himself naked beneath the creamy sheet. He calls to her: ‘Was I attacked?’ Hind turns to him, smiling her Hind smile. ‘Attacked?’ she mimics him, and claps her hands for breakfast. Minions enter, bring, serve, remove, scurry off. Mahound is helped into a silken robe of black and gold; Hind, exaggeratedly, averts her eyes. ‘My head,’ he asks again. ‘Was I struck?’ She stands at the window, her head hung low, playing the demure maid. ‘Oh, Messenger, Messenger,’ she mocks him. ‘What an ungallant Messenger it is. Couldn’t you have come to my room consciously, of your own will? No, of course not, I repel you, I’m sure.’ He will not play her game. ‘Am I a prisoner?’ he asks, and again she laughs at him. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ And then, shrugging, relents: ‘I was walking the city streets last night, masked, to see the festivities, and what should I stumble over but your unconscious body? Like a drunk in the gutter, Mahound. I sent my servants for a litter and brought you home. Say thank you.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘I don’t think you were recognized,’ she says. ‘Or you’d be dead, maybe. You know how the city was last night. People overdo it. My own brothers haven’t come home yet.’
    It comes back to him now, his wild anguished walk in the corrupt city, staring at the souls he had supposedly saved, looking at the simurgh-effigies, the devil-masks, the behemoths and hippogriffs. The fatigue of that long day on which he climbed down from Mount Cone, walked to the town, underwent the strain of the events in the poetry marquee, – and afterwards, the anger of the disciples, the doubt, – the whole of it had overwhelmed him. ‘I fainted,’ he remembers.
    She comes and sits close to him on the bed, extends a finger,finds the gap in his robe, strokes his chest. ‘Fainted,’ she murmurs. ‘That’s