CHAPTER TWENTY

Independence Day

The mood at the guesthouse over the next two days depended on the subject under discussion.

I heard wide dissatisfaction with the crowds. Mina was normally a one-horse town—a few thousand people lived here out of season. Now several million bodies were plunging through its canyons, and the risks were great, especially for old people. Arafat had raised our spirits to a high point. The jam at Mina threatened to bring them low. The gap between a pilgrim's inner condition and the crush he faced every time he stepped outdoors was a real challenge, emotional as well as physical.

The jamarat area had been in full swing when Fayez arrived with his grandmother. The melee he described sounded familiar, but the throngs were twice as dense as those I'd seen. The worst offenders, in Fayez's view, were droves of rough-and-tumble Pakistani farmhands. Pathans and Indian shopkeepers ran a close second. Fayez grew livid on the subject. “Completely uncivilized,” he sighed. “They need an education.”

“Education?”

“A training course,” he said, “before they get here. In Malaysia they have a scaled-down haram, with an entire pilgrim route laid out around it. You know: ‘Here is Mina. Here is Muzdalifah.’ You walk around it, in miniature. You get your bearings.” The Malay hadjis were wonderful, he said. Yemenis, however, ran every which way. He had seen two old men trampled.

We traded stories about the jamarat—I behind John, he with his grandmother. The woman was not so frail as he'd feared. She had refused to go ahead of the daylight crowds. She had made it across the stoning ground unharmed.

If Fayez was angry, Rafeeq, the Libyan delegate, looked depressed. I found him withdrawn in a corner of the lobby, eyes cast down, avoiding human contact.

Rafeeq was a barrel-chested man with a keen intelligence. His father, a legend in Libya, had led a revolt against Italian occupation. Rafeeq had come to New York at age eighteen and put himself through school by driving taxis and sweeping out bus stations. He had studied economics, then gone on to teach at Tulane, Duke, and Georgetown. In the service of his country he had also become an adviser to the International Monetary Fund. Perhaps this post had cost Rafeeq his Libyan citizenship. I could only guess at the twisting road that had carried him from his shepherd's youth in Cyrenaica to a scholarly, early retirement on the Potomac. His feet were badly blistered now, and he had the raspy cough everyone caught here. Usually we got on well. This morning Rafeeq did not want to see me.

Information concerning the tunnel continued to trickle in, via two TVs in the guesthouse lobby. The quantities of dead had increased overnight, from a vague few hundred to 1,473, mostly elderly Asians. In my experience this was a lot of people—about the same number as in the village where I lived. On the other hand, the body count amounted to less than .0005 percent of the hadj. I could not make sense of the matter from either perspective. Philosophical and horrified by turns, my mood swung about like a compass needle. Luckily there were Muslims around me. Raised on Islam's unitarian views, they had a knack for facing facts without jumping to conclusions. Their naturalness at this made the trait seem genetic.

“It's in Allah's hands.”

“What is finished is over.”

Dr. ‘Ali raised his eyes in silence.

Equanimity tempered our talk about the tunnel. At first I mistook this for coolness. It was poise.

The ending of the hadj was a different subject entirely. When that came up, the corners of men's mouths rose and they smiled. Especially for first timers the hadj was the crowning moment of a lifetime. To have got through it required celebration. Muslims, who drink no alcohol, tend to celebrate by meeting, chatting, embracing, and strolling arm in arm. An amount of all this was going on in the lobby, fueled by trays of coffee at each couch. No one spoke now of how hard it had been to get here or of what the trip had cost in health or money. The most common emotion was gratitude, a genuine gladness to be here. I heard pat phrases designed to calm complainers. One man in the elevator touched a downcast pilgrim on the shoulder. “If it was not hard,” he said, “it would not be the hadj.”

