Pilgermann

11

One wakes up in the morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then must it with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one’s lot.

Every morning when I woke up I had perforce to put on the identity of Eunuch. I had to make to myself a little oration that always began with,‘Yes, but …’. As the raw being of me drew back from the identity that was offered I would say, ‘Yes, but still there are things to be done, still there is life and world, still there is action required of me.’ On the morning after drawing Hidden Lion on the stone and on the paper I woke up and said, ‘Yes, but there is Hidden Lion,’ and just at that moment there came moving upon the morning air the call of the mu’addhin. It seemed to me that his voice, contiguous with infinity, was tracing on the air the pattern I had drawn upon the stone and upon the paper, and I moved forward eagerly into the day.

The hum of the day arose from the city, the work of the day began: the beating of hammers, the baking of bread, the voices of buying and selling. Through these streets of the action of every day we walked to our paved square of stillness that was waiting to become what it would become. The morning sun slanted its light across the paving-stones, the wooden rod in the centre with its morning shadow told the time. The chalk lines drawn by me in darkness were shocking in the light of morning, strange and surprising in their actuality, like a mountain.

‘Does it seem to you,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘that this design was already waiting in the stone for the time when it would become visible?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think that all possible patterns were in these stones even before they were cut and dressed and made into paving-stones.’

We both stood looking at the chalk lines on the tawny stone. Having spoken the words we had just spoken we now found in our minds the next thought: the actions that would take place on those tiles that were not yet made, were those actions also waiting in the paving-stones that would then be under the tiles?

Bembel Rudzuk measured the three different triangles that in their multiples made up Hidden Lion and wrote down his measurements on a sheet of paper which he put into his document case.

‘When can we start?’ I said.

As I spoke the shadow of the wooden rod faded into the tawniness of the stone. We both looked up at the grey sky.

‘In the spring,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘when the rains are over.’

I felt like a child deprived of a treat. I wanted something to happen immediately, I felt that such manhood as now remained to me could only live so long as there was action to nourish it. I stretched out my arms towards the corners of the stone square, trying to pull into myself the power that radiated from the centre and passed beyond the outer limits of the paving to infinity.

A small boy walked on to the stone at a corner of the square. He looked sharp and hungry, like a fox. Like a fox, wary and watchful, he came slowly step by step from the corner towards the centre, walking as one walks on thin ice; perhaps he was counting. At a certain point he stopped, knelt on the stone, and began to draw on it, first with a bit of charcoal then with red ochre. What he drew was a triangle with a short base and long sides; it was irregularly divided into pointed red and black shapes, some triangular, some diamond-shaped, unevenly massed and drawn all skewed and crooked, like scales on a deformed serpent; from base to apex there ran up the middle, like spines, a line of black diamond shapes. Near the triangle he drew a lopsided circle made up of other black and red shapes, masses of black, slivers of red; it suggested the giant eye of an unimagined insect. From this eye emanated red and black arrows.

I walked over to the boy. I had learned to say in Arabic, ‘What is this called?’ and now I pointed to his design and said this to him.

He looked up at me attentively and shook his head.

I said in Greek, ‘What is this called? What is it meant to be?’

Again he shook his head, still looking at me attentively.

‘Did you understand me?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Are you able to speak?’ I said.

He shook his head. Had his speech been castrated? Had his tongue been cut out? I didn’t want to ask why he was unable to speak. Had he made a vow of silence?

Still looking at me with that same serious attention he held out his left hand with the fingers outspread and curved as if holding a sphere, then he slowly rotated his wrist. Having done this he stood up and walked back as he had come: first to the corner of the paved square then away into the town.

Then the grey sky opened and down came the rain. As it poured down and drenched me to the skin my heart leapt up to meet it, I didn’t know why. That rain, the prospect of which had only a moment before filled me with despair, was now bringing me ease and refreshment.

Under that drenching rain we went to the brickyard. There was little to be seen but an expanse of mud leaping up in points, a little square mud-brick building with a dome, and two or three little square ziggurats that I took to be kilns. In the doorway of the mud-brick building lounged a little moon-faced man of fifty or so; his face was contemplative and serene.

‘This brickmaster,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this lord of the bricks, his name is Bab el-Burj, Tower Gate. He used to be a slave and his name was Efficiency.’

‘Why is his name now Tower Gate?’ I said. ‘I prefer to avoid people and boats with symbolic names if I can.’

‘There’s no symbolism in it that I know of,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘he simply liked the wordplay of Bab el-Tower, that’s all.’

‘No bricks,’ said Tower Gate when we stood before him. ‘As you see, I have no bricks whatever, I have only the emptiness left behind by a great many bricks. I am contemplating this emptiness.’

‘May we contemplate it as well?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I don’t think there’s enough for the three of us,’ said Tower Gate. ‘Let me offer you rather some coffee.’

The interior of the little mud-brick building was sumptuously carpeted and adorned with gorgeous hangings and cushions. Bembel Rudzuk and I sat down while a puddle formed around us and Tower Gate prepared coffee. He had no servant with him nor were there any workmen to be seen.

‘Strange, is it not,’ said Tower Gate, ‘that in the Quran there is no chapter called “The Kiln” or “The Oven”? It’s such a good metaphor, it lends itself so well to metaphysics.’

‘There’s the Jonas chapter,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘he went into the whale and came out of the whale as a brick goes into and comes out of the kiln.’

‘Jonas was half-baked,’ said Tower Gate; ‘he was still unfinished and without wisdom when the whale vomited him up. No, as a metaphor Jonas is not in a class with bricks.’ Tower Gate was given to making what might be called ‘Aha!’ and ‘Oho!’ gestures with his hands, and so he gestured now. ‘Neither is bread,’ he said (‘Oho!’ said his hands): ‘bread is baked and eaten and becomes excrement. Brick, which is bread of earth, bread of our origins, is also baked — like Abraham it is put into the fire and like him it emerges hard and enduring, ready to shelter the humble and the mighty both.’ (‘Aha!’ said his hands.) ‘It is eaten by time but only slowly, slowly through the alternating dawns and darks of this continuous demonstration that we call the world. No excrement.’

‘You have given me so much to think about that I cannot remember what I came to see you about,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Bricks?’ said Tower Gate.

‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘You read my mind.’ He took out of his document case the drawing in which I had repeated the Hidden Lion pattern and showed it to Tower Gate.

