CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Jam
Solvitur ambulando.
The last of the moon dropped behind the hill as we traipsed down to the parking lot. Mardini went first, raking the path with a flashlight. I brought up the rear, staying a couple of paces in back of John. Once or twice he slipped but did not fall. The forward thrust of the hadj seemed to raise his spirits. Lying on the pebbles had been torture. Walking was better; it chased the numbness from his toes.
The parking lot was clogged with vehicles. The streetlamps were out, and it took some extra minutes to locate our driver. We found him perched on the gate of the red Suburban, paring his fingernails. Mardini explained our decision. The driver nodded. We climbed into the wagon and roared off.
Mina lay two miles up the valley. A couple of slipways above the sand were the only ways to reach it. I sat alone in the backseat, watching the view pour forward as we rode. Orion glanced off the windshield. Glowing quads of tents flowed by the road.
Climbing a broad bridge thrown across a wadi, we saw a dozen vans streak down the channel in a dusty midnight drag race back to Makkah. Their lights cut crazy arcs over the sandbanks. Inspired, our driver pressed the pedal to the floor.
A conversation started up in the front seat. Now that we were under way, John doubted the Tightness of leaving Muzdalifah. The Prophet had kept his vigil until dawn. What were we doing? Was it proper?
I, too, wondered about the pilgrim laws. The forms of the hadj seemed so open; yet now and then you came upon a rule that could wreck your efforts if you broke it. You performed sa‘y after tawaf, never before; if you reached Arafat too late, your hadj was void. Mardini now repeated a hadith that allowed thé weak to beat the crowds to Mina. His studied quotation impressed me. I had so often thought of Mardini as my roommate, just one more pilgrim in the party, that sometimes I forgot his erudition. All the sheikhs addressed him as imam.
The minarets of the Khaif mosque shone mint green in the distance. Across the valley lay a slaughterhouse. A triangle of sheds on five or six acres, it was the largest complex in the valley. The abattoir was already in full swing. It had to be, to accommodate tomorrow's feast, the ‘Id al-Fitr, when half a million sheep were sacrificed. This rite that ends the hadj is observed throughout the Muslim world, but nowhere on a grander scale than in Makkah. Herds had been building up in town all week. At Mina every hillside had its pens. They lined the sides of the potholed road we traveled. The bleating grew louder as we climbed.
All at once the driver began shouting, thrusting his head out the window, gunning the engine. I sat up, squinting. A flock of sheep stood in our headlights up the road.
Perhaps they were blinded. Perhaps sheep are even dumber than they seem. As the van bore down, they rushed forth to meet us. It looked a lot like suicide to me, until just before impact, when the flock divided smoothly down the middle and flowed around us like a school of fish. In the end it was our driver who overreacted. He cranked the wheel hard as the sheep skipped by, and the wagon fishtailed. We felt the back end slide; we heard two thunks, as if rolling over a tree trunk.
Looking back, I saw a figure on the road, chasing the van with a wooden staff and shouting. Undoubtedly it was the owner of the sheep. Our driver saw him, too, in the rearview mirror. We picked up speed and flew around a bend.
“The sacrifice is not until tomorrow,” Mardini whispered.
The driver berated Satan, then himself, after which he sank into a funk. A minute later, near the summit, he came to an intersection of three roads. Traffic gelled. He threaded and bullied, leaning on the horn, sideswiped a concrete wall and tapped some fenders. Mardini showed his disgust for this by ignoring it. “When the Makkans get out to Mina,” he said, “they lose their minds. And they don't have insurance.”
“They don't?”
“Of course not.” He chuckled. “What fool would sell insurance here?”
Our towels were caked with sand. My skin felt chalky. When John suggested a shower at the guesthouse, Mardini reluctantly agreed. I did not share his urgency that evening. I did not understand yet how grueling the jamarat rite could be. Mardini would not have had illusions. Already John was limping, and we hadn't tossed a stone. He was anxious to get through the rite while John could walk.
Upstairs we showered and changed into fresh towels. The moleskin between my toes was filthy. I peeled it off and applied a new one. I was packing my bag when Mardini stopped me. “Leave everything here!” he said. “Just take your stones.”
We were back outside in twenty minutes. I was bathed in sweat before we left the drive.
