“It’s hard for me to imagine what you’re saying …” He fell silent for a moment, then continued. “If we were the kind of people who thought like Mushabbab, I’d say the body was simply a full stop at the end of the last chapter, and that this is the beginning of a new one… Maybe this is how progress is meant to happen …”
After Mu’az had faded away, Yusuf stayed facing the Sanctuary, absentmindedly watching the doves ascend the clouds of incense, tracing circles in the sky above the house of God as if to guard it through the night.
It was midnight by the time Yusuf returned to the Sanctuary. He stopped to take a last look out at Mecca and his gaze settled on Mount Abu Qubays, the home of many legends. Its peaks were swathed in darkness, with not even a window from which light might trickle out to passersby or a lantern carelessly left on a doorstep. The mountaintop had been completely shorn of its houses and left to sink into ravenous emptiness. All of a sudden, there was a light. That oughtn’t to have been unusual, but a jolt of electricity tore through Yusuf’s mind, sparking the dry tinder of his insanity. To him the hesitant flicker of light was like a shriek of death or a desperate cry for help. Yusuf ran back to the pillar in the colonnade next to al-Salam Gate where he stashed his bundle of clothes, and quickly changed out of his ritual ihram into an ordinary robe whose aged cotton had yellowed slightly, wrapping his headscarf around his face. Then he left his hideout and ran — on a mission to save something, whatever it was — in the heights of Abu Qubays.
For a moment, Yusuf was a child again on a regular Saturday morning outing. When they were little, his mother Halima would walk them both from the Lane of Many Heads out to Mount Abu Qubays, passing through the Small Market just outside the Sanctuary’s Farewell Gate on the way; it was the gateway through which anyone leaving Mecca had to pass. As they walked through the market, they were awash in the laughs and cries of vendors. Their eyes gorged themselves on the vivid greens that vied for the attention of their senses. Pyramids of dew-dappled tomatoes were ringed by rows of parsley bunches, fragrant mint and radishes, and the pumpkins, stacked on the ground in a pyramid, toppled over and rolled about at shoppers’ feet. Every morning, camels who’d started their journey at dawn would deliver the succulent bounty of the orchards and gardens of Ta’if: al-Shafa, al-Hada, Wadi Mihrim, and Wadi Fatma, to market.
Yusuf’s hunger — a hunger for Azza and Azza alone — would surge as he watched her surrender her senses to the scents of the Small Market. She would dash to the stalls that sold miro kebab, where she’d score one of the deep-fried balls of meat mixed with millet. The doughnut vendor was generous too, drenching his fried creations in sugar or seasoning them liberally with pepper. They’d stop to look at the great pots of fava beans cooking in homemade ghee and listen to the tune of the wooden pestles grinding up bread in big vats and mixing it with honey or banana to make ma’soub, until finally Halima would take them to the King of Heads. The King of Heads sold the finest sheep’s head meat in Mecca. Like a sculptor he would hew out the choicest morsels for Halima, wrap the lot up in brown paper and hand it to Yusuf, saying: “Here you go, my man. Carry this for your dear ladies.”
With the paper package tucked under Yusuf’s arm, Halima would lead the two children up the steep slope of Mount Abu Qubays. Their ascent was easy and spontaneous, without any formalities, at the start. They followed along dusty tracks lined with old houses bearing roofs decorated with perforated gypsum. Collapsed skylights had left many houses open to the elements; they’d been replaced with a layer of bare wood, like a cry of “Lord help us!” Halima encouraged the children to be tough as they continued on their journey upward. Planted on the rooftops around them, elderly men betrayed by their crippled knees sat watching, stinking of Vicks and chicken fat — the prescription of choice for arthritis — their legs stretched out in front of them like flayed rabbits. In their stiff white cloth caps and faded colored waistcoats, they sat there like a collective memory going stale, watching passersby walking up and down the hill, watching what took place and what didn’t on the benches out in front of the houses — nothing ever did happen, in fact, except for the wait until the next prayer, when they would join their families and pray, looking out over the rows of devotees in the Sanctuary below.
The young Yusuf’s body memorized the benches outside each of the houses on the mountains around the Sanctuary — which lay like a navel below, as if Mecca were a big crater, its four sides plunging down toward the House of God and the Kaaba at its center — and the lines of innate wisdom etched onto the foreheads of the old men. They, too, were crumbling, dilapidated. Halima would urge the two on, and they’d continue upward toward the open summit, nearer and nearer to God. As he climbed, the blood would pump more violently in Yusuf’s temples and he’d lose the ability to see out of his left eye, seeing only with the right, which was trained on the sky, while Mecca and its Sanctuary, the corners where the four Sunni schools of law were taught, and the domed roof over the Well of Zamzam, lay down to his left.
As they ascended, little Azza’s eyes would pop out like an insect’s so she could see in all directions, and her skin would lose color as her blood drained out into the well below them until they eventually made it to the Cave of Treasures. The opening received them like an iwan set into the rocks. Goat droppings and traces of previous visitors gave the place some life. From the clearing in front of the cave, it looked like it was just a crevice in the mountain, its mouth blocked by stones stacked up like a puzzle without any mortar. According to Yusuf’s many historical reference works, it was built by Noah, peace be upon him, to cover the final resting-place of Adam and Eve and their son Seth, who had been given ninety tablets of divine secrets and knowledge of humanity’s destiny from on high and had hidden them in that spot where they lay in wait for the person who would discover them. Yusuf and Azza’s imaginations were piqued by the cracks in that stone curtain, which must have been there to allow a little light to filter into where the three lay, but they never dared to steal a glance into the cavern. In Yusuf’s history books, it said that the rocks had been softened by the flood and that Noah’s feet had sunk into them as he strode across the eastern cliffs, leaving footprints a meter long. Visitors would gather around them every Saturday morning, tracing the steps of the Prophet Noah as he came to return Adam’s coffin, which he’d carried on the Ark, after the great flood receded. Only today did Yusuf realize that the stone on which they’d always had their picnic was a pool of water left over from the flood, the depression left by Noah’s foot as he went to bid his final farewell to Adam. There, Halima would lay out their picnic and divide up the sheep’s head, picking out the tapered end of the tongue meat for her son to spear and butcher, and the three of them would devour their snack by the graveside of Seth, son of Adam. Yusuf would be overcome by a manic urge to write, his pen quivering at the thought of those ninety tablets Seth had left to him, which held the secret to his nine hundred years, and to humanity’s longevity — a secret that Seth buried before he was buried himself beside his father in the cave on Abu Qubays.
Halima would explain to Azza’s father, Sheikh Muzahim, that the aim of these trips to Abu Qubays was to seek healing — to cure Azza of her terror of falling asleep and Yusuf of his headaches. Meccans believed that eating sheep’s head there strengthened the heart and cured congenital headaches. Yusuf thought back to Azza’s heart when she was a little girl, squeezing an eyeball between her molars, biting into it, causing the white of the eye to spurt out onto her tongue. The thought of what she was doing would seize her suddenly and she’d spit the white fat out.