‘Oho!’ said Tower Gate with his voice and his hands both. ‘The Willing Virgin!’

‘What willing virgin?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘This pattern that you show me,’ said Tower Gate, ‘it’s called “The Willing Virgin”.’

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Because the next time you look there’s something different about it,’ he said. ‘Of course that’s true of many patterns but this is the one with that name. Had you another name for it?’

‘Hidden Lion,’ I said. I wasn’t able not to say it although I had wanted the name to be known only to Bembel Rudzuk and me.

‘Aha!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Very good indeed! The lion is hidden in the willing virgin; after all who can say no to a lion?’

All of us pondered this for several moments.

‘How big are the big triangles?’ said Tower Gate.

‘Nine and a half inches to a side,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

Tower Gate took my right hand, spread it out, and measured the span with an ivory ruler. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Nine and a half inches! Had you noticed that?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Your design?’ he said to me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re going to put this pattern on that empty square of yours?’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘It’s good that you come to me now,’ said Tower Gate. ‘I can think about it over the winter and I’ll tell you in the spring.’

‘Tell us what?’I said.

‘Whether I want to have anything to do with it,’ he said.

‘Why does it need so much thinking?’ I said.

Tower Gate looked at me as if he thought that talking to me might be a waste of time. ‘You’re dealing with infinity,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘This pattern,’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this square of yours, it’s not to be the floor of a building or the courtyard of a khan or anything like that, is it?’

‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘it’s just to be itself, it’s not a part of something else.’

Tower Gate tilted his head to one side and made with his mouth a sound expressive of doubt, misgiving, and deprecation. ‘That’s it, you see,’ he said. ‘That’s what gives me pause, that’s what’s putting the wind up me. Any other pattern I’ve seen has been ornamenting something, it’s been part of something, it has not in itself been something. Do you see what I mean? To incorporate a pattern of infinity in a house is not immodest, one’s eyes are in a sense averted from the nakedness of Thing-in-Itself. But here you’re doing something else altogether: you’re making this pattern with no other purpose than to look at Thing-in-Itself. This to me seems unlucky.’

‘On the other hand,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who has put this idea into my head if not Allah? And who has guided the hand of my friend if not Allah?’

‘What a question!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Do we not read in the Quran that whatever good happens to thee is from Allah but whatever evil happens to thee is from thy own soul?’

‘And from where does my soul come if not from Allah?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘What do we know? Who are we to say?’ said Tower Gate’s hands. With his voice he said nothing.

As we walked home through the rain Bembel Rudzuk seemed to be carrying on an interior conversation with himself. Sometimes he shook his head, sometimes he nodded, sometimes he shrugged.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘This matter of the tiles,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing simple about it — one can so easily go about it the wrong way. At first I had in mind to make them of sun-dried mud; I wanted nothing too permanent, I wanted clay from the river bank that would endure only its little season as artifact before it returned to itself. Then there came to me a dream: I was standing on Hidden Lion near the centre of it. The pattern was complete. At the centre of it stood a little tower and at the top of the tower stood a hooded figure who pointed with his finger to the tiles. They were fired and glazed. This hooded personage said nothing but in my mind were the words: “They have lasted this long because they have passed through the fire.”’

How strange it was to me, that rainy season through which passed the year 1096 into the year 1097. It was strange in the way in which it associated itself with a name and an image. Through the winter rains there echoed cavernously under the main street of Antioch a great rolling rush of waters in which could be heard the heavy sliding of earth and sand and gravel. This was the winter torrent that little by little was carrying Mount Silpius away into the river and the sea. Down through the cleft in Silpius ran the torrent, through the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate, then under the city it rumbled through its vaulted channel to the Orontes. Onopniktes was the name of this torrent: Onopniktes, the Donkey-Drowner. When I first heard that name a thrill of recognition ran through me, there appeared in my mind the dark and echoing caverns of that churning flood in which rolled over and over dead donkeys in the wild foam. Because of its name, because of the idea of those dead donkeys rolling in the racing flood, because of the idea of the mountain rushing particle by particle under the city to the river and the sea, Onopniktes became in my mind one with the rush of history and the rising of a darkness in the name of Christ.

While that greater Onopniktes that coursed its wild way under the cities of the world brought the Franks upon its flood to Antioch, Bembel Rudzuk carried on his business from day to day but ranged less widely than he used to, both in his shipments and in his travels; he was wealthy enough to be as busy or as unbusy as he chose, and for the present he confined his trading to the stretch of coast from Suwaydiyya south to Ghaza. Professionally well-informed by his correspondents, he noted that pirates were active more than usual; he also had news of the departures of the various armies of Christ on their way to our part of the world. Bembel Rudzuk traded mostly in silk and he found the rise and fall of the price of a standard bale a reliable index to the Mediterranean state of mind. ‘Today the market is like a firm and well-shaped pair of buttocks,’ he said, ‘but tomorrow it could be like burnt stubble. Risk is salt to the meat of commerce but I don’t like the smell of the world just now; it has the smell of disorder, it has the smell of a leaking ship in which sea water has got into the silk and the crew have opened the wineskins and are looting the cargo; it has the smell of mildew and rotting oranges.’

Strolling in his warehouse, snuffing up the scents of commerce from the corded canvas bales, Bembel Rudzuk clinked in his hand a sealed purse of gold dinars. on, some say it was his own son, Ham,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that this Noah who built the ark, who also built the first altar, this big shipper and worshipper, he ended up like you but we don’t hear anything about his being thrown out of the congregation. I myself think that the crux of the matter is whether you start out as a eunuch or only end up as one. Did you start out complete?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At least physically.’

‘Think,’ he said, buttoning me on to his hard blue eye as if I were a buttonhole, ‘think of this tradition of a castrated Noah. What do you think about it?’

‘I’m not yet able to take it in,’ I said. I imagined thunder and lightning, the ark rolling in heavy seas, Noah naked with blood streaming from his castration, Noah shaking his first at God. I wanted to put my hands on the Rabbi’s throat and cut off the supply of wind with which he continually made words.

Tradition,’ he said with his red hair standing out all round his face like Saint Elmo’s fire, ‘puts things together like a good cook: a little of this and a little of that. Tradition is a balancer, a bookkeeper, an accountant. Debits and credits, yes?’

‘Which?’ I said.

‘This is why Noah, who was given so much, has something taken away,’ said the Rabbi, and folded his arms across his chest as does a man who has utterly dried up his opponent in debate.