Mina's main street filled a narrow ledge above the valley. The hadj encampments lay below and to our right. Burckhardt had paced this road at fifteen hundred yards. It was many times longer tonight and bathed in lamplight. One or two ancient features had not changed. Before the days of traffic tunnels, this street's only connection to Makkah had been by a stone step path over the mountain. I passed these steps, which pre-date Muhammad, near the Aqaba Jamara. They were thick with pilgrims going up and down.
Because the pilgrims paused here for three days, the road was lined with tent kitchens and soup shacks. We had hoped to beat the crowds, but the street was deluged. The farther we went, the more the numbers grew.
The right of the weak and the halt to go ahead strongly affected the look of this population. Inordinate numbers of people moved on crutches, and there were many misshapen limbs and bandaged heads. The street resembled an engraving of the old Lourdes road. Mixed in with the special cases went many younger, healthy-looking men. Perhaps, like us, they were here as protectors. Perhaps they were on fire with devoutness and could not wait to get on with the rites. One, rushing by in tattered robes, looked like a ringer for the man John Bunyan described in Pilgrim's Progress, running with his fingers in his cars and crying, “Life, life, eternal life.” There were others too, Sudanese, Egyptians, Moroccans, and one tall, intensely vibrant Yemeni with tangled hair and a rope around his waist like John the Baptist. He did not look behind him but fled toward the middle of the town.
A two-tiered curving, futuristic bridge on concrete pilings paralleled the road as we moved west. It lay on our right, converging with the pavement. Where the street forked, we followed a rail and went down. A sign on the arch read JAMARAT in four languages. The ramp led steeply to a lower level, and the bridge's upper tier became a roof. There were lights below and a broad, covered walkway over which the crowds strode, hip to hip. The design of this two-story boulevard recalled the mas'a, but here we saw no marble, no expensive touch of any kind. Rough and plain, it looked less like a shrine than an underground car lot. The jamarat arena was a no-frills operation.
This rite began the closure of the hadj. Relief was apparent in the early crowds. In addition, the prospect of pelting a slab with stones, even to ward off evil, contained a certain element of sport. The wheelchairs rolled along in double time. Smiling, laughing faces outnumbered the others. Our procession developed a packed and slipping rhythm, like many conga lines bouncing together.
As we came within sight of the pillars, the noise level rose. The roof collected our echoes, raining them down on us. Mouths mimed “Allahu akbar!” but no apparent sound came out. The space was absorbed in an oceanic roaring. More and more people raised and waved their arms. Some faces looked ecstatic. In the crush John's eyes grew wider. I kept myself at his back, to break the shock waves. Mardini went before him with folded arms.
Our goal was the big third column at the far end of the hall. Except in size, these pillars are identical. Set up at intervals of a hundred yards, each one rises from a ground-floor base, tapers up through a hole in the overpass, and soars a further eight feet into the air. The new bridge seemed to me a stroke of genius. Its two-tiered construction split up the crowds, letting twice as many hadjis at the pillars.
The jostling grew intense as we passed the first two columns. I dug in, to shield John. Progress became a tricky combination of taking half steps forward while resisting pressure from behind. There was no overt violence in the crowd, only an unpredictable swell of forces. I have said that the throws are athletic, that people feel relief at the end of the hadj. There was another cause of the turmoil in our procession. In the popular mind the jamarat pillars are personally associated with Satan.
In Morocco I had heard this rite called rajm as-Shaytan, “stoning the devils.” During the hadj men referred to the pillars as Shaytan. Although assigning a name to a stone is traditionally frowned on in Islam, and while the Saudis, very correct in all these matters, had placed signs near the columns, calling them pillars, some pilgrims performing the rite showed fewer scruples. They expressed themselves very clearly. They were stoning the devil.
A dense ring of pilgrims surrounded the third and largest pillar. As I worked my way forward, I loosened seven stones tied into my scarf. The bodies were packed here, and I had to dig for room to raise one arm. Naturally left-handed, my right-hand throws were not as strong as some. To compensate, I edged nearer the column. Aiming on tiptoe, I somehow hit the pillar seven times.
Mardini and John remained a few rows back, lofting the last of their pebbles at the column. As I moved toward them, a hand shot up behind John and knocked off his glasses. As Mardini stooped to pick them up, John took a second blow around the temple. While I struggled to reach them, Mardini pointed away from the pillars, hauling on John's arm. He had the glasses.
* * *
Away from all that now, back up on the high road, we continued away from Mina and the crowds. The streetlights faded quickly at this end of town, and there were no buildings. The hills butted sheer against the mountain. Black boulders loomed above the road.