A few sections of the guesthouse were set aside for foreign dignitaries. As the building had only one lobby, I saw these people often. They swept in through the big glass doors, accompanied by guards. In an entourage they appeared serenely distant, but one to one they were forwardly warm, even starved for talk. You saw the relief in their eyes when they addressed you. The trappings of power cut men off, I thought, and the hadj was a chance to dispense with class divisions. Most of these men and women were multilingual, at ease in their roles, and informal. In short, they deserved the title royal guest.

I came downstairs before the zuhr prayer and found Mardini chatting on a couch with an assistant to the Lebanese prime minister. I decided not to interrupt their meeting. A long, near-vacant couch stood across the room. I sat down and opened a small diary.

The guesthouse had been a palace years before. Its upstairs rooms looked spartan, but the lobby was spacious, ornate as a Hilton lounge. An acre of handloomed carpets dampened the sounds of socializing. The marble walls resembled thunderclouds.

I was writing up last night's walk through the King Khalid tunnel when I noticed a woman seated on my right, watching me intently. She wore a cream-white robe and a gray silk shawl. Perhaps she had been there all along.

She introduced herself as Mrs. Mojadidi. She and her husband resided in Jidda, she said, but they were Afghans. They had lived abroad for twenty years, in Tripoli to begin with, until Qaddafi became impossible, after which the Saudis brought them here. Quite a few of her people lived in Jidda. I longed to hear more about Libya. The Western press had virtually written off the country, and I knew nothing of the way Libyans lived. Mrs. Mojadidi did not oblige me. She shook her head and changed the subject. She asked whether my hadj had been mubarak. I said that it had been and repeated the politeness. We sat smiling matching smiles on the sofa. Mrs. Mojadidi's English was dissolving.

Before very long her eyes began to dart. “We must find the princess,” she whispered. “Please, wait here.”

A minute later she returned, leading a younger woman by the hand.

“This is Princess Na'im,” she said. “Her husband and his family served our country.”

The good humor of these women was contagious. The princess carried the conversation. Soon I was being invited to London for Ramadan, to attend the retreat of her teacher, Sheikh Nazim. Nazim was a Sufi in the Naqhsbandi lineage, a Turkish pir, or guru, based in Cyprus. I had met a few of his students in California. They were gentle, purposeful people.

“Unlike you, I was born to Islam,” she said. “But only lately have I got it. Peace of mind is so difficult to locate! Being around Nazim has shown me something.”

I told them about myself. I said I was married.

“You must bring your wife to London,” the princess said. “I'll take her shopping.” And she held up a gold and lapis ring on her right fourth finger. It was twelfth-century Persian. “I found it in Bond Street,” she said, “for next to nothing. Tell your wife!”

I remarked on her fluent English.

“Of course! We have lived in London since the coup.” She looked thoughtful. “You really must meet my husband. He's so bored here.”

Aziz Na'im was a tall, slender man with silvering hair. He had a beardless face and unlined skin and spoke above a whisper, in ruminating sentences that purled toward their goal, like Edward Gibbon's. Even his posture was patrician—he seemed to curve slightly backward, like a reed.

We spoke about food and the weather. After the women had slipped away, Na'im took me into his confidence. The hadj had been wonderful, he said, but he was bored now and beginning to feel cornered. The Saudis felt such concern about the safety of their guests that he and his wife could not set foot outside without a guard. The jamarat rite had been judged too chaotic for them. Their outings had been limited to shopping. He did not like shopping, especially when the women overbargained. I suggested things might be changed, but he shook his head. He had been here last year; he knew how it went. After the hadj you were more or less trapped in the lobby.

Aziz had been stationed in London for many years, working with the Afghan foreign service. He had stayed on in England after the 1978 Saur revolution.

This was the palace coup his wife had mentioned. It had ended the royal republic of Prince Daoud and led to a decade of Soviet occupation. I knew from my reading that Daoud, his brothers and cousins had been controversial figures in their country. As its first Western-educated rulers, they had forced the king to step aside, installed a constitution, banned the veil. Near the end Daoud was harshly criticized for relying too much on secret police and succumbing to sycophancy. His death brought about the end of the Naderi dynasty.

