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but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for taking too many roles: yes, yes,. he’s not just playing the archangel but also him, the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he comes. Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of them can never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to the imagined incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the missing vision, with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the help of a travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.

He has understood: that he is afraid of the other, the business-man, isn’t it crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It’s true, but: the kind of fear you feel when you’re on a film set for the very first time and there, about to make his entrance, is one of the living legends of the cinema; you think, I’ll disgrace myself, I’ll dry, I’ll corpse, you want like mad to be worthy . You will be sucked along in the slipstream of his genius, he can make you look good, like a high flier, but you will know if you aren’t pulling your weight and even worse so will he Gibreel’s fear, the fear of the self his dream creates, makes him struggle against Mahound’s arrival, to try and put it off, but he’s coming now, no quesch, and the archangel holds his breath.

Those dreams of being pushed out on stage when you’ve no business being there, you don’t know the story haven’t learned any lines, but there’s a full house watching, watching: feels like that. Or the true story of the white actress playing a black woman in Shakespeare. She went on stage and then realized she still had her glasses on, eck, but she had forgotten to blacken her hands so she couldn’t reach up to take the specs off, double eek: like that also. Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I’m just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help .

To reach Mount Cone from Jahilia one must walk into dark ravines where the sand is not white, not the pure sand filtered long ago through the bodies of sea-cucumbers, but black and dour, sucking light from the sun. Coney crouches over you like an imaginary beast. You ascend along its spine. Leaving behind the last trees, white—flowered with thick, milky leaves, you climb among the boulders, which get larger as you get higher, until they resemble huge walls and start blotting out the sun. The lizards arc blue as shadows. Then you are on the peak, Jahilia behind you, the featureless desert ahead. You descend on the desert side, and about five hundred feet down you reach the cave, which is high enough to stand upright in, and whose floor is

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