‘And to what conclusion does this bring us?’ I said.

‘That is for you alone to know,’ said the Rabbi. ‘I cannot tell you because I don’t know what the Lord has given you in exchange for what has been taken from you.’

I opened my mouth to speak. What could I tell him? That God was no longer He and had become It? That from Jesus himself came the seed that gave life to Jesus? Could I tell him about the tiny dead golden body of Christ in the mouth of the Lion of the World? Could I tell him of the maggot-writhing headless tax-collector and the other companions of my road? Could I tell him of Sophia?

‘You don’t have to say it aloud,’ said the Rabbi; ‘I don’t have to know; God already knows and if you also know then that’s enough.’

‘So what do you want from me?’ I said.

‘I want you to come to the synagogue and pray with your fellow Jews,’ he said.

The Nagid had so far been maintaining a dignified silence as befitted someone who was not a seeker-out of others but the sought-out of many; none the less it was a bustling kind of silence. This Nagid, whom I think of as Worldly ben Worldly although he had a name that I ought to remember, was a tall, grand-looking man who seemed to embody the principle of making arangements and the idea that the ponderous wheel of time and history might not roll too crushingly on if one knew the right people. Now he made with his hands that gesture of holding a large invisible melon or model world so characteristic of top arrangers everywhere — I have often thought that the idea of the roundness of the world first came to scientific observers from seeing this gesture, so suggestive of a Platonic ideal that the existence of a physically real counterpart could not seriously be doubted — and said, ‘We Jews are scattered over the face of the earth; let us at least be united in those places to which we have been scattered.’

Both the Nagid and the Rabbi, being classified as dhimmis, beneficiaries of Muslim hospitality, wore yellow turbans and belts and were not allowed to ride horses or carry weapons. Perhaps because I was already castrated I found this further diminution galling. I had not so far flouted the law by carrying weapons or riding a horse but I had not put on a yellow belt and turban. In my mind I tried to, but could not, put into words my reasons for not wanting to be welcomed into a community of yellow turbans. Nor would I ever again be a member of any congregation other than that vast and erring one called the human race.

‘Matters between God and me have gone beyond synagogues and congregations,’ I said to the Rabbi and the Nagid. ‘I have no prayers.’

‘It’s not as if you can pass for a Muslim by denying us,’ said the Rabbi; ‘you will simply be known as the eunuch Jew who does not wear the yellow belt and turban.’

‘So be it,’ I said.

Soon after Chanukah came the First Muharram, the new Muslim year, the Hijra year 490. On the Tenth Muharram Bembel Rudzuk fasted. ‘Not everyone fasts on this day which is akin to your Day of Atonement,’ he said. ‘And of course there are those who on this day pitch black tents and mourn the death of Husain at Kerbela. I am not devout in the usual sense of the word but I find that fasting refreshes my attention; so I do it because my attention is always flagging and there are times when I fail to see the she-camel.’

‘Tell me about this she-camel,’ I said.

‘In the Quran we read of a people called the Thamud,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘They dwelt in rocky places, they had their dwellings in the rock. There came to them a prophet, his name was Salih. He told the Thamud that he was bringing to them the Word of God but they asked him for proof. Salih then called upon Allah and there appeared from out of the solid rock a she-camel, pregnant.

‘This she-camel was an exemplary camel; she grazed and she found her way to water and in this way she showed that God’s gifts are meant for all of God’s creatures, that pasturage and water should not be held fast by the rich and kept from the poor, they should be freely shared.’

‘What happened with this camel?’ I said.

‘Those people of the rocks, those hard and stony people, Salih told them that the eye of God was upon them; he told them to be hospitable to the stranger-camel, to let it graze where it liked and not to withhold water from it. They laughed at him, the Thamud, and after the camel had given birth they hamstrung both the mother and the foal. They killed the camel and her child and they dared Salih to call down punishment upon them.

‘“Go to your houses,” he told them. “You have three days in which to prepare yourselves.” After three days the earth shook, thunderbolts crashed down among those people, the ground opened up, the rocks melted and ran down into the abyss, the people were annihilated; the Thamud people were no more.

Those foolish Thamud people are often referred to in the Quran and thus are we reminded that not only is every she-camel the she-camel of God, but every other animal and all of us as well, we are all creatures of God. In every configuration of time and circumstance there is the she-camel of the matter to be discerned by those whose attention is strong and constant. All of us dwell in the stone and when the stone brings forth a she-camel we must take notice of it and respond appropriately. But it is so easy to see only the stone and not the camel; I am always afraid that I shall fail to see that she-camel of God.’

All through the rains there was no word from Tower Gate. ‘Is he going to make the tiles or not?’ I said to Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I think he’s going to do it,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘he hasn’t said no.’

Passover that year came at the end of March. The day before the Eve of Passover Jews were to be seen selling their leaven to Muslims, and this little act of accommodation touched me. See, I thought, everyone does not wish us dead! and my eyes filled with tears. I remembered the Gentiles buying the leaven of the Jews in my town, the town of my boyhood and my young manhood, the town where I had climbed the ladder to Sophia. So far away it was already in space and time!

On Passover Eve when Jews were reading the Haggadah at the Seder, when the door was left open and a cup of wine was poured for Elijah, I walked in the rain to Bembel Rudzuk’s empty stone square. Freed from the traditional observance of the festival my mind widened into the rain, into the night, widened across the space of time to Pharaoh’s Egypt, to the killing of the lamb without blemish, to the dipping of the hyssop in the blood, to the striking of the lintel and the sideposts with the blood, to the passing of dread wings in the night and the smiting of the first-born of Egypt, both man and beast. Ah, God! I thought, when will you learn! Why must your arm be stretched out against anyone? Why must you choose us to be yours and to be punished for ever by you and by the world? Then I remembered that God was no longer He. Perhaps as It he remembered nothing, perhaps like blind Samson he simply felt for the pillars and put forth his strength against them.

And then, thinking those heavy thoughts in the rainy night I found myself laughing because it suddenly came to me that it was not only Passover for the Jews but Easter for the Christians; Christ having been crucified at Passover the two moon-coupled festivals were for all time chained together. In Antioch that night the Christians would be reciting the eternal crime of the Jews and worshipping their tortured Jew on his cross while that same cross in cloth of scarlet was moving eastwards on the shoulders of the Franks. While the Jewish doors of Antioch stood open for Elijah. When God was He there was nobody like Him for jokes.