Daoud and most of his family had been murdered in the coup. There was no tactful way to ask Na'im what had happened. Instead, we spoke abstractly about change. In Aziz's view the only real Islamic revolution had taken place nearly fourteen hundred years ago. Its basis, he said, was in Muhammad's emphasis on equity and the pursuit of truth. Its source was Qur'anic. Muhammad's first revelation had been a command to read, to seek to know. After his death subsequent caliphs had followed this commandment, constructing a loose-knit confederation founded upon universal law. For a period of six centuries the Qur'an and the constitution were synonymous. The Mongol invasions had destroyed that unity in the 1200s. Decadent Mamluk and Turkic rulers had fractured it further. Later, Western domination had stunted the very ability to govern. This long Islamic dark age was ending now.

Rebirth, Aziz observed, is always messy. In his own country's case, decades of colonial influence had so deranged the process that even populist candidates were “mostly reactionary—not revolutionary at all.” They knew best what they did not want; they had forgotten what they wanted. They argued over which movement was more Islamic. But a movement could not be more or less Islamic! A movement was either Islamic, or it was not. Despite the confusion, Aziz was hopeful of a renaissance. Because Islam was not at heart regressive, matters, he felt sure, would be worked out. He confessed he had no idea how this would happen.

I met Fayez at the elevators after lunch. He suggested we go to the jamarat together, for the second of our three required throws. The afternoon heat, he believed, would limit the size of the crowds there. I had planned to go later, alone. Fayez objected. “Safety in numbers,” he told me. He referred to the jamarat area as “the jam. “

I wanted a shower first. Fayez rode along in the crowded elevator. Upstairs we met Rafeeq limping down the hallway. He did not seem to know us when I stopped him. His bare left foot was swollen, red and yellow, and his head drooped. I gave him a tube of Neosporin from my bag. While he rubbed on the ointment, he launched into a speech against the crowds, but Fayez interrupted. “I saw you at Muzdalifah!” he chided. “You were smiling!” Rafeeq released a grin and hobbled off.

We visited John Muhammad, too. The long hike back to Makkah had landed him in bed on a field of pillows. A doctor had already come to chastise him. There was no question of his throwing stones today. He had appointed Abd al-Qadir to do it for him. Abd al-Qadir, who had missed his chance with the murderer, seemed destined to be a proxy in some way.

Before we left, I gave John two Halcion tablets.

“You're a regular walking pharmacy,” Fayez said.

Fayez looked edgier than yesterday. His left eye blinked more than the right. His jaw was rigid.

“Do you know why the hadj is so hard?” he asked. “Because you're working off your sins. At the end of it, if you've done things right, you should come out as clean as a baby.”

I said did he mean that innocence was gained?

He nodded. “And it makes me nervous. Because everything I do from here on really matters. It's a dangerous position.”

Main Street was a cataract of shoulders and umbrellas bobbing toward the bridge in drenching sun. The high noon heat had not put off the pilgrims. I lost track of Fayez by quick degrees. The crowd had a trick of opening, then closing down around us. His arms disappeared in stages as he slipped ahead. Next his shoulders went, and then his neck. Soon all that remained was a pistoning pink umbrella, shrinking as we were swept along.

The pebbles tied into the tip of my scarf swayed with every step like a bandolier. The stones, people said, were little bits of bismillah. They protected you from the evils of Shaytan. Others compared them to bullets. With every throw, one shouted “God is great! “ like a mujahid freedom fighter firing a rifle. The pace was athletic. We did not skip a beat. When a man to my right lost a sandal, he kept going. The thrust from behind made stopping dangerous.

The jamarat bridge had a high road and a low road. Being alone made me cautious. I chose the subway level, which I knew. Where the bridge cut off the sun, the heat grew thicker. It welled out of the ramp way. Going down, the raw look of the jamarat area impressed me. A lot of cement had been poured to widen these walkways, yet it was a cut-rate undertaking, befitting Satan. Safety and convenience mattered, not much else.

