The Satanic Verses

until he, too, shook himself and we started down. The weather was changing rapidly; a blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now, heaviness instead of that light, that lightness. We just made it to the meeting point and the four of us piled into the little tent at Camp Six, twenty-seven thousand feet. You don’t talk much up there. We all had our Everests to re-climb, over and over, all night. But at some point I asked: ‘What was that noise? Did anyone fire a gun?’ They looked at me as if I was touched. Who’d do such a damnfool thing at this altitude, they said, and anyway, Allie, you know damn well there isn’t a gun anywhere on the mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard it, I know thatmuch: wham bam, shot and echo. That’s it,’ she ended abruptly. ‘The end. Story of my life.’ She picked up a silver-headed cane and prepared to depart. The teacher, Mrs Bury, came forward to utter the usual platitudes. But the girls were not to be denied. ‘So what was it, then, Allie?’ they insisted; and she, looking suddenly ten years older than her thirty-three, shrugged. ‘Can’t say,’ she told them. ‘Maybe it was Maurice Wilson’s ghost.’
    She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick.

    The city – Proper London, yaar, no bloody
less
! – was dressed in white, like a mourner at a funeral. – Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody
hope
and
trust
. When the train pulled into Victoria station he plunged out without waiting for it to come to a complete halt, turned his ankle and went sprawling beneath the baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners, clinging, as he fell, on to his increasingly battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen, and seizing the moment Gibreel ran through the scattering crowd like a man possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.
    ‘What do you want,’ he burst out, ‘what’s your business with me?’ ‘To watch you fall,’ she instantly replied. ‘Look around,’ she added, ‘I’ve already made you look like a pretty big fool.’
    People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize overcoat and trampy hat,
that man’s talking to himself
, a child’s voice said, and its mother answered
shh, dear, it’s wicked to mock the afflicted
. Welcome to London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading down towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.
    But when he arrived in a great rush at the northbound platform of the Victoria Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a 48-sheet advertising poster on the wall across the track, advertising the merits of the international direct-dialling system.
Send your voice on a magic-carpet ride to India
, she advised.
No
djinns or lamps required
. He gave a loud cry, once again causing his fellow-travellers to doubt his sanity, and fled over to the southbound platform, where a train was just pulling in. He leapt aboard, and there was Rekha Merchant facing him with her carpet rolled up and lying across her knees. The doors closed behind him with a bang.
    That day Gibreel Farishta fled in every direction around the Underground of the city of London and Rekha Merchant found him wherever he went; she sat beside him on the endless up-escalator at Oxford Circus and in the tightly packed elevators of Tufnell Park she rubbed up against him from behind in a manner that she would have thought quite outrageous during her lifetime. On the outer reaches of the Metropolitan Line she hurled the phantoms of her children from the tops of claw-like trees, and when he came up for air outside the Bank of England she flung herself histrionically from the apex of its neo-classical pediment. And even though he did not have any idea of the true shape of that most protean and chameleon of cities he grew convinced that it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath it, so that the stations on the Underground changed lines and followed one another in apparently random sequence. More than once he emerged, suffocating, from that subterranean world in which the laws of space and time had ceased to operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one was willing to stop, however, so he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish maze, that labyrinth without a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last, exhausted beyond hope, he