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 “No,” Salman the Persian gets the point. “Like archangels. The Grandee’s a clever man.”

“Angels and devils,” Mahound says. “Shaitan and Gibreel. We all, already, accept their existence, halfway between God and man. Abu Simbel asks that we admit just three more to this great company. Just three, and, he indicates, all Jahilia’s souls will be ours.”

“And the House will be cleansed of statues?” Salman asks. Mahound replies that this was not specified. Salman shakes his head. “This is being done to destroy you.” And Bilal adds: “God cannot be four.” And Khalid, close to tears: “Messenger, what are you saying? Lat, Manat, Uzza—they’re all females! For pity’s sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old cranes, herons, hags?”

Misery strain fatigue, etched deeply into the Prophet’s face. Which Hamza, like a soldier on a battlefield comforting a wounded friend, cups between his hands. “We can’t sort this out for you, nephew,” he says. “Climb the mountain. Go ask Gibreel.”

Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he’s floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he’s swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a threehundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he’ll try a dolly shot, tracking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand—held with the help of a steadicam he’ll probe the secrets of the Grandee’s bedchamber. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises, but there aren’t enough girls for a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn songs? They should have built up that fairground scene, maybe a cameo role for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent, wiggling her famous bazooms.

And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: “Go ask Gibreel,” and he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me? I’m supposed to know the answers here? I’m sitting here watching this picture and now this actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the bloody audience of a “theological” to solve the bloody plot? -- But as the dream shifts, it’s always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere spectator

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