We moved unsteadily, it seemed to me, like staggering sailors washed up on a beach. I felt exhausted. Lack of sleep, the crowds, the miles to go joined themselves into a single question. If that was the jamarat rite before the crowds, I kept thinking. I couldn't finish the sentence. We stopped at a fountain to wash John's glasses.
The road widened, then dead-ended into a car park near the tunnel. A second, pedestrian tunnel branched off to the right. Mardini led the way to a line of cabs.
We followed the standard protocol for renting Middle Eastern taxis: you never stepped into a cab without settling the fare. The first driver quoted a price nobody liked. Mardini cut it by half, and the man began shouting. Mardini ignored him, walked away, and began to price the second cab in line. The line, of course, existed to prevent this. The first man rushed up to interfere. I closed my eyes and leaned back on the taxi. When I looked again, Mardini had left the parking lot and was walking into the foot tunnel leading to Makkah. John went after him. I went after John.
“What happened?”
“They wanted fifty dollars.”
“We'll walk,” Mardini called. “It's safer.”
His words were beginning to echo; he was twenty yards ahead of us, entering the dark mouth of the tunnel.
It was cool in the tunnel, but dusky. The ceiling fans whipped up scraps of paper on the road. There were also occasional acrid whiffs of chlorine. Maintenance crews spread a white powdered disinfectant on any road spill, and the tunnel concentrated the smell. I watched my step here. Fluorescents hung from the ceiling in some sections; other stretches of the road were dark. We clung to the side of the right-hand wall and walked quickly.
The road debouched under a hill on the other side. Another taxi rank was set up here, but we kept walking. Apartment buildings rose around us. Where a roof line slipped, I saw a minaret lit up like a rocket. The familiar bowl of Makkah glowed below us. I tried not to look at it or think of the tawaf and sa'y ahead. I had been through these rites and knew what they exacted. I could not imagine John performing them. By now we'd been going nonstop for twenty hours. Mardini seemed unaffected, but that was normal. Mardini conducted life on another plane. My own legs were aching. In the small of my back I felt a familiar throb.
Fortunately the way was all downhill. When we stopped for a traffic light on Second Street, I asked Mardini the direction of our hotel.
He pointed. “And there's the haram.”
Mardini wanted to finish the hadj tonight, to pay our required visit to the mosque, while John was able.
“Then we'll be hadjis.”
I nodded, waiting for John to throw in the towel.
Whenever headlights passed us by, I scanned the road for taxis. Coming into town, we met a crowd of local Makkans in scarves and thobes. Some were leading goats on lengths of clothesline. Others carried trays of unbaked bread. We passed a café set up in the ancient style. Backless chaises longues lined a front veranda, where men reclined and puffed on water pipes. It looked like a slice of paradise to me. I suggested going in, but the place was a rough house.
The road descended, then leveled out again. We passed a telephone-company building on a mall. The office windows throbbed with fluorescent lighting. Inside a night clerk stood behind a desk.
For several days Mardini had been trying to telephone his sister in Sidon, but Lebanon was deep in civil war. It was hard to imagine the phone lines withstanding all those rocket launchers. The waits were interminable and every call had failed.
Tonight the clerk was optimistic. He jotted down the number and fiddled his switchboard. Mardini went into a booth and shut the door. I sat down next to John. The room was tiled in white, and the lights were painful. I shut my eyes. I heard more doors close. Muffled voices bounced around the walls.
When Mardini woke me, I was lying on the bench, toppled over sideways.
“Hotel?” he said.
I squinted.
The pilgrimage went on and on and on. It was not a place at all. It was a hemstitch in a landscape, a thread on a human needle, plunging and rising. It had stages and points of emergence. It did not stop. Only hadjis, who made up the march, fell by the wayside. You woke where you stumbled. You picked up the trail. I did not want to be the one to break our progress. On the other hand, with the hadj there was always more. What did it matter? I argued the two points back and forth in my head while Mardini waited. Finally, I nodded.
He didn't even blink. “Easy. No problem. We will visit the mosque tomorrow.”
