The Satanic Verses

weakness, Mahound. Are you becoming weak?’
    She places the stroking finger over his lips before he can reply. ‘Don’t say anything, Mahound. I am the Grandee’s wife, and neither of us is your friend. My husband, however, is a weak man. In Jahilia they think he’s cunning, but I know better. He knows I take lovers and he does nothing about it, because the temples are in my family’s care. Lat’s, Uzza’s, Manat’s. The – shall I call them
mosques? –
of your new angels.’ She offers him melon cubes from a dish, tries to feed him with her fingers. He will not let her put the fruit into his mouth, takes the pieces with his own hand, eats. She goes on. ‘My last lover was the boy, Baal.’ She sees the rage on his face. ‘Yes,’ she says contentedly. ‘I heard he had got under your skin. But he doesn’t matter. Neither he nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I am.’
    ‘I must go,’ he says. ‘Soon enough,’ she replies, returning to the window. At the perimeter of the city they are packing away the tents, the long camel-trains are preparing to depart, convoys of carts are already heading away across the desert; the carnival is over. She turns to him again.
    ‘I am your equal,’ she repeats, ‘and also your opposite. I don’t want you to become weak. You shouldn’t have done what you did.’
    ‘But you will profit,’ Mahound replies bitterly. ‘There’s no threat now to your temple revenues.’
    ‘You miss the point,’ she says softly, coming closer to him, bringing her face very close to his. ‘If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she doesn’t believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce. And what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn’t the slightest wish to be his daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours. Ask Baal: he knows her. As he knows me.’
    ‘So the Grandee will betray his pledge,’ Mahound says.
    ‘Who knows?’ scoffs Hind. ‘He doesn’t even know himself. Hehas to work out the odds. Weak, as I told you. But you know I’m telling the truth. Between Allah and the Three there can be no peace. I don’t want it. I want the fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?’
    ‘You are sand and I am water,’ Mahound says. ‘Water washes sand away.’
    ‘And the desert soaks up water,’ Hind answers him. ‘Look around you.’
    Soon after his departure the wounded men arrive at the Grandee’s palace, having screwed up their courage to inform Hind that old Hamza has killed her brothers. But by then the Messenger is nowhere to be found; is heading, once again, slowly towards Mount Cone.

    Gibreel, when he’s tired, wants to murder his mother for giving him such a damn fool nickname,
angel
, what a word, he begs
what? whom
? to be spared the dream-city of crumbling sandcastles and lions with three-tiered teeth, no more heart-washing of prophets or instructions to recite or promises of paradise, let there be an end to revelations, finito, khattam-shud. What he longs for: black, dreamless sleep. Mother-fucking dreams, cause of all the trouble in the human race, movies, too, if I was God I’d cut the imagination right out of people and then maybe poor bastards like me could get a good night’s rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his eyes to stay open, unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas and sends him blind, but he’s only human, in the end he falls down the rabbit-hole and there he is again, in Wonderland, up the mountain, and the businessman is waking up, and once again his wanting, his need, goes to work, not on my jaws and voice this time, but on my whole body; he diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards him, his gravitational field is unbelievable, as powerful as a goddamn megastar … and then Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over and over, in the cave of the fine white sand that rises around themlike a veil.
As if he’s learning me, searching me, as if I’m the one undergoing the test
.
    In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you he’s getting in
everywhere
, his tongue in my ear his fist around my balls, there was never a person with such a rage in him, he has to has to know he has to K N O W and I have nothing to tell him, he’s twice as