The Satanic Verses

her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. ‘Rekha Merchant,’ Gibreel greeted her. ‘You couldn’t find your way to heaven or what?’ Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation … Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: ‘What the hell?’
    ‘You don’t see her?’ Gibreel shouted. ‘You don’t see her goddamn Bokhara rug?’
    No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don’t expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.
    Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: ‘Spoono? You see her or you don’t?’
    Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing.Gibreel faced her alone. ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ he admonished her. ‘No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing.’
    O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that’s a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.
    He became afraid. ‘What do you want? No, don’t tell, just go.’
    When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that’s where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you’re going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha’s curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name
Al-Lat
.
    He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds.
    Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha’s lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise:
    ‘Fly,’ Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. ‘Start flying, now.’ And added, without knowing its source, the second command: ‘And sing.’
    How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
    Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?
    How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? Whatcompromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?
    Is birth always a fall?
    Do angels have wings? Can men fly?
    When Mr Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel’s, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his