Magd al-Din laughed hard and said that if he made such a request, Spike might kill him. They both laughed. Dimyan thought how easy it would be for him to go to Alexandria, and that way he would not have any sexual problems. That Magd al-Din is a marvelous sheikh — he offers solutions to the toughest problems so easily. How was it that Dimyan himself had not figured this solution out when it was so obvious?
This was the difference between him and Magd al-Din. If Magd al-Din were not a peasant railroad worker, he would have been a politician, perhaps a military commander. But Dimyan realized that he would not be able to go. It was not easy for him just to leave Magd al-Din alone in this wilderness. What a beautiful feeling he had for his friend. He realized that every time he went to Alexandria to get their salary every month. He could stay only for one night despite his longing for his wife. But he also could not stop seeing Brika. Perhaps she was the real reason for his staying put. But his love for Magd al-Din was a strong reason, there were no two ways about it.
At night, on the eve of the Feast of the Virgin, after the last day of the fast, Dimyan awoke from his sleep to a soft sound echoing in the room. Magd al-Din had put out the kerosene lamp and it was pitch dark, but Magd al-Din’s eyes were gleaming in the dark and the sound of his breathing was getting louder. He heard Dimyan’s voice from the other side, “What’s wrong, Sheikh Magd?”
“Nothing, Dimyan.”
“But you’re crying. Are you thinking of Zahra and the kids?”
Magd al-Din did not reply. That night he felt the terrible injustice visited upon him. How could he bear not to see Zahra after the delivery of his baby son? Why could he not travel? How did he allow himself to be a victim of all this injustice without fighting back? What in his chest was attracting him away from the village and accepting it, as if leaving the village was his own desire? In truth he had done himself an injustice as grave as the mayor’s.
“Yes, Dimyan. I remembered Zahra and the kids, but I thanked God. I cried for a few moments, then I praised and thanked God for his grace.”
“You know Sheikh Magd,” said Dimyan, breaking the silence. “I sometimes think that we’ll go crazy here. I’m in love with a young woman, I don’t know where she comes from or where she goes, and I forget my family, and you remember your family but don’t think of going to them. Was Qays, the man who went crazy over Layla, living in a desert like this one? If that were the case then he was right to go crazy.” Magd al-Din found himself laughing as Dimyan continued, as if to himself, “Yes. If it happened that one of us went crazy, he must be right, and soon people will find excuses for you and me, Magd al-Din.”
Magd al-Din smiled at Dimyan’s quirky effusions, so clearly the thoughts of one who had just awakened.
“You mean it’s the desert that will make us go crazy?”
“No, it’s the dark around us. Nobody else in the whole world is talking in the dark except the two of us. Go to sleep, Sheikh Magd. I’m going to sleep myself. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Virgin. There must be some foreign soldiers celebrating it. In the morning I’ll walk toward the barracks for the first time. Maybe I’ll find a mass to take part in. Listen, Sheikh Magd, recite some verses from the Quran to help you sleep calmly.”
They both were silent for a while, then Magd al-Din asked, “What do you say in the mass about our Lady Maryam?”
“We say many things, but I remember only a few lines.”
Then he began to chant in a deep voice:
Mary’s glory is growing
East and west.
Exalt her, glorify her,
Enthrone her in your hearts.
She shines on high.
Her light never sets..
“Al-Safi al-Naim, a man whose name means ‘Pure Bliss,’ cannot but be a reminder of heaven,” said Magd al-Din, addressing a Sudanese soldier as Dimyan stood there, puzzled.
“I thought you were saying that someone had died and moved to the abode of pure bliss,” said Dimyan, and the tall, huge Sudanese soldier laughed, his white teeth sparkling in the light.
A friendship had developed between Magd al-Din and Dimyan and a number of Indian soldiers since the early days of their arrival. When Magd al-Din saw the wall clock in the stationmaster’s room, he had felt confident that he would be able to tell the time of the prayers. But then that same afternoon he had heard the call to the mid-afternoon prayers reverberating in the desert, thin, plaintive, and noble, but he did not know where it had come from. He learned that among the Indian troops were many Muslims and that groups of them frequently came to the station to unload the military equipment from the trains. Magd al-Din found himself standing on the platform at sunset making the call to prayer. He knew that the wind would carry the call to the south, so he intoned in a very loud voice and stood to pray, with Hilal and Amer behind him. The following day an Indian soldier, young with a dark-complexioned, yellowish, square-shaped face and small, gleaming, intelligent eyes, with the traditional Indian turban on his head, came to ask who had made the call to the sunset prayers the previous day. He said that Magd al-Din had a beautiful voice and promised to come at noon to pray behind him. At noon he came accompanied by a number of his merry friends. It was they who were giving large quantities of cookies, chocolate, tea, cheese, corned beef, lentils, and rice to Magd al-Din, Dimyan, Hilal, and Amer. Magd al-Din heard names he had not heard before and stories about a country that he had not believed existed. Everyone knew there is a country called India, but to actually see someone from that country was a real miracle. He came to meet men with names like Muhammad Zamana, Muhammad Siddiqi, Wilayat Khan, Karam Singh, Chuhry Ram, Raj Bahadur, Ghulam Sarwar, Irshad, Jinnah, and Iqbal. They were Muslims and Hindus who could not be more than eighteen, most of them sixteen, mere children, transported by the British Empire to lands other than their own from Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi, Bombay, and Kashmir. No one thought the day they were born that they would be in the Egyptian desert, fighting armies from Europe, and that they would most likely die there.
Amer had entered a state of profound depression, spending the day in the telegraph office tapping his fingers on the table, no one bringing him telegrams to send, receiving telegrams from no one. As for Hilal, he slept most of the time, waiting for passengers, of whom only one or two Bedouin traveled on any given day. But in addition to his work was traffic control and making the ground switches, for there was an old rail line that ended in front of the station, the line on which the military equipment trains spent the night before going back empty the following day. He also had to operate the semaphore, towering its black and white arms as soon as the train moved. He did that from a switch adjacent to the platform. He also had to change the oil in the lamps attached to the rear of the arm of the semaphore once a week and light it every evening. There was a reason for his being there.
Today al-Safi al-Naim joined the Indian soldiers. He came on his own; no one had invited him. He said he heard the call to prayer coming from the direction of the station and was surprised by it. Then he saw the Indians around prayer times sneaking toward the station. So he decided to follow them. It had taken him a long time, but he finally did it.
“You look as though you might be from Sudan,” Dimyan said, laughing.
Magd al-Din smiled in surprise as al-Safi al-Naim said politely, “I am from Omdurman.”