Yesterday we had thrown at just one pillar. Seven little pebbles and we were gone. Today and tomorrow all three columns would be pelted—twenty-one pebbles per session, forty-nine in all. This kind of symbolic precision seemed to me part of the genius of the hadj. It provided a focus in a crowd inclined to frenzy. The right-size pebbles had to be cast a specified number of times in the proper direction, or the act was void. Intention still counted, but so did magical exactness, an unerring adherence to getting it right, as others had done before you. It was a perfect piece of religious psychology. Hitting the mark with a pea-size stone was just enough of a task to keep tempers from flaring. The press of the crowds, the nagging heat became unimportant. We had our pebbles to consider.

I had counted out my day's ration at the guesthouse, including an extra seven in case some missed. I loosened the stones as we marched and shifted them into my right hand. The pilgrims stood twenty deep around the column, like contestants in a massive penny toss. I worked my way into the circle. Ten feet from the pillar I came up short in a clog of elbows. The press was too great to move nearer. I had to wriggle for room to raise my arm.

I started throwing, giving a lot of loft to every stone. The pebbles were very light and hard to follow. There were shouts of “Allahu akbar!” yet the air inside the circle was strangely still. I could hear the plink of arcing gravel raining on the pillar. Now and then a stone from behind fell short, striking my neck like grapeshot. Pilgrims were missing! I closed one eye. I aimed and hurled. People around me whooped as their throws hit home. Faces cracked into smiles. I heard laughter. For a moment the scene resembled a booth at a county fair. Then it was over, and we flowed forward.

Lapidation is the most arcane of the old religious rites. Its roots are said to reach back to the Mesolithic period, to a people who fashioned the bow and tamed the dog. Whatever age had brought it in, the version we performed today expressed itself as an act of restraint and protection. It was less a matter of casting at than of casting out. We were not warding Satan off but compelling him to knuckle under. I had liked picking up the pebbles in the moonlight. I enjoyed aiming at targets with them, too. We were taking part in an exercise that for Westerners had vanished with the Druids. It was as sociable and precise as a good athletic event.

Ahead I saw no end to the pilgrim river. It slowed like protoplasm at the pillars. It thickened and streamed around them, moving on. When my pebbles had all been thrown, I continued walking, letting myself be washed along, sticking to the center of the current. The ragged edge of the jamarat crowd was its least agreeable section. Most accidental tramplings occurred in these eddies, and I learned to avoid them. The safest place lay deep inside the throng.

The crowd broke down and spilled me out near the tunnels. Doubling back by a row of wooden shacks, I stopped to snack on kabobs near the Bayah mosque.

The clouds and breeze of Arafat were gone now. The canvas city sagged into relapse, and leaden heat pinned down the valley. Through the afternoon hours nothing rose much higher off the ground than lamb fat curling up from campfires. At the guesthouse a steady trio of elevators ferried weary pilgrims to their rooms. I lay on a cot until sunset, dozing and listening to the BBC.

Word of the tunnel disaster had reached the outside world. At the top of each broadcast the same gruesome story led the news. It shocked me to hear about Makkah on the British airwaves. Our Hejazi isolation was not so complete as I'd believed. The report conveyed new details. Eighty percent of the victims had been elderly. Most of the dead were Turks and Indonesians. The word stampede cropped up. Fifty thousand pilgrims had been trapped inside a tunnel made for a thousand. These were new, disturbing wrinkles. I tossed on the mattress and did not sleep much.

Mardini and I returned to Saleem's that evening.

We went by taxi. Knowing what I knew now about Moaisim, I did not want to trudge through another tunnel. The cab ride proved unsettling enough. Our driver was an especially high-speed version of his type, and the hadjis who slept in the tunnels had learned nothing. They reclined too near the pavement, as before, legs extended inches from the traffic. As we emerged into the twilight, Mardini began to discuss the price of cars.