Now that I had seen the hadj firsthand, I began to think there was nothing familiar about it. My studies and meetings in Marrakesh had led me to view Islam as a Western cousin. Events in Makkah partly changed my mind. The nature and shape of the pilgrimage made plain the Arabian root of Muhammad's teaching. Like the isolating chain of the Hejaz, it drew a line between Jerusalem's urban vision and the more nomadic outlook of Arabia. The Qur'an linked Islam to Jewish and Christian sources, but the hadj bound it firmly to Makkah.
The hadj is unique among Islam's five pillars. Declaration, prayer, fasting, and alms share an ethical basis. The hadj went beyond them, past society. Its significance is as a turning point, a rite of passage accomplished on two feet. I especially admired the way the sweat and the symbols flowed together. By an act of imagination and exertion, a spiritual rite of some duration fulfilled a private quest. For all its public aspects the experience was intensely personal. By giving the pilgrim a chance to choose his moment, it provided a service missing in the West since the days of the medieval palmers: it offered a climax to religious life.
* * *
I woke about one the next day with stiff joints and a backache. Dressed already, Mardini sat by the window, slicing cucumbers. Instead of the ihram, he wore slacks, brown shoes, and a sport shirt open at the collar. I showered and dressed casually. Wearing loafers especially pleased me. I'd had it with rubber sandals for a while.
Down in the lobby John sat stiffly on a couch, greeting a couple of delegation members. These men had just returned from the stoning grounds, and they looked bedraggled. Most of the others were still in Mina. John seemed pleased to be ahead of the crowds. The men went to shower, and he stood up. I noticed, going out, that he wore a back brace.
During the night the hadj had shifted keys. Truck horns blew as we left the building. The jammed streets pumped like a passage from Stravinsky: tumult and digression, passionate yearning, obstructed quests. Strident blows. Abruptness. Reconciliation. The hadj was now symphonic. The hollow, when we reached it, overflowed.
There was no point in trying to round the mosque or reach my favorite gate at the back of the building. We were here to perform the tawaf, and we went right in. We waded the aisles, reaching the building's core in twenty minutes, and gazed across the floor at the Ka'ba. After our days in the desert the authority of this simple structure astonished me. The angular lines created a towering effect. It sprang up through the pillars like a freight train in a forest.
Inside the horseshoe wall on its southern side lines of hadjis stood at Hagar's grave. The worshipers at this popular spot were always changing. Right now they were mostly Africans. I thought how at ease I had come to feel in this temple without pews, where the races mixed freely. Malcolm X had found relief here, too.
We stepped into the crowd and began our circuits. In the time it took us to go around two times, the numbers of pilgrims seemed to triple. Our elbow room compressed with each turn, driving us closer and closer to the Ka'ba. Robert Frost's couplet ran through my mind:
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the secret sits m the middle and knows.
Then I went back to shouting “Allahu akbar.”
By the end of our third circuit, we were close enough to the velvety black kiswa to reach out and touch it. I had never been so near the shrine before. I was fascinated by everything—the pores in the rock, the texture of the embroidery. I was frightened for John, too. In our next lap the roar of the crowd became so confused that I had to shout for Mardini to hear me. I pointed to John, then to the rim of the circle.
Mardini nodded. Shielding John, we worked our way out of the center. At the edge of the ring lay a final barrier—a solid wheel of elderly hadjis on litters, bobbing around the rim, fencing us in. A person who stumbled here was sure to be trampled. We pumped in place like limbo dancers, ducking under the boards to the other side.
Leaving the crowd behind, we went up a rise, turned to face the Ka'ba, and performed two bows. The order of these events was familiar now. We stopped for a drink at the well, then proceeded across the mosque to the mas'a.
The sa'y’s racecourse was constructed on two levels. Today the lower course was packed. We went upstairs to the second floor and strolled between the hills seven more times. When the sa'y was complete, Mardini produced a tiny pair of scissors. We clipped a few hairs from the backs of our heads, then slipped through the Prophet's gate into the street. The formal duties of the hadj were over.
The old market quarter lay nearer the mosque than I had imagined. At the entrance stood a row of barber shops. Pilgrims sat inside, having their heads shaved. We stopped to watch, then passed under an arch into the souk. What remained of this quarter was very, very old. The alleys were cobbled, the bazaars mostly small and specialized. We passed a spot between two carpet shops where Abu Bakr, Muhammad's first male convert, once kept a store. We window-shopped. We were hadjis.