Spring came, the Franks arrived in Constantinople and the price of a bale of silk went up by three dinars in Tripoli. ‘As when the leaves of the olive trees show their undersides before the rain comes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘These Franks inspire uncertainty, everyone is wondering what will happen next. Some think that fewer ships and caravans will be arriving and everything will be in short supply.’

The weather grew fine, the wooden rod at the centre of the square cast a strong young shadow. My original chalk drawing and the drawing made by the speechless boy had both been washed away by the winter rains; the empty stone presented itself to the eye as if for the first time and the sun shone down as if there would never again be cold and wet, there would only be hot and dry. With the passing of days there began to arrive donkey-loads and camel-loads of triangular tiles, as startling in their actuality as Silpius, red and black and tawny as I had seen them in my mind. With the tiles there arrived workmen who unloaded the camels and the donkeys, sorted the tiles according to size and colour, stacked them on the paving stones, and began to mix mortar.

In my hand was the wooden compass with which I had made my first drawing, and now I opened it once more to the radius that would summon to the surface of the stone that same circle I had first drawn in the darkness.

I removed the rod, inserted the plug, placed the compass foot, and then it was as if the chalk line moved the outer compass leg before it as it closed itself into a circle. Again I developed the flower of six petals, and line by line out of it grew the hexagons and triangles of Hidden Lion.

It was then that there appeared a fully armed man walking across the paved square towards us. ‘This man,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘is Firouz. He used to be a Christian, now he is a Muslim. He is an emir and he is close to our governor, Yaghi-Siyan. The Tower of the Two Sisters is under his command and two other towers as well.’

I watched Firouz walking towards us and I found myself not liking the man. He had a way of half-turning as he walked: a half-turn this way, a half-turn that way. ‘He’s a turning sort of man,’ I said to Bembel Rudzuk.

‘He is indeed a turning sort of man,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and more likely to take a bad turn than a good one. Try not to let yourself be drawn into a quarrel with him.’

Firouz walked to the centre of the paved square; his shadow fell across my circles, triangles, and hexagons. He touched the central six-pointed star with his foot. ‘This is the star of the Jews, is it not?’ he said to Bembel Rudzuk. (By this time I had sufficient Arabic to follow the conversation.)

‘You have seen this star in Islamic patterns without number,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘You have seen it in mosques and palaces and in houses everywhere; even is it stamped by some of our Muslim merchants on the canvas coverings of bales.’

‘That may well be,’ said Firouz, ‘but at the same time it is a device used by the Jews, is it not?’ ‘It is one of many devices used by many people,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Was it drawn by you?’ said Firouz.

‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘it was.’

Firouz’s demeanour was such that I knew it could only be a moment or two until he asked me if I was a Jew. I think that he already knew that I was but did not want to appear to have taken the trouble to inform himself of such a trifling event as my Jewish arrival in Antioch; he preferred rather to go through this play-acting in which he pretended only now to have his curiosity aroused by the six-pointed star.

Such an interesting moment, that moment before someone who is not a Jew asks you if you are a Jew! The world being as it is, any live Jew is a survivor in that there will always be other Jews within living memory who are dead only because they were Jews. So whoever asks, ‘Are you a Jew?’ is saying at the same time, ‘Are you one of those who has not so far been slaughtered?’ To answer yes to this question has at one time and another assured the death of the answerer. At that moment in Antioch Jews were not being slaughtered but nevertheless the question would not be a neutral one, it would not be such a question as: ‘What do you think of our summer weather?’ No, it would be a question with an under-question: ‘Are you a Jew who dies without fighting or a Jew who makes trouble?’

‘As you say,’ said Firouz, still addressing his remarks to Bembel Rudzuk and affecting to take no notice of me, ‘it’s a star one sees everywhere. And yet this particular version of it, with all those triangles appearing at the same time to move inward and outward — there’s something one might almost call one-eyed about it, wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say that the inward tends to be swallowed up by the outward in this design?’

‘One of the virtues of this simple but at the same time complex design,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this design in which we see the continually reciprocating action of unity and multiplicity, is that it suits its apparent action to the mind of the viewer: those who look outward see the outward preeminent; those who look inward see the inward.’

‘Are you a Jew?’ said Firouz to me suddenly.

‘Hear, O Israel!’ I said in Hebrew, ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is One!’

‘I bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God,’ said Firouz. For a moment he stared at me wildly as if I had struck him in the face, then he turned to Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Has your Israelite friend registered for the tax payable by those non-Muslims who sojourn among us?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘he has been paying the tax since he first came to Antioch.’

‘See to it also,’ said Firouz, ‘that he dresses in accordance with his station and that he does not ride a horse or carry weapons.’ He turned on his heel, walked back across the square to where an attendant was holding his horse, mounted, and rode off towards the Tower of the Two Sisters, turning once in the saddle to look back.

‘This too will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Firouz is a man of moods and many of them are unpleasant. As we can do nothing about him we might as well get on with our work.’

There came then to the centre of the square Tower Gate’s foreman. ‘You might as well fetch the bricks for the tower now,’ he said to some of the workmen: ‘that’ll be the next thing after we do this hexagon.’

‘What tower?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘The tower at the centre,’ said the foreman.

‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Did you commission this tower?’ I said to Bembel Rudzuk when the foreman had moved away from us.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but it will give us a platform from which to observe the action of the pattern, and as it will be built at the very beginning we shall thus better see the development of the pattern as it is assembled. I myself had been thinking of erecting a tower when the pattern was complete but it’s better really to have it now.’

The central unit, the hexagon from which would overlappingly radiate all the other hexagons and the stars they contained, measured six feet four inches at its greatest width, and it was on this hexagon that the hexagonal tower was to be built. On the underside of each of the thirty-six tiles of this central hexagon Bembel Rudzuk wrote one of the various names of Allah: The Beneficent on one, The Merciful on another, and so on. ‘You too must write on these tiles,’ he said to me.

‘I cannot,’ I said. ‘God for me is beyond naming, nor have I any other words to write.’ As I said this I noticed two figures poised attentively at the edge of the stone square: one was the Imam, the leader of the local Muslim congregation; the other was Rabbi Akiba ben Eliezer. The Imam was tall and lean, the Rabbi short and stocky; the Imam had black eyes and a white beard, the Rabbi had blue eyes and a red beard; but their differences disappeared in the unanimity of their disapproval: their paired gaze was like four long iron rods, the two from the Imam pinioning Bembel Rudzuk and the two from the Rabbi pinioning me. Having declined the Rabbi’s invitation to join the congregation I always felt defensive when I saw him. Bembel Rudzuk, while a perfectly respectable member of the Muslim community, was known to be a strongly individual thinker. I hoped that the Imam and the Rabbi would be content to leave us to our work as we left them to theirs; but of course we were their work so I resigned myself to that iron optical embrace.

