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The Prophet’s uncle Hamza has been walking home alone, his head bowed and grey in the twilight of that melancholy victory, when he hears a roar and looks up, to see a gigantic scarlet lion poised to leap at him from the high battlements of the city. He knows this beast, this fable. The iridescence of its scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through its nostrils it exhales the horror of the lonely places of the earth. It spits out pestilence, and when armies venture into the desert, it consumes them utterly . Through the blue last light of evening he shouts at the beast, preparing, unarmed as he is, to meet his death. “Jump, you bastard, manticore. I’ve strangled big cats with my bare hands, in my time.” When I was younger. When I was young.

There is laughter behind him, and distant laughter echoing, or so it seems, from the battlements. He looks around him; the manticore has vanished from the ramparts. He is surrounded by a group of Jahilians in fancy dress, returning from the fair and giggling. “Now that these mystics have embraced our Lat, they are seeing new gods round every corner, no?” Hamza, understanding that the night will be full of terrors, returns home and calls for his battle sword. “More than anything in the world,” he growls at the papery valet who has served him in war and peace for forty-four years, “I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. Damn sight better to kill the bastards, I’ve always thought. Neatest bloody solution.” The sword has remained sheathed in its leather scabbard since the day of his conversion by his nephew, but tonight, he confides to the valet, “The lion is loose. Peace will have to wait.”

It is the last night of the festival of Ibrahim. Jahilia is masquerade and madness. The oiled fatty bodies of the wrestlers have completed their writhings and the seven poems have been nailed to the walls of the House of the Black Stone. Now singing whores replace the poets, and dancing whores, also with oiled bodies, are at work as well; night-wrestling replaces the daytime variety. The courtesans dance and sing in golden, bird-beaked masks, and the gold is reflected in their clients’ shining eyes. Gold, gold everywhere, in the palms of the profiteering Jahilians and their libidinous guests, in the flaming sand—braziers, in the glowing walls of the night city. Hamza walks dolorously through the streets of gold, past pilgrims who lie unconscious while cutpurses earn their living. He hears the wine—blurred carousing through every golden-gleaming doorway, and feels the song and howling laughter and coin-chinkings hurting him like mortal insults. But he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, not here, so he moves away from the illuminated

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