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of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay “rail roko” demonstration was being broken up by police lathicharges. The newspaper’s reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a “note”. Neither the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally . Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second. surprise of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight A 1--420, was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself.

“Sleep okay?” He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the equally extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball cap, metal—rim spectacles and a neon—green bush—shirt across which there writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer possible.

“Eugene Dumsday at your service,” the dragon man stuck out a huge red hand. “At yours, and at that of the Christian guard.”

Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. “You are a military man?”

“Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of Guard Almighty.” Oh, almighty guard, why didn’t you say. “I am a man of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment ever got folks’ brains by the balls.”

“I don’t follow.”

Dumsday lowered his voice. “I’m talking monkey-crap here, sir. Darwinism. The evolutionary heresy of Mr. Charles Darwin.” His tones made it plain that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. “I have been warning your fellow-men,” Dumsday confided, “against Mr. Darwin and his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide

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