The thirty-six central tiles having been duly inscribed were now ready to be set in mortar. The lines where paving stones met indicated the axes of the square, and guided by these the foreman and his helper stretched their strings, trowelled in the mortar, and caused the tiles to appear to their proper places. Their activity seemed nothing so gross as common tile-laying: rather the tiles leapt into their hands, there was written on the air a fleeting calligraphy of dark limbs and white garments and Aha! the tiles manifested the central hexagon. The foreman and his helper seemed (they did it so quietly that I couldn’t be certain) to be hissing and humming some little song frequently punctuated by tiny explosive exhalations of breath: ‘Dzah!’ and ‘Dzee!’ and ‘Dzim!’ To this almost silent sibilance moved the white garments, the dark limbs, the red and black and tawny triangles into Hidden Lion.

As Bembel Rudzuk and I stood looking at the design we both noticed at the same moment that it was as it had been with the drawing that I had made on paper that night in November when Hidden Lion first appeared to me: The motion is already there,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Did you notice when it first became apparent?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I was intent on the placing of the tiles. Did you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I simply forgot all about it.’ ‘Our first lesson,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘the heart of the mystery is meant to remain a mystery.’

Hidden Lion! (For me that would always be the name of precedence; the Willing Virgin was the name for an aspect of the pattern that had not been made apparent to me by the pattern itself.) To see that central hexagon in its full-scale alternation of large and small red and black and tawny triangles, its solid and tangible actuality of fired and glazed tiles, was quite astonishing, there was so much action in it. I have before this described my drawing of the twelvefold repetition and my surprise at the quantity and variety of the action in it. But here there was as yet no repetition, there was only this hexagon made up of large and small triangles: the eighteen large outer ones; the twelve small inner ones; the six shallow ones between the inner and the outer. It was immediately apparent that the large interlocking red and black and tawny triangles of the outer hexagon were predisposed to turn, to revolve, to remind themselves that they were born of a circle. To this central hexagon at Bembel Rudzuk’s request I gave a name: David’s Wheel.

Firouz came to us again that day and stood looking at David’s Wheel, magnetically drawn, it seemed, by the pattern. This time he seemed to be without animosity, seemed to look on us with respect, as when a little boy watches his father string a bow that he himself will not be able to bend until he is grown a man. He spread out his fingers as if gripping a small wheel, he rotated his outspread, hooked fingers. ‘It turns,’ he said, ‘there is a turning in it: the turning of the sun and the moon and the stars; the turning of the wheels of fate and fortune. Thus do we see that at the centre of the universe there is a turning, there is a turning at the heart of the mystery. This turning pattern that you have made with these tiles, has it a name?’

‘David’s Wheel,’ I said, and then I was sorry that I had said it; I didn’t want him to know the name of anything that meant anything to me.

‘David’s Wheel,’ he said. ‘David slew Goliath and became a great king. And yet he turned, did he not. He turned from what was right, he turned to the wrong, he lusted after Bathsheba, he told Joab to put Uriah her husband in the forefront of the hottest battle. Then when Uriah was dead he joyed himself, did he not, with Bathsheba the juicy widow, the fruit of his wrongdoing.’

‘He was only a man,’ I said. ‘He made music, he sang and danced before the Lord.’

‘Only a man!’ said Firouz. ‘Only a man!’ He turned on his heel, always he left with that heel-turn, never did he simply walk away as others did.

Tower Gate now made his appearance, drawing near in a manner that commanded attention by the power of his attention; he came as if mystically summoned by David’s Wheel, and he so focused his approaching presence on that hexagon that it seemed to be a winch that was winding him in with an invisible rope.

When he arrived at David’s Wheel he looked down into it with a look that made me feel utterly left out and excluded from any understanding whatever of the thing that I had summoned with my compass and my straight-edge; one sees that always with specialists: a bowman picks up a bow in a way that leaves the non-bowman feeling poor; a silk merchant reads the silk with his fingers and almost there rise up from his touch phantom ships and camels, distant mountains, distant seas. Tower Gate looked down into David’s Wheel and in his face I tried without success to read whether he looked into crystalline depths or into an abyss of smoke and flame.

‘What do you see?’ I blurted out.

He looked at me as if I had farted during prayers, looked away graciously, then looked back with a face that showed willingness to put the incident behind us. ‘Let me show you the plan and elevations for the tower,’ he said to Bembel Rudzuk, and opened a roll of drawings which he handed to his foreman, who laid them on David’s Wheel and put loose tiles on the corners to hold them flat.

‘This tower wants to be very plain,’ said Tower Gate; ‘it wants to be nothing immodest, nothing too commanding. It is a little hexagonal tower with its stairs going round the outside of it. This is not a seashell that grows itself round its own spiral and remembers in its windings the sound of the sea; this tower remembers nothing and its unsheltered spiral is open to the sky.

‘To what is the height of this tower related? To the triangles on which it stands. These triangles offer us an angle of thirty degrees, an angle of sixty degrees, and an angle of one hundred and twenty degrees. The obtuse angle not being usable we try the other two: projecting a sixty-degree angle from the edge of your square to a point above the centre gives us a tower more than a hundred feet high, a real God-challenger and not to be thought of even if it were practically possible on a base only six feet four inches across; projecting a thirty-degree angle gives us a tower about thirty-five feet high which is still a little pretentious. What then remains to us? In reverence and in modesty (if indeed we can apply such words to a project so thoroughly dubious) we halve that angle and arrive at this tower just over sixteen feet high, taller than a man on a camel but not so high in the air as the mu’addhin; it is a height for broadening one’s view a little but not for feeling too far above the world.’

‘I am powerfully impressed by the care you have taken in this matter,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and I am profoundly grateful for the discretion you have shown; one can so easily do the wrong thing.’

‘We may well have done the wrong thing in any case,’ said Tower Gate, ‘but life is after all a matter of making choices and one is bound to choose wrong in one or two of those matters that really matter.’

