The Satanic Verses

running upstairs barefoot, sensible footwear. ‘You’re young enough,’ she said. ‘If you take care, you’ll live. If not, you’ll be a cripple at forty.’ When Gibreel – damn it! – heard that she had climbed Everest with spears in her feet he took to calling her his silkie. He had read a Bumper Book of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the sea-woman who left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man she loved. She had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an agony, as if she were walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking, forward, away from the seaand over land. You did it for a bloody mountain, he said. Would you do it for a man?
    She had concealed her foot-ache from her fellow-mountaineers because the lure of Everest had been so overwhelming. But these days the pain was still there, and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness, was proving to be her footbinder. Adventure’s end, Allie thought; betrayed by my feet. The image of footbinding stayed with her.
Goddamn Chinese
, she mused, echoing Wilson’s ghost.
    ‘Life is so easy for some people,’ she had wept into Gibreel Farishta’s arms. ‘Why don’t
their
blasted feet give out?’ He had kissed her forehead. ‘For you, it may always be a struggle,’ he said. ‘You want it too damn much.’
    The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of phantoms. They wanted
the
story, her story. They wanted to stand on the mountain-top.
Do you know how it feels
, she wanted to ask them,
to have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long? Do you know what it’s like when the only direction is down
? ‘I was in the second pair with Sherpa Pemba,’ she said. ‘The weather was perfect, perfect. So clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever lay beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba. Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to the summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without oxygen, but when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It was a stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a woman sitting on top of that bastard mountain, a human being, not a breathing machine. Pemba said, Allie Bibi, don’t do, but I just started up. In a while we passed the others coming down and I could see the wonderful thing in their eyes. They were so high, possessed of such an exaltation, that they didn’t even notice I wasn’t wearing the oxygen equipment. Be careful, they shouted over to us, Look out for the angels. Pemba had fallen into a good breathing pattern and I fell into step with it, breathing in with his in, out with his out. I couldfeel something lifting off the top of my head and I was grinning, just grinning from ear to ear, and when Pemba looked my way I could see he was doing the same. It looked like a grimace, like pain, but it was just foolish joy.’ She was a woman who had been brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by the hard physical labour of hauling herself up an icebound height of rock. ‘At that moment,’ she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every step of the way, ‘I believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can lift a veil and see the face of God, everything. I saw the Himalayas stretching below me and that was God’s face, too. Pemba must have seen something in my expression that bothered him because he called across, Look out, Allie Bibi, the height. I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top, and then we were there, with the ground falling away on every side. Such light; the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and let it soak into my skin.’ Not a titter from the class; they were dancing naked with her on the roof of the world. ‘Then the visions began, the rainbows looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a waterfall from the sun, and there were angels, the others hadn’t been joking. I saw them and so did Sherpa Pemba. We were on our knees by then. His pupils looked pure white and so did mine, I’m sure. We would probably have died there, I’m sure, snow-blind and mountain-foolish, but then I heard a noise, a loud, sharp report, like a gun. That snapped me out of it. I had to yell at Pem