The guard at the last checkpoint took Hamza's passport, looked at the photograph, looked at him, and looked at the line of buses behind. Then he handed it back without stamping anything and waved the driver on with two fingers.
The bus lurched forward. Hamza turned round in his seat. Through the back window he watched two soldiers walk a steel barrier across the road behind them and drop its feet into the slots in the tarmac. The next bus was a white coach with Indonesian writing on its side. Its driver leaned out and shouted. The soldiers did not look at him.
"That's it," said the man in the seat across the aisle, a Sudanese engineer who had shared his dates with Hamza at the crossing. "We were the last."
Hamza laughed, because it sounded like a line from a film, and stopped when nobody else on the bus joined in.
The road ran on between black hills. The sun stood where it had stood since the end of summer, high and a little to the west, and the rocks threw short shadows that had not moved in months. He had been on buses for six days. He smelled of diesel and of other men's oranges. Twice on the way down from the border the bus had passed through towns cut in two. On one side of the main street the gardens hung heavy and green and children sat on the walls eating melon. On the other the trees were grey sticks and the doors were shut. The second time, a boy on the green side threw a rind at the bus and laughed, and the engineer reached over and pulled the curtain across. When the first minarets came up over the ridge, white and thin against the white sky, the engineer took off his cap and held it in his lap, and Hamza found that he had done the same.
The marble of the Prophet's Mosque was cool wherever there was shade and took the skin off your foot wherever there was not. On the first day Hamza learned the route from shade to shade, as a boy learns the stepping stones across a stream.
He slept the first two clock's nights on the carpets inside, among hundreds of others, with his rucksack as a pillow and his shoes in a plastic bag. On the third he found the circle.
It sat by a pillar near the back, eight or nine men of all ages and an old teacher in a white cap with a stick across his knees. The teacher had a Moroccan accent and no front teeth. He looked at Hamza for a long time when Hamza sat down at the edge of the circle, and then he pointed with the stick at the place beside him.
"Where from?"
Hamza told him.
"You came a long way to sit on my carpet. What do you have by heart?"
"The short ones. The Opening. Some of the last part." Hamza felt his face go hot. "I stopped going to lessons when I was twelve."
"Then you are twelve again. Good. Twelve learns fast."
The teacher told the circle what he must have told a hundred circles since the sun stopped. The Prophet had said that whoever memorised ten verses from the beginning of the chapter of the Cave would be protected from the Dajjal. He said it without raising his voice, and then he lifted the stick an inch off his knees.
"Now listen to the part nobody wants," he said. "These are not a key you turn in a lock. You learn them the way you learn your mother's face. If you learn them to have something in your pocket, you have learned ten verses and that is all. Protection is from Allah. Ask Him for it. The verses are how you ask."
Hamza nodded, though he was not sure he understood.
He had laughed on the first evening. He had stood at the kitchen window filming the sky, with the clocks saying seven and the sun saying one, and he had laughed because it was ridiculous, until his grandmother stood with her prayer shawl half lifted and asked which prayer it was. Three months later he had told his mother he was going to Medina while he still could. She had not argued, and he had wanted her to.
They began with the first verse. The teacher recited it in Arabic, and Hamza repeated it, and got the third word wrong. The teacher slapped the carpet beside his knee with the flat of his hand and recited it again. Hamza repeated it twenty times, then thirty, rocking a little without meaning to, the way the boys around him rocked. By the clock on his phone it took him most of an afternoon to hold the first three verses together. By the end of the second day he had five. On the fourth he lost the sixth verse twice in the middle of the night prayer, which the mosque called by the estimated hour with the sun pouring through the high windows, and he stood behind the imam furious with himself and trying not to move his lips.
The tenth verse came easiest. The young men in the story had fled into a cave and called on their Lord, and the teacher gave the meaning in English for him, slowly, so he would know what he was saying: "Our Lord, grant us from Yourself mercy and prepare for us from our affair right guidance."
Hamza said it in Arabic forty times that night, sitting against the pillar with his eyes shut. Every time he got to the end of it, the end of it felt like his own.
He called home from the phone shop on the street behind the mosque, because his own phone would no longer reach.
It rang a long time. Then his father picked up, chewing.
"Hamza!" His father swallowed. "You got in. Your grandmother said you'd get in. She's been on that rug for a week."
"Is Mama there?"
"At the clinic. She's always at the clinic. Your mother is being a saint for the whole district." He laughed. Hamza could not remember the last time he had heard him laugh on the phone. "Listen, we've got fruit. Apricots, plums, the lot. Abu Sami's yard is like a market. You should see it."
Hamza pressed the receiver closer to his ear. Behind his father's voice he could hear the flat: the fridge, the tap, and under them, very faint, his grandmother reciting. She was reciting the same chapter he had spent a week learning.
"Dad," he said, and did not know what he meant to ask.
"What?"
"Nothing. Tell Mama I'm learning the chapter of the Cave."
"The chapter of the cave," his father said, cheerfully, as if Hamza had named a restaurant. "Good. Good boy."
The line clicked. Hamza stood with the receiver in his hand until the shopkeeper coughed.
The water coolers in the courtyard had a queue at every hour, because every hour was hot. Hamza stood in it with his steel cup. Ahead of him were three men in dusty clothes with the long faces of people who had walked a long way, and they were talking among themselves in the Arabic of the north.
"He's turned south," the oldest said. "My cousin saw the camp at Tabuk. It goes on for miles. Lorries, cattle, people singing."
"He can't come in here."
"He doesn't need to come in." The old man drank and wiped his mouth. "They say he'll pitch outside. On the salt marsh, past the western edge, where nothing grows. He'll sit there and wait for the city to send people out to him."
The queue moved. Hamza filled his cup and did not drink it.
He walked to the edge of the umbrellas' shade and looked west, over the hotels and the cranes, toward the flat grey land beyond them that shimmered in the heat. Nothing stood on it. A plastic bag lifted off the white crust, turned over twice in the air and lay down again a few yards on. Hamza found that his lips were moving. He was on the second verse, and the third, and he let them go on, and the cup of water grew warm in his hand.
He had walked past that ground on the first day from the bus station and taken it for a car park nobody had finished.