When prior to the hadj Samir had revised my first quotation downward, I had sent a second wire to my California buyer, requesting a lower price on half the cars. Now he had sent back a compromise. He was also looking into cheaper shipping. To my surprise, the deal was going forward. We were dickering amiably for middle ground. I felt delighted and remotely optimistic. Any arrangement by which I might profit through selling cars in Makkah seemed too propitious to dwell on. I did not want to think of it too much.

We found Saleem in the majlis, puffing a hookah in front of the TV. He looked unhappy with the local coverage. “We stare at the screen and we stare at the screen,” he said. “They tell us the same story every hour. It adds up to nothing.” This reminded me of some lines by Robert Frost:

The people along the land

All turn and look one way.

They turn their back on the land.

They look at the sea all day.

. . . . . . . . . . .

They cannot look out far,

They cannot look in deep.

But when was that ever a bar

To any watch they keep?

Saleem loved poetry in any language. Politically he was a skeptic, full of doubts. In this case, he thought it peculiar that the broadcasts said so little. Yes, there had been a stampede; but what had caused it? The official word, a traffic jam outside, seemed suspect. Samir had telephoned around the town. There was talk of a bombing.

I was shocked. “Who would do that?”

“Any group wanting to make the king look weak. It wouldn't be the first time,” Saleem said.

This was true. A few years before three hundred Iranians had died in a street demonstration near the mosque. Their protest had been viewed as a provocation. There were other examples, too, including attempts to embarrass the Saudis by violence. The point of a bomb scare in Makkah would be to prove them incompetent to run the hadj.

Mardini scoffed at this theory. “Was anyone arrested near the tunnel?”

“Not yet.”

“Were there traces of explosives? Did the roof cave in?”

“No.”

Mardini sat back. “You see? Saleem has a big imagination.”

All this served to remind me that we were in the Middle East. Remote, heady Makkah tucked into a bowl among treeless peaks could make you forget how near you were to trouble: to Beirut, with its wildfire wars; to Israel's barbed wire camps; to an Iraqi supercannon. Makkah drew devotees from all these hot spots. None was more than a few hundred miles away. On a map the connecting roads resembled fuses.

Saleem switched off the set after the news. Over the gash on his head he now wore a Band-Aid. We began to talk business. I had questions concerning import taxes, shipping costs, insurance on the cars. Saleem produced a binder with his figures.

At 11:00 P.M. he drove us back to Mina. Even under way the big car's doors retained the heat, scorching my arm when I draped it out the window. The hadj had not yet returned to its nighttime schedule. The tunnel lay empty of traffic going in, and the sleeping hadjis beside the road looked eerie. Then the tunnel curved, a rush of hot wind from nowhere rocked the car, and an entourage of six Mercedes 560 SEL sedans blew past, moving at a hundred miles per hour. Saleem swerved as they shot ahead of us. The cars remained in view for a few more seconds, then vanished down the gullet of the tunnel.

“A million dollars worth of steel,” I said.

“Perhaps. But it's nothing to them.”

Mardini had seen the same sedans that morning, parked outside the guesthouse. The cars belonged to a group of Kuwaiti princes. They were here for the hadj, and for the oil talks next week. I repeated what I had heard on the BBC: that Iraq had accused Kuwait for the seventh time of pumping oil from fields inside its border. The emir was looking forward to “constructive talks” at Jidda.

“Their meetings will get them nowhere,” Saleem said.

Talks seemed only to lead to more talks. The differences were mainly economic. Since December, Kuwait, through overpumping, had helped drive down the barrel price of oil by seven dollars. So far, each of these drops had cost Iraq about a billion dollars, devaluing the dinar to one twelfth its former worth. The principal parties were now engaged in diplomatic chess. In a late defense Kuwait had raised the matter of a war debt, amounting to about ten billion dollars. A few weeks after, matters worsened. I was on my way back to the States when I heard the announcement. To strengthen his hand at the bargaining table, Saddam had ordered thirty thousand troops into the desert south of Basra. U.S. satellite cameras had picked them up, forty miles from the Kuwaiti border. The emir of Kuwait dismissed this as a bluff, and perhaps it was. On July 31, however, discussions broke down for good. Baghdad denounced the emir's “fiscal arrogance,” and two days later Iraqi troops crossed the border. Kuwait was invaded. The stage was being set for a Gulf war.