At an ice-cream shop we toasted our status with three vanilla cones. In a jewelery store, while Mardini bought a wristwatch, I admired a display of gold pendants, hanging in a glass case, pinned on felt. These were perfectly cast in the shape of the Ka'ba. I asked the clerk to weigh a small one, about the size of an airmail stamp, and finally purchased it for fifty dollars.
We emerged from the souk on the east side of town and caught a cab to Mina. By now John's back brace had begun to give him trouble. The exhilaration of our rounds was wearing off.
At the guesthouse, I expected a celebration. The hadj had formally ended, today would be a feast, but by now all the other delegates were in Makkah. I saw no familiar faces in the hall. Down in the lobby a handful of pilgrims sat whispering on couches. The room's abnormal quietness confused me. At the reception desk I found a message from Saleem. He wanted us to dine with him that evening.
We settled John, then showered, and left the guesthouse without speaking to anyone. Main Street was completely devoid of traffic. On King Khalid Road we waited without success for a passing cab. In the end we walked.
The pedestrian tunnels were not like those for cars. They had fewer lights and were not split into lanes. Being about a mile long, fresh air was still a problem. The same huge fans we had seen before were mounted in the ceiling.
Going in, we clung to the right side of the tunnel. The sun, now low in the sky, backlit the road. We were almost the only pedestrians that evening. For some reason the fans had been switched off, and the scrape of our steps ran in front of us. Otherwise the place was very quiet. The absence of people puzzled me again. The farther we walked, the more withdrawn I felt. Midway down the tunnel the air grew tomblike, and my head began to ache. The road lay littered with refuse. Depressed, I found myself thinking, Why don't they clean this up? Mardini glanced up at the silent fans. We walked faster.
The tunnel fed into Aziziyah Road. This was the busiest street in Saleem's district. During the hadj of 1853, Sir Richard Burton had found rooms here. Today steel traffic galloped up and down, and the walks were filled with university students. I was glad to see them. My throat was burning from the airless tunnel. We caught a cab and hurried to Saleem's.
Our early departure from Muzdalifah had put us out of sync with the ‘id. The focal point of the three-day feast was Mina. In Makkah we had missed its early phases.
No religious blame attached to this. Only the actual sacrifice was required. I had arranged for that some days before, buying a ticket for thirty-eight dollars from a street vendor. The stub (I was told to guard it) ensured that a sheep would be offered in my name. The rest of the ticket and half a million like it were sent off to the Mina slaughterhouse.
The slaughterhouse had been mechanized for two decades. Whereas carcasses used to be buried in common graves, currently even hides are put to use. Today's ‘id looks surprisingly efficient. A family receives enough meat for the three-day feast. Acres of packers and freezers take care of the rest of it. Even in scorching summer weather the resulting unused tons of meat are boxed and shipped as gifts to poorer African and Middle Eastern countries. I had seen the freezer trucks on the Jidda road.
In the 1920s, when Rutter was here, no separate facility existed to handle the sacrifice. The narrow Mina sideroads all ended in sacrificial fields, and the sand about the tents was littered with corpses. By 1970, the increase of pilgrims made clean-up measures mandatory. Not only the stench but the threat of insect- and buzzard-borne diseases became overwhelming. Today the sacrifice is sanitary.
In the 1960s these matters were not always so well arranged. Jalal al-e Ahmad, an Iranian author who made the hadj in 1964, described the slaughtering grounds as a devil's punch bowl. With the exception of red bulldozers, he saw things as Ibn Batutta must have seen them, a few years before the scene was swept away. The killing fields on the far side of the valley lay covered with fresh carcasses of sheep and goats. The killing was done by hand, often with dull knives. Muscles quivered. The earth ran red and frothy. Al-e Ahmad raised the hem of his garments as he walked, like a man trudging through a painting of purgatory. Every step bred fresh hallucinations. At one point a young man brandishing a knife stood up abruptly from inside the ribs of a fallen camel, stopping Al-e Ahmad in his tracks. As for the carcasses, small servings of cookable meat were stripped away by professional butchers and carried back to the pilgrim camps on foot. The rest was laid out to dry in the sun or sprinkled with lye and bulldozed. For the urban intellectual Al-e Ahmad, this visit to the abattoir was the worst part of the hadj. He nearly passed out on two or three occasions, and his journal is full of frantic recommendations against waste and carnage. He berates the Saudi government—a favorite game in Iranian writing—and he considers vegetarianism. He remarks that had the directors of Mondo Cane included a scene from Mina in their movie, the film would have made a fortune.
