Hamza put his arm out of the pickup's window as they came round the last roundabout on the western road, and the air took hold of his hand.
It held about as firmly as water at the shallow end of a pool. His fingers slowed in it. The heat stayed the same. So did the wind off the moving truck. Still, something stood across the road at the height of a man and leaned against his palm.
"Feel it?" Bassam said. He had slowed to walking pace without touching the brake. Every car on the road did that here. The traffic police had stopped fining anybody for it in the spring.
"I feel it."
"My uncle says it's heat coming up off the lava field. Pressure off the black rock." Bassam grinned at the windscreen. "My uncle also says the earth is six thousand years old."
Past the roundabout the city ran out. There was a last petrol station and a tyre shop with its shutter half down. Somebody had planted a row of young palms beside them and then stopped watering them. After that the road went straight west across grey-brown ground. The sun stood over it where it had stood for nearly a year, high and white, a little west of the top of the sky. Every post and palm and parked car kept its shadow pooled short at its foot, with nowhere to send it.
Bassam pulled onto the gravel and switched off the engine. They got out.
Other people had come to stand at the line. Two policemen waited under the petrol station's canopy, and a family had brought a cool box. An old man in a white cap had laid his prayer mat on the gravel facing south and sat on it doing nothing, his hands on his knees. Nobody went further than the last lamp post, though nobody had told them not to.
Hamza walked up to the lamp post and stood beside it.
He had tried to describe this to his mother on the phone and given up. It was like the back of the mosque on a Friday, when the rows were already full and the imam had not yet said Allah is greatest, and a great many men stood shoulder to shoulder and held their breath. His shoulders squared without his asking them to. His feet came together. The road ahead was empty to the horizon, and his body stood in it the way it stood in a crowd.
A stray dog came trotting along the verge from the city side. It stopped at the lamp post, lifted its nose, and lay down with its chin on its paws, facing outward.
"Watch," Bassