The Satanic Verses

of ice, smoothas glass, like a bad dream come true. In the miasmic semiconsciousness induced by his low body temperature he was possessed by the nightmare-fear of cracking, of seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away with the shards. He was full of questions, did we truly, I mean, with your hands flapping, and then the waters, you don’t mean to tell me they
actually
, like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we could, across the ocean-floor, it never happened, couldn’t have, but if not then how, or did we in some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids, the sea passing through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes or no, I need to have to … but when his eyes opened the questions acquired the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could no longer grasp them, their tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was looking up at the sky, and noticed that it was the wrong colour entirely, blood-orange flecked with green, and the snow was blue as ink. He blinked hard but the colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that he had fallen out of the sky into some wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he considered briefly: Hell? No, no, he reassured himself as unconsciousness threatened, that can’t be it, not yet, you aren’t dead yet; but dying.
    Well then: a transit lounge.
    He began to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that it occurred to him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane.
    Then nothing existed. He was in a void, and if he were to survive he would have to construct everything from scratch, would have to invent the ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there was no need now to worry about such matters, because here in front of him was the inevitable: the tall, bony figure of Death, in a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a dark cloak flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silver-headed cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots.
    ‘What do you imagine yourselves to be doing here?’ Death wanted to know. ‘This is private property. There’s a sign.’ Said ina woman’s voice that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled.
    A few moments later, Death bent over him –
to kiss me
, he panicked silently.
To suck the breath from my body
. He made small, futile movements of protest.
    ‘He’s alive all right,’ Death remarked to, who was it, Gibreel. ‘But, my dear. His breath: what a
pong
. When did he last clean his teeth?’

    One man’s breath was sweetened, while another’s, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no side-effects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let’s be clear: great falls change people. You think
they
fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im-. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heaven-light to hellfire … under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming
new
, and at their age at that.
    What? I should enumerate the changes?
    Good breath/bad breath.
    And around the edges of Gibreel Farishta’s head, as he stood with his back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that she discerned a faint, but distinctly golden,
glow
.
    And were those bumps, at Chamcha’s temples, under his sodden and still-in-place bowler hat?
    And, and, and.

    When she laid eyes on the bizarre, satyrical figure of Gibreel Farishta prancing and dionysiac in the snow, Rosa Diamond didnot think of
say it
angels. Sighting him from her window, through salt-cloudy glass and age-clouded eyes, she felt her heart kick out, twice, so painfully that she feared it might stop; because in that indistinct form she seemed to discern the incarnation of her soul’s most deeply buried desire. She forgot the Norman invaders as if they had never been, and struggled down a slope of treacherous pebbles, too quickly for the safety of her not-quite-nonagenarian limbs, so