At Saleem's we sat down to a table decked with mutton—barbecued joints on platters and succulent organs floating in fine broth. There were salads and rice and vegetables and baskets of warm bread. We were eight this evening, including Saleem's wife, Sari, and two children. Samir took the head of the table. As we were sitting, Shafeeq came through the door in a new white thobe.
As we ate, Saleem recounted their day at Arafat. His routine tone surprised me. Whereas I had traveled around the globe for this, Saleem had left his home on Sunday morning, taking his family and a house guest with him, like an Englishman picnicking on the moors. They had reached the cliffs above the plain at sunrise and pitched camp. It had been the best weather for the hadj in eleven years, with a touch of cloud cover and a breeze. Later on in the morning he and Shafeeq had propped drop cloths off the Cadillac Brougham. By then the ground lay thick with acres of cars.
Saleem's one regret was drinking too much water. As time went on and the sun climbed, he drank more. After lunch he set out for a bathroom. He waded through rows of bumpers, arrived at the edge of the cliff, then doubled back and finally came to a line of portable toilets. The queues were long. He waited, inching forward, bladder bursting. When his turn came, he threw open the door and clambered in, but the outhouse had not been designed for his bearish figure. He cracked his forehead on a crossbeam. Tonight his brow was gashed and his bladder ached. He sat on two pillows as we talked.
Shafeeq was pink from the sun, and his wet hair gleamed. He looked somehow beside himself, steeped in the afterglow of hadj. I felt fortunate to be here, but Shafeeq! He had ridden his horse into Biscayne Bay and come up in Makkah.
We talked and ate and, when the meal was done, adjourned to the majlis. Coffee arrived and Saleem lighted his pipe. Soon the room was wreathed in fruity smoke. Sari complained of the smell and lit a Marlboro. Samir turned on the TV, very low.
It appeared we were going to chat about cars over coffee. Samir had done some research on my price list. Knowing how commerce blended with the hadj, it did not seem irreverent to get down to business. But before we could start, Saleem glanced at the TV and turned up the volume. On the screen, through layers of smoke, I began to make out twisted steel beams and shrouded bodies. The camera jerked unsteadily, then fixed on an announcer in a thobe.
There had been a stampede in one of the Mina tunnels, at a place called al-Moaisim. No one knew yet what had caused it, but the passage was clogged at both ends, and some pilgrims were trapped there. Their number and condition were unknown, because no one could get to them. Meanwhile a localized power failure had somehow cut the current to the fans. People were rumored to be choking.
Every few minutes we learned a little more. Gradually a theory began emerging: that car traffic had started the stampede, that a handful of hadjis had fallen from a bridge at the mouth of the tunnel, that people had panicked, blocking the entries. A large crowd had been camped inside, it was said. Asphyxiation crept into the broadcast. After several minutes a wave of stretcher bearers started in.
I had never been anywhere near the Moaisim tunnel and couldn't visualize its situation. The television pictures, limited to a single hand-held close-up of the announcer, did not help. The fuzzy arch in the background resembled the tunnel we had walked through, but of course, it wasn't. Moaisim lay on the other side of the valley, near the slaughterhouse.
The faces around me were turned to the screen at very different angles. Shafeeq's looked concentrated, overtaken; Saleem's, suspicious of the official story. Samir muttered apologies, pained as a Makkan that such things could happen in his city. On the screen a doctor was giving a speech on asphyxiation. Saleem erupted. Where had this talk about car traffic come from? The facts were not in; already we had explanations. And what about the fans? These tunnels, he said, had back-up systems in case the power failed; he knew the engineer who had designed them. Mardini put in that the fans had been off in the King Khalid tunnel, too. At that Samir stood and left the majlis. He was going to telephone friends, to see what had happened.
I kept hoping the cameraman would move around more. Without a view I felt disoriented. Like Shafeeq, I found it hard to absorb this finish to our week. The hadj had started out with the Zanjan earthquake. It had continued with prayers for the dead five times a day. It was peopled by pilgrims in cotton shrouds rehearsing scenes for the afterlife. Now it had ended with a real-life demonstration, close up, impersonal. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” But it was night now. I could have done without it.
These were my first reactions to the tunnel. For the most part I sat numbly with the others, eyeing the television. Eventually Saleem switched off the set. The children were roughhousing in another room, and Sari went in to calm them. We did not talk business. It was time to leave.