He woke at the hour of the dawn prayer, as he always did, and the room was full of sun.
Muhammad lay still for three breaths. His body said it was a little before dawn. It said so plainly, in the stiffness of his shoulder and the dryness of his mouth, the way it had said so every morning since he was a boy in al-Qaryah. The window of the old detention room said noon. The light came straight down into the courtyard and made a short black shadow under the bench by the wall.
He got up. He washed for prayer at the tap in the corridor. The water was warm from the pipes, which it never was at this hour.
On the table lay the folder with the map, and on the back of the folder, in pencil, were five times in a column. He had copied them the evening before last from the mosque's printed timetable, the one the caretaker pinned up every month. They were the hours of the last day that had ended. Dawn. Noon. Afternoon. Sunset. Night. He had prayed the sunset prayer by the clock at twelve minutes past seven with the sun overhead, and the night prayer after it, and he had slept. Now the clock on the wall said the column's first line had come.
He set the rug by the mark on the skirting board and prayed the dawn prayer under a noon sun. He kept to the form Sheikh Bashir had taught him. The prayer did not change for the light.
When he had finished he sat on the rug for a while and listened. Across the courtyard, behind the gymnasium doors, children were crying. Children cried in the gymnasium most nights. These were the cries of children who had been told to sleep and could see that it was day.
On his way across the courtyard a woman stopped him at the gymnasium door. She had a baby on her hip and a plastic bag of bread in her other hand, and her eyes were red at the rims.
"Is it morning?" she said. "I don't know whether to feed them breakfast or put them down again."
"It's morning," he said. "By the clock it's morning."
She looked up at the sun and then at him. "Then they'll have breakfast," she said, and went in. He heard her through the door, telling someone to get up, the day had started.
Sheikh Yusuf had his circle in the side room of the mosque after the dawn prayer, as he had every morning since the counter began. There were eleven of them today on the carpet. Some were students, some were cell leaders who had come in from the districts overnight because nobody had told them it was night. Halima sat by the door with a notebook. Yusuf sat against the wall with his bad knee out straight in front of him and his books in a stack at his hip.
They were arguing when Muhammad came in, and they did not stop.
"The sun hasn't set," a young man with a new beard was saying. "So it's still the same day. We've prayed the noon prayer. The afternoon one isn't due until the shadows lengthen. The shadows haven't lengthened. So we wait."
"For how long?" said an older man, a cell leader from the river district. "A week? Then pray by Mecca. Their clock. Whatever time it is in Mecca."
"Mecca has the same sun."
"Then by the clock. Any clock."
"Which clock? The clock says it's morning. Look out of the window."
Yusuf let it go on. He had told Muhammad once that he let students argue until they were tired, because tired students listened. When Muhammad sat down on the carpet near him, the old man reached into the stack at his hip without looking and drew out a thick green volume with a cracked spine, and held it out.
"The book of trials," he said. "You know the place."
Muhammad knew the place. He opened the book to it and the room went quiet, because they had seen Yusuf give him the book.
He read it in Arabic first, the whole of it, at the pace he would have read it to children. Then he went back to the part they needed and gave it to them in plain words.
It was the long narration of al-Nawwas ibn Sam'an. The companions had asked the Messenger of Allah how long the Dajjal would stay on the earth. Forty days, he told them: a day like a year, a day like a month, a day like a week, and the rest of his days like their days. Then they had asked the question the room had been arguing about for an hour. In that day which is like a year, would the prayers of one day be enough for them? He told them no. They were to estimate its extent.
Muhammad closed the book on his finger.
"Sheikh," he said to Yusuf. "Is that how you have it?"
"In Muslim," Yusuf said. "From al-Nawwas. Sound." He looked round the circle over his glasses. "They asked the same question you're asking. Fourteen hundred years ago. It was answered."
The young man with the new beard had gone red. Nobody looked at him.
"Estimate," said the cell leader from the river district. "Estimate how?"
Muhammad turned the folder over on his knee and showed them the column in pencil.
"By the last day we had," he said. "These are its hours. A day is still twenty-four of them, by the clock, whatever the sun does. Dawn at this hour. Noon at this one. We pray each one when the clock comes round to it." He looked at the cell leaders. "In every cell, one person keeps the hours. Written down, on paper, not a phone. They check their watch against the radio every morning. If the clocks are wrong, everything after them is wrong."
"And when the timetable runs out? It's a month's sheet."
"Then we move the times the way they would have moved." He paused. "The sheikh knows better than I do how scholars have estimated before. Ask him. I've given you the start."
Halima had been writing the whole time. She looked up.
"The children won't sleep," she said. "Two hundred of them, in a room with skylights."
"Then we make the night," Muhammad said. "Blankets over the windows. Lights out at the hour of the night prayer. Same hour, every day."
She nodded and wrote it down, and under it she wrote a number, and he knew she was counting blankets.
By the time they had fixed the times for the next week, the clock above the door said it was a little after seven in the morning. The light through the high windows had not changed by a hair since he came in. A fly walked across the patch of it on the carpet and out the other side.
The cell leaders were copying the column into their notebooks. Yusuf had shut his eyes. He did that when he was listening hardest, and some of the students thought he slept.
Then there were running feet in the courtyard, and the door banged back against the wall.
It was Yusuf's grandson, the boy who had first come to the gymnasium a year ago and gone home and told his grandfather about the man in the gymnasium. He was fifteen now and taller than he had been, and he was out of breath, holding his phone in front of him like something hot.
"Grandfather," he said. He looked round the room and found Muhammad. "There's a video. From the road. Everyone's sending it."
Muhammad held out his hand for the phone, then lowered it. He did not need to watch a man perform for a camera. He looked at the boy instead.
"Tell us what they say," he said. "In your own words."
The boy swallowed. The room was quiet enough that Muhammad could hear the children crying behind the gymnasium doors across the courtyard.
"They say the man on the road wears a gate of fire and a river," the boy said.