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damp-headed, what eccentrics they look! Splish, splosh, washing and praying. On their knees, pushing arms, legs, heads back into the ubiquitous sand, and then beginning again the cycle of water and prayer. These are easy targets for Baal’s pen. Their water—loving is a treason of a sort; the people of Jahilia accept the omnipotence of sand. It lodges between their fingers and toes, cakes their lashes and hair, clogs their pores. They open themselves to the desert: come, sand, wash us in aridity. That is the Jahilian way from the highest citizen to the lowest of the low. They are people of silicon, and water-lovers have come among them.

Baal circles them from a safe distance—Bilal is not a man to trifle with—and yells gibes. “If Mahound’s ideas were worth anything, do you think they’d only be popular with trash like you?” Salman restrains Bilal: “We should be honoured that the mighty Baal has chosen to attack us,” he smiles, and Bilal relaxes, subsides. Khalid the water-carrier is jumpy, and when he sees the heavy figure of Mahound’s uncle Hamza approaching he runs towards him anxiously. Hamza at sixty is still the city’s most renowned fighter and lion-hunter. Though the truth is less glorious than the eulogies: Hamza has many times been defeated in combat, saved by friends or lucky chances, rescued from lions’ jaws. He has the money to keep such items out of the news. And age, and survival, bestow a sort of validation upon a martial legend. Bilal and Salman, forgetting Baal, follow Khalid. All three are nervous, young.

He’s still not home, Hamza reports. And Khalid, worried: But it’s been hours, what is that bastard doing to him, torture, thumbscrews, whips? Salman, once again, is the calmest: That isn’t Simbel’s style, he says, it’s something sneaky, depend upon it. And Bilal bellows loyally: Sneaky or not, I have faith in him, in the Prophet. He won’t break. Hamza offers only a gentle rebuke: Oh, Bilal, how many times must he tell you? Keep your faith for God. The Messenger is only a man. The tension bursts out of Khalid: he squares up to old Hamza, demands, Are you saying that the Messenger is weak? You may be his uncle . . . Hamza clouts the water-carrier on the side of the head. Don’t let him see your fear, he says, not even when you’re scared half to death.

The four of them are washing once more when Mahound arrives; they cluster around him, whowhatwhy. Hamza stands back. “Nephew, this is no damn good,” he snaps in his soldier’s bark. “When you come down from Coney there’s a brightness on you. Today it’s something dark.”

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