After the march from Arafat to Mina most Makkans returned home for the ’id. The Makkans had cool houses to recline in. They did not bother signing up for tents. This was lucky. Had another five hundred thousand pilgrims jammed the valley, the tiny village would have split its seams. Once a day the jamarat rites brought the locals streaming back through the tunnels, but not to stay. They slipped into Mina long enough to throw their stones, then rushed away again to escape the melee.

I woke late on Wednesday morning and went up to the roof. From here I could overlook the long, sunlit defile of Mina Valley. Uniform acres of canvas still wavered in the heat. More camps overflowed the valley walls, spilling uphill toward Ta'if, where they melted like dots in a pointillist composition—about a half million flecks in all.

The tents were emblems of the hadj's shifting essence—the insha’ Allah factor, I called it. In less than a week the whole set would be struck, packed into trucks, and carried off to storage. Viewed from the roof in a melting sun, the scene resembled an insubstantial pageant, ready to fade at a moment's notice, the fabric of a dream.

I breakfasted downstairs on tea and rolls and went into the lobby at eleven. Fayez passed by and sat down on my couch. He had just returned from the streets, his robe was smudged with dirt, and he trailed depression. He wore a streak of chlorine on his jaw. Had we been in tents, like millions of other hadjis, his mood swings might not have seemed pronounced. As it was, the relative comforts of the guesthouse emphasized them, in contrast to the chaos of the roads. Today he was in a rage over the traffic. The exchange of the car for the camel, he said, was going to bring the downfall of the hadj.

Conducting a spiritual quest in a state of gridlock vexed everyone I met. Day and night Main Street lay choked with buses. The four-mile ride to Muzdalifah took four hours. I understood Fayez's reaction. I shared it. Combining the hadj and the car in a Saudi desert had produced the biggest traffic jam on earth. The auto's main attribute, its speed, was completely subverted. The invention seemed useless. The hadj would have been easier on foot.

Fayez wanted to replace the cars with trains. He suggested a circular subway system, linking Makkah to Arafat and Mina, permitting pilgrims to travel below ground. The passage would be more orderly. They would not be in the sun.

This was not a completely new idea. Trains had been under discussion for fifteen years.

“It's either that or the hadj will die out,” he said.

A lot of people before Fayez had predicted the end of the hadj. Burckhardt and Burton, forty years apart, each had reasons to think it would die in their century. Burckhardt based his assessment on a growing indifference to religion and on the rising costs of travel. Burton, an imperialist by nature, foresaw a day when necessity “will compel us to occupy in force the fountainhead of al-Islam.” In a more passive vein, General Lyautey, the brilliant French resident general of Morocco, had suggested in 1916 that the hadj “be permitted to fall into disuse,” as a political expedient. In fact, all these men were gazing into a mirror. It was not the Muslim pilgrimage that would crumble, but the French and British empires. The hadj has prevailed into modern times, for reasons that are clear. Society continues to validate it. Modern transport encourages it. Modern economics, in the form of petrodollars, sustains it. It has not been reduced to a metaphor. It remains a public means to a personal quest, a practicable rite of brief duration that, by an act of intelligence or imagination, enters hearts. It would survive the gasoline engine, I supposed.

Prince Na'im stopped me in the lobby after lunch. I had my pebbles tied into my scarf and was heading outside again to stone the columns. The prince wore khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. He looked dressed for a golf match. His eyes were furtive.

“Take me with you,” he whispered.

“Sir?”

He scanned the room. “Kidnap me.”