So the tower was built. It had no ornamentation, no red and black triangles; it was made of plain tawny bricks. The platform at the top was built out a foot wider all round than the base; it was enclosed by a parapet three feet high and left open to the sky.

The tower being complete the pattern began to spread outward from it. I felt a pang of regret: once begun, a project can only be completed or abandoned; actuality is gained as potentiality is lost. There was no stopping the growth of Hidden Lion; the serpents twisted through the stars, the pyramids shifted and regrouped, the lions appeared and disappeared, the illusory enclaves of disorder were suddenly there, suddenly not there. And under each tile a name of God.

To visualize a pattern, whether in a drawing or in tiles or even to see it with the eye of the mind only, is to make visible the power in the pattern. Because of the scale of Hidden Lion the power was very clearly to be seen from the top of the tower; it was like the power that surges beneath the skin of a strong river.

‘This motion that we see is the motion of the Unseen,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘This power that we see is the power of the Unseen, and it is both conscious power and the power of consciousness. Here already are two of my questions answered: motion is in the pattern from the very beginning because the motion is there before the pattern, the pattern is only a mode of appearance assumed by the motion; consciousness also is in the pattern from the very beginning because the consciousness is there before the pattern, the pattern is only a kind of window for the consciousness to look out of. Although serpents, pyramids, and lions seem to appear in the pattern, that is only because the human mind will make images out of anything; the pattern is in actuality abstract, it represents nothing and asserts no images. It offers itself modestly and reverently to the Unseen and the Unseen takes pleasure in it.’

I said, ‘May it be that there is no necessity to study this pattern or observe it methodically? May it not even be inadvisable to do so? May it not be that the best way of conducting oneself with this pattern is simply to take it in without any thought and to enjoy in it the presence of the Unseen?’

‘I think you’re right,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

So. Bembel Rudzuk went on writing the names of Allah on the undersides of the tiles and the workmen went on dancingly fitting them into the pattern. And what was my work at this time? I was a witness. I was there to see every tile fitted, I was there to see Hidden Lion grow triangle by triangle. I wrote down no observations, kept no record of its progress from day to day; I drained off none of the virtue of it; I gave my mind to it and there it lived and went its way.

All the time that the work of putting together Hidden Lion was going on we were watched daily by children, by idlers and street sages, by all manner of people pausing on the way from one place to another. The children soon began to walk on the pattern in special ways and to dance on it, sometimes stepping only on the red triangles, sometimes only on the black. Seeing them always out of the corner of my eye I found in my mind new and unwritten names of God: The Tiptoeing; The Sidewise-Jumping; The Hopping; The Leaping; The Dancing; The Whirling.

One morning the baker who had a shop near Hidden Lion came and stood respectfully before Bembel Rudzuk. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I have heard that this design came to you in a dream, that you were commanded by Allah to cover this square with this pattern, and that on the underside of each tile is written a name of Allah in all the tongues of mankind. Is this true?’

‘The design came to me in the mind of this pilgrim,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, indicating me. ‘Certainly it is by the will of Allah that we do this work, and it is true that there is written on the underside of each tile a name of Allah, but in Arabic only.’

‘This is virtuous action,’ said the baker, ‘and therefore one is not surprised that there is virtue in it. My son comes here to play in the evening, he does no harm, he only walks on the tiles. For three months he has had an infection of the right eye. Yesterday evening he walked from star to star on one line of stars for as far as the tiles went. Walking towards Mecca he trod only on the small red triangles and looked at them fixedly; walking back he trod only on the small black triangles and looked at them fixedly. This morning the eye infection is completely gone. I have no wish to intrude upon your good work but I ask in all humility that you take this small offering which is nothing really, it is only that something should pass from my hand to your hand in the name of Allah The Responsive, The Restorer.’ He put some money into the hand of Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Will you not rather give this money to the poor?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I give to the poor as well,’ said the baker. ‘This is something else, this is in praise of Allah whose attributes are infinite, Allah who has caused this idea to move you; it is only to show that I in my insignificant way am grateful.’

‘So be it,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘The pattern is abstract; let the money also be used abstractly. I shall put it into one of the tiles of the pattern where it will be united with the design on the pattern and with the names of Allah in celebration of your gratitude to Him The Responsive, Him The Restorer.’

Bembel Rudzuk instructed a workman to chip out of the two-inch thickness of one of the tiles a shallow recess in the bottom; the money was mortared into the tile and the tile, inscribed with the desired names of Allah, was put into Hidden Lion.

On the next day came the potter whose shop was in the same street as that of the baker. ‘In the five years of our marriage,’ he said to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘my wife had not been able to conceive. At the end of the first day’s work after the building of the tower she came here and stepped on every tile that was in the pattern, saying while she did so the names of Allah. For seven evenings she came here and did this. Now is her womb quickened with life. I beg that this wholly inadequate offering be incorporated in one of your tiles dedicated to Allah, The Generous One.’

Bembel Rudzuk sighed. ‘Having accepted the money of the baker I cannot refuse yours,’ he said. ‘I shall do with it as you request.’

‘Wonderful are the ways of Allah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk after the potter had gone. ‘For such a little time was Hidden Lion permitted to go its uncorrupted way! Yesterday I did a foolish thing and today I am forced to continue in my foolishness. Already is the integrity of the work marred physically and spiritually. Two of the tiles have been mutilated for this primitive good-luck commerce and now there will be no end to it. Yesterday the Imam scowled at me; today he will laugh: I have become a vendor of good-luck charms.’

‘Then don’t let them give you any more money,’ I said.

‘Too late,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I must go on as I have begun. Striving too hard after wisdom has made me a fool.’

The visits of the baker and the potter made us aware that Hidden Lion had a life of its own in those evening hours when we were not there. The pregnancy of the potter’s wife reminded me that it had not been days but weeks since the tiles had begun to cover the square. People had been walking on the tiles, dancing on them, kissing them, counting them, contemplating them, acting in various special ways upon them, doing whatever they were moved by the place, the pattern, and the desire of their hearts to do. In the days that followed it was not single visitors who came but several at once, then more and more who waited patiently to tell Bembel Rudzuk how their wishes had been gratified and to give him their offering large or small for the work.

The Imam and the Rabbi were often to be seen observing what was going on. Bembel Rudzuk was right: the Imam, although not actually laughing, was smiling broadly. The Rabbi had on his face a particularly Jewish look: the pensive look of a man who while smiling almost fondly at people who are being childish is at the same time well aware that these childish people may at any moment require his life of him.

