The Satanic Verses

Within an hour the news arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen into a fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha's bed with his head thumping as if it had been filled up with demons. Hind continued to make calm preparations for a banquet, sending servants to every corner of the city to invite guests. But of course nobody would come to a party on that day. In the evening Hind sat alone in the great hall of her home, amid the golden plates and crystal glasses of her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous while surrounded by glistening, steaming, aromatic dishes of every imaginable type. Abu Simbel had refused to join her, calling her eating an obscenity. ‘You ate his uncle's heart,’ Simbel cried, ‘and now you would eat his.’ She laughed in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed them, too, and sat in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange shadows across her absolute, uncompromising face.

Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:

For when the head of the Messenger began to ache as never before, he knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:

Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and afterward asked to choose between this world and the next:

So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:

And he said unto Ayesha, ‘I have been offered and made my Choice, and I have chosen the kingdom of God.’

Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even though when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning upon its stand:

‘Who's there?’ he called out. ‘Is it Thou, Azraeel?’

But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a woman's, make reply: ‘No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel.’

And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: ‘Is this sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?’

And she said: ‘It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them cut a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave.’

Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more into a great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, ‘Still, I thank Thee, Al-Lat, for this gift.’

Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began mightily to lament:

But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: ‘If there be any here who worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive.’

It was the end of the dream.

VII. The Angel Azraeel

1

It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love, the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halévy's libretto for Carmen– one of the prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he'd assembled in lighter days, and which included among its winged metaphors the Sweet (of youth), the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyám-FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and the Obscene; this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons... ‘Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.’ Take that, kids. – And in a separate but proximate glass display-case of the younger, happier Chamcha's fancy there fluttered a captive from a piece of hit-parade bubblegum music, the Bright Elusive Butterfly, which shared l'amour with the oiseau rebelle.

Love, a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling a human (as opposed to robotic, Ski