In his hand he held a plastic water bottle full of stones. He had been out in the parking lot collecting pebbles. He was ready to throw, but his hosts would not allow it, he explained. On their first day out the Na'ims had almost been trampled. As a result, the Saudis had assigned them a couple of soldiers to act as proxies and carry out their rites. This was permissible under pilgrim law, but Aziz thought the gesture ridiculous. He wanted to throw his own stones. He wanted to come and go and take part in the hadj. The night before, he said, they had waited for their driver for three hours, then coaxed a local Makkan to take them to dinner. This protocol breach had so upset the Saudis that now a driver trailed him everywhere, even in the guesthouse. Because of this, Na'im and I were strolling in wide arcs around the lobby, speaking in whispers.

I could sympathize with the prince's confinement. The hadj, which dissolved class barriers, had hemmed him in. Despite an unwanted affront to my Saudi hosts, some part of me longed to take him with me, to slip him past his guards into the crowd.

“Do you know what day this is?” he asked.

“The third day of the ‘id.”

“In your country,” he said, “it's July the Fourth.”

As I took this in, his eyes seemed to beg me to free him. It was Independence Day.

The jamarat road ran thick with pilgrims out for their final throw. I left the prince behind and went alone. Across the road tents were already coming down in sections. Food stalls were closing, too. At one intersection two cooks dumped a pot of soup into a gutter, then scattered a patch of chlorine on the stones. Whiffs of disinfectant burned my nostrils. The pavement was hotter than a match head.

Where the route split into a subway and a bridge, I took the high road, coming up a ramp into the sun. Except for a view of the granite hills, this level was not much different from the other. Perhaps the crowds were packed more densely. The walls of the bridge were lower. Paper scraps lay piled by the road. As we reached the first pillar, a helicopter swooped over the hills, kicking up dust. The noise of churning rotors beat our eardrums, thunka-thunka-thunka, like machine guns. I mistook it for an army gunship. In fact, it was another flying hospital. Each of these monsters carried a medical team and a fully stocked clinic. They mainly served the weak, the prostrate. If someone were trampled, aerial surgery could be performed. They were a boon, but I never liked seeing them. They boded ill and caused confusion. This one appeared to be out on a false alarm. After a minute's hesitation, it swung away abruptly, vanishing as quickly as it had come.

I allowed myself to be carried to the first column. I threw my stones and rode the crowd again. I was no longer walking. Rather, I was being swept forward, using my feet as rudders. The jamarat rite was nothing if not energetic. There was a certain humor in it, too—once again people were whooping as they saw their stones connect. The ritual had the feel of a contest, no matter how sacred. Beneath the commotion it seemed to blend the challenge of the mas'a walk with Fayez's notion of innocence won through labor. The throws were elating, but this was hard work, too, performed in a melee. It required precision, aim, and quick departures to keep from being crushed.

A crowd pressed me from behind near the second column. I braced my hands on die basin to keep from ramming into it and took this chance to peer over the rim. It was filled with stones and many unmatched sandals. Some foot-long sticks lay down there, too, but it was the sandals that impressed me. In an excess of enthusiasm some hadjis had left themselves barefoot on the bridge. The rule called for pebbles no larger than a fava bean, but excitement got the better of some pilgrims. Over my shoulder a rubber flip-flop spiraled through the air. Cloudbursts of pebbles broke around me. We were throwing to beat the devil, hollering “Allahu akhar” in the sun.

We were dealing here in a world of unseen things, of ideas and traditions that required imagination. We were embedded in a very ancient story. The word Satan still felt strange to my tongue, and yet a lot had happened since my first walk here. With a suggestion of bombs in the tunnels, with hints of war to our north, things looked different. Today I saw the devil from a bridgehead. He was the shadow of man's most destructive instincts.

Every faith addressed this matter somehow. Whether the prince of darkness was Shakespeare's Gentleman or Conrad's “soft spot” or the mute neuroses pointed up by Freud, the fact remained that his presence required action. Islam, with its usual wisdom, understood this. Intellectual resistance was insufficient. One ought to put one's body into it. To steel one's nerve, to objectify the struggle, one threw stones collected in the moonlight.