Firouz, a few days after his instructions as to dress, horses, and weapons, was reminded by the Rabbi’s yellow turban and belt that I was not similarly distinguishable. He questioned me about this with some severity and I told him that as a eunuch I could not count myself a member of the Jewish congregation. He then asked the Rabbi if that was so. The Rabbi, buttoning me with his eye, said that it was so. I expected Firouz to say that exclusion from the congregation did not cancel my Jewish status in dhimma matters but he did not say that; he looked thoughtful and he never broached the subject again.

At this time the pattern was still expanding, it had not yet covered the whole square. Children, I noticed, were particularly fond of walking and dancing the shape of the unfinished edges. It became evident to me that the forward edge of a pattern’s visible expansion is attractive, it excites in people and in things a desire to shape themselves to it, to meet it and move with its advance. I speak of the forward edge of the pattern’s visible expansion because I had become more and more strongly aware that the visual manifestation of a pattern comes only after the pattern is already in existence and already infinite: the visible expansion is only a finite tracing of what, being infinite, cannot further expand.

It was at this time also that I noticed that Hidden Lion in its abstractness was capable of activating in my vision more than the serpents, pyramids, lions, and enclaves of apparent disorder that I have described: there rose up from the motion and consciousness of the pattern an apparition of Jerusalem, a phantom of place unseen. It was that Jerusalem of my ignorance, that inn-sign Jerusalem of coarse and vivid colour, the solid geometry of its forms tawny-stoned, golden-domed, purple-shadowed, the aerial geometry of its light and shade rising with the forms transparently upon the air over Hidden Lion. Sometimes it was there, sometimes not. I was uncertain of the meaning of this apparition; sometimes I thought one thing, sometimes another. Sometimes I tried to move my mind away from it.

Firouz of course remained attentive to our activities. Seeing people give money to Bembel Rudzuk and seeing the money then mortared into the tiles he said to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘What is this commerce that you do with your geomancy? What do you give for this money that you take?’

Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘It is not a commerce of my choosing but I don’t know how to stop it; to refuse this money that is offered gratefully to Allah would be to deny the giver a part in the pattern.’

‘Will you accept money from me as well?’ said Firouz.

‘For what?’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘What have you had from this pattern?’ He didn’t say the pattern’s name, we only used that between us. To everyone else it was simply ‘the pattern’.

‘One night I stood at the top of your tower,’ said Firouz, ‘and there came to me a thought of great profundity.’

I didn’t like to think of Firouz at the top of our tower, I didn’t like to think of any thought that might have come to him there. Clearly Bembel Rudzuk didn’t want to take the money, he didn’t want to accept Firouz into the membership of Hidden Lion but he didn’t feel easy about saying no. ‘Your profound thought,’ he said to Firouz, ‘surely it would have come to you anywhere.’

‘Indeed not,’ said Firouz; ‘it came to me while I was contemplating the inwardness and outwardness of this particular pattern; I am convinced that it could not have come to me anywhere else. You have taken money from anyone who has offered it to you, I have seen you do it. Am I alone to be excluded from this multiplicity of people who have become unified with your pattern?’

‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk miserably, ‘I have no wish to exclude you.’

Firouz took Bembel Rudzuk’s hand and pressed a piece of gold into it. ‘You see how I value this,’ he said. ‘To have my own tile in this great pattern! Tell me, what is the name of it?’

‘The name of what?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘The name of this pattern,’ said Firouz. ‘This design that is so mystical in the simplicity of its complexity, surely it has a name?’

‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who am I to put a name to a pattern? Let each person who looks at it think of it with or without a name as Allah wills.’

‘Your humility is overwhelming,’ said Firouz. ‘It flattens me utterly. And yet, modest as you are, probably when you think of this pattern you think of it with a name.’

Bembel Rudzuk shrugged. ‘Mostly I don’t think of it, I simply become absorbed in it thoughtlessly.’

‘Ah!’ said Firouz. ‘Thoughtless absorption! Yes, yes, I understand that absolutely: one simply becomes one with the everything, one is free for a time from the burden of one’s self. What bliss! And yet, and yet — returning to the world and its burdens one puts names to things. So it is that I have lost myself in this pattern, but returning to the world I look at this abstraction with which I have merged; I turn my head this way and that way, I see twisting serpents, moving pyramids; suddenly there leaps forward the face of a lion, then it is gone again. “Ah!” say I, “I have been with Hidden Lion!’” With that he did his regular heel-turn and walked turningly away, but stopped after only a few steps and turned back towards us. ‘I was forgetting to ask,’ he said, ‘what name of Allah you’ll be writing on the underside of my tile.’

‘The Watchful,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘He who observes all creatures, and every action is under His control.’

‘Why that one?’ said Firouz. ‘Why that particular one for me?’

‘It came into my mind when you asked, so I assume that it was put there by Allah,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘“Every action is under His control,”’ said Firouz. ‘How can that be, really? Think of the dreadful things that are done in this world every day.’

‘The child is under the control of the parents, is it not,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘yet must the child creep on its hands and knees before it can walk, and when it first walks it can go only a step or two before it falls.’

‘True, true,’ said Firouz. ‘That’s all we are: little children creeping on our hands and knees. The parent, however, doesn’t punish the child for falling, while Allah The Watchful will surely punish the sinner, will he not?’

‘The child who falls when learning to walk has not the choice,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but the sinner has.’

‘That what was the use of bringing the child into it at all?’ said Firouz. ‘It’s a useless analogy, it’s no help whatever.’

‘It’s a perfectly useful analogy,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘the consequence of not being able to walk is to fall and the consequence of not being able to maintain moral balance is also to fall. How could it be otherwise?’

‘To be in a fallen state,’ said Firouz, ‘that isn’t so dreadful; all sorts of fallen people ride about on good horses wearing fine clothes and who can tell the difference? I’m thinking about later, I’m thinking about the Fire where one burns and burns and is given molten brass to drink. Do you think that’s really how it is?’

‘I think that the Fire is in the soul of each of us,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘those of us consigned to the Fire burn every day and every night.’

‘You don’t burn though, do you?’ said Firouz. ‘You’re cool and easy, your soul dwells in the Garden of its self-delight.’

‘Where my soul dwells is between Allah and me, not between, you and me,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘You’re so comfortable!’ said Firouz. ‘You’re so easy, you’re like a cat that purrs before a dish of the milk of your own wisdom that is so delicious to you.’

