The last thing Muhammad took out of the gymnasium was the mark on the skirting board. He could not take the mark. He knelt beside it for a moment, the scratch he had made with a nail on his first night there to show the direction of prayer, and put his thumb on it, and then he stood up and went out to the buses.
The courtyard was full. Three buses, eleven lorries, a water tanker the well-watch had driven down from the hills, cars with mattresses tied to their roofs, and families on foot with bundles, waiting to fall in behind. The flagpole's shadow lay where it had lain since the sun stopped, short and black on the white ground.
Halima was in the blue van at the front, the one whose windows the young men had painted over. Muhammad looked in at her. She lay on the back seat with a folded towel over her eyes and her nine ledgers in their nine colours stacked on the floor beside her, roped together so they would not slide.
"Which one is next?" she said from under the towel.
"The noon prayer. In an hour and ten minutes. I'll stop the column."
"You'll forget."
"I won't forget."
He shut the door gently. He walked back down the line. North, they had decided, in the room off the corridor with the map untied on the table. North and west, toward Syria, by the roads the cells could still hold. Nobody had said why Syria, and nobody had asked.
They called the noon prayer at a petrol station with no petrol, on the second clock's day of the march.
The column pulled off the road into the forecourt and the dirt beyond it. People got down from the lorries and stood stretching in the heat. Muhammad gave the call himself, in Arabic, standing on the concrete island between the dead pumps. The forecourt had no shade except under the canopy. The women and the old went under it. The men made rows in the open on cardboard and blankets.
He looked at his watch before he raised his hands. He had set it in the first week to the times of the last ordinary day, the day before the sun stopped, and every cell in the refuge had the same times written on a card. The watch said noon. The sun, as it had said for months, said nothing different.
They prayed. At the end, as he turned his head to the right and the left, he saw the boy who had asked.
The boy was ten or so, from one of the dry districts, and he had been asking questions since the first mile. He came and squatted beside Muhammad on the concrete while the rows broke up.
"In two hours it will be the afternoon prayer," the boy said. "Then the sunset prayer. Then the night one. But it's noon. It's been noon since I was nine." He pointed straight up without looking. "How can it be night when the sun's there?"
Muhammad thought about how to put it to a boy of ten, and then decided to put it the way it had been put.
"When the Prophet told his companions about this time," he said, "he told them there would be a day as long as a year. They asked him whether one day's prayers would be enough for them in a day like that. He said no. He told them to estimate its extent." He showed the boy his watch. "So we estimate. We say, this would have been noon, this would have been night. We may be wrong by a little. Allah knows we're trying."
The boy looked at the watch, and at the sun, and at the watch.
"So night is when we say."
"Night is when it would have been. We're only remembering for it."
At a river crossing on the third day the road's people were waiting for them. Two white tankers stood on the far side of the bridge with their hoses out, and a table under an awning, and men in pale clothes who smiled and waved the lorries on. The river under the bridge was a bed of cracked mud. The tankers dripped.
The column slowed. Muhammad walked to the front of it and across the bridge, alone, and stood by the table. He did not speak to the men at the table and they did not speak to him. He stood there while every vehicle of the refuge crossed behind him and went on past the tankers at a walking pace, the drivers looking straight ahead. Near the end a family got down from the eleventh lorry, a man and his wife and three children, and walked over to the awning with their empty cans. The man looked at Muhammad once, the way a man looks at a creditor. Muhammad nodded to him. He did not call him back.
Sheikh Yusuf rode on a mattress in the back of the fourth lorry with his stick across his knees and a tarpaulin rigged over him on two poles. Muhammad climbed up beside him whenever the column stopped. On the third day he climbed up and found the old man's lips blue at the edges.
"Don't," Yusuf said, before Muhammad could speak. "I know what colour I am. My wife went this colour. It took her a week." He turned the stick a quarter turn on his knees. "I won't see Damascus."
Muhammad did not tell him he would. He had never told a man something he did not know, and Yusuf would have heard it in his voice if he had tried.
"Do you want to stop? We can leave a lorry with you. A cell in the next town."
"And die in a bed in a stranger's house while you go on without me? No." Yusuf smiled. "I gave you my hand in a gymnasium. I'll go where it goes."
They drove on. Muhammad stayed in the back. The road went up through brown hills with the sun on them, past villages split down the middle into green and grey, and once past a whole town that had gone out to the road's people, where the trees were so heavy with fruit that branches had broken and lay in the street, and nobody had picked them up.
Yusuf watched it go by and said nothing for a long time.
"Seven books," he said at last. "Forty-three years. I thought I'd spend the end of it correcting a student's chains of narration." He breathed carefully. "This is better."
At the estimated night the column stopped on a long straight stretch with nothing on either side but stones. The young men threw blankets over the lorry cabs and pegged tarpaulins to the ground, and people lay down in the sliver of shade under the wheels, and the sun stood exactly where it had stood at the noon prayer, at the dawn prayer, at every prayer since August.
They prayed the night prayer in rows on the stones. Muhammad led it standing on the road. Behind him, in the back of the fourth lorry, he could hear Yusuf following it sitting, the old voice a beat behind his own.
Afterwards he climbed up. Yusuf was lying back on the mattress with his eyes open, looking at the underside of the tarpaulin, which glowed white.
"What hour is it?"
Muhammad looked at his watch, though he knew.
"We said it was night."
"Then it's night." Yusuf's hand moved on the stick and was still. "Good. I always slept well at night."
He closed his eyes. Muhammad sat beside him and held the hand that was not on the stick, and listened to the breathing go long and then longer, with spaces in it, like steps slowing at the end of a road. Somewhere down the column a baby was crying and someone was singing to it. The sun lay on the tarpaulin, white and still.
The breathing stopped in one of the spaces and did not start again.
Muhammad said in Arabic, "Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return." He said it quietly, so as not to wake the people sleeping under the wheels. Then he sat on in the back of the lorry with the old man's hand in his, and the sun stood over them both, unmoving, at an hour they had all agreed to call night.