‘I am as Allah made me,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and certainly I never asked you to drink from that dish.’

‘Always a clever answer,’ said Firouz. He turned to me. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘what name of Allah would you write on the tile?’

‘God for me is nameless,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ said Firouz. ‘Profundity! How could I have expected otherwise!’ Again he executed his heel-turn and I thought that we had perhaps seen the last of him for that day but no, here he was turning yet again to speak to us once more.

‘How many tiles will there be in Hidden Lion when it is complete?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘We haven’t calculated that.’

‘How many tiles are there in it so far?’ said Firouz.

‘We have not counted,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Allah is The Reckoner.’

‘Of course,’ said Firouz. ‘This is part of the milk of your wisdom, is it not. And yet if the Governor should impose a tax on paving-tiles then you with all your piety would have to do some reckoning.’

The workmen were just then unloading a camel and two of them now approached the advancing edge of the pattern with a four-handled basket full of tiles. Firouz walked turningly towards them with his features composed in an official expression as if he were going to confiscate the tiles. The workmen stopped in their tracks and looked at him with fear and uncertainty.

It was at that moment that the Governor Yaghi-Siyan appeared, riding a horse and flanked by six of his bodyguard. At the edge of the stone square he dismounted and approached us. When he came to the outermost edge of Hidden Lion he ostentatiously took off his shoes and walked barefoot across the tiles to us. Bembel Rudzuk and I took off our shoes as well and made him a little bow. Firouz whirled round to face the Governor and seeing us all barefoot hurried to take off his shoes. He flung out a hand to steady himself against the basket that the two workmen were still holding between them; perhaps he leant on it too heavily or perhaps the workmen, already nervous and fearful of him, were startled by his sudden movement and let go of the basket — in any case it fell with its heavy load of tiles and there was a howl of pain from Firouz who had somehow contrived to have his foot under it.

The terrified workmen lifted the basket clear and while Firouz composed himself heroically I examined his foot and ascertained that the metatarsal bone was broken. A man was sent for bandages while I set the bone and bound it temporarily with my kaffiya. As I was doing this Firouz said to me, ‘I know that this design has come from your hand and not that of Bembel Rudzuk. It is your Hidden Lion, Jew.’

‘This Hidden Lion belongs to no one person more than to any other,’ I said. ‘It is simply the lion that remains hidden until it reveals itself.’

Yaghi-Siyan seemed unmoved by Firouz’s suffering. He looked down at him and said, ‘Tell me, Firouz, what have you done to this load of tiles that it should fall upon you like this, eh? Did it attack you or was it acting in self-defence? Were you perhaps threatening it? Or were you attempting to extort money from it?’

Firouz drew back his lips from his teeth in a ghastly smile. ‘This was a didactic load of tiles,’ he said. ‘It was teaching us that what is clay can fall.’

‘Also,’ said Yaghi-Siyan, ‘it was teaching you to step carefully.’ He looked steadily at Firouz until Firouz looked away; no more was said between them.

When I had properly bandaged Firouz’s foot I had the thought of further immobilizing the broken bone by stiffening the bandage with clay from the riverbank to enclose the foot in a mud-brick shell. This being done Firouz was set aside to dry in the sun.

‘Will you now write a name of Allah upon me?’ said Firouz to Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Will you fit me into your design?’

‘The tiles in this pattern,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘have not only been dried in the sun; they have also passed through the fire.’

‘Ah!’ said Firouz, but he said no more than that.

Yaghi-Siyan was standing before Bembel Rudzuk with a kind of aggressive humility, impatient for him to leave off paying attention to Firouz. ‘I am told,’ he said, ‘that this tiling is done for its own sake alone.’

‘Your Excellency,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this that we do here is only a kind of foolishness, a kind of vanity. It is done to be looked at.’

‘I don’t think it is foolishness,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘I sense here the presence of Allah.’

‘That may well be due to your own virtue rather than to anything in the work itself,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I think not,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘I think that this is something out of the usual run, something extraordinary, even inspired. Most things are a kind of commerce, even most piety: one gives something, one gets something. But this is original, this is abstract; it simply becomes itself, asking nothing.’

‘To hear your Excellency say this of course gives me great pleasure,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘You’re being polite,’ said Yaghi-Siyan; ‘you’re being careful, you’re being closed. Say something careless to me, something open, something abstract.’

‘This is my abstraction,’ said Bembel Rudzuk indicating Hidden Lion with a sweep of his arm. ‘This is my openness, my carelessness, my impoliteness.’

‘May I climb your tower?’ said Yaghi-Siyan.

‘This tower is of course yours, Excellency,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘It is my privilege to invite you to make use of it.’

Yaghi-Siyan went to the tower and now I was able to see the profundity of Tower Gate’s design: towers are naturally dramatic structures that intensify the image of any figure that is to be seen looking down from them. Particularly do they do this when the figure disappears into a doorway at the bottom and then reappears looking over a parapet at the top. But here the stairs round the outside of the tower kept the figure unremarkable by making visible the effort of going from the bottom to the top; at the top the low parapet continued this objectivity. There were to be seen only a little tower, only an ordinary man.

From this nameless tower did Yaghi-Siyan look down on Hidden Lion. Not a breath of air stirred his white burnous, the blue sky was utterly without a sign of anything. At just such an unheralded moment, I thought, might marvels appear to a watcher on a tower: the earth opening up; the kraken rising to the surface of the sea; the mountain lifting itself into the air over the city. It occurred to me that the Unseen might at any moment make use of any pair of eyes to see everything in an altogether different way, a way never thought of before. I felt the earth leap like a fish beneath me. An immeasurable time passed, perhaps it was only a moment, perhaps it is still continuing: the dark face of Yaghi-Siyan; the white burnous; the blue sky; the leaping earth.

When Yaghi-Siyan came down from the tower he looked up to where he had stood, then he looked down at the tiles he was standing on. ‘From there I saw the motion,’ he said; ‘from here I see the stillness. What is it, what is it that moves us? We were the wild horsemen out of the east, Byzantium drew back before us. Now I stand here in this city with a wall around it but the inside is continually rushing to join the outside. Almost I am dizzy with it.’ He began to weep; weeping he bowed his head to the tiles. Then he stood up, walked back to his shoes, put them on, mounted his horse, and rode back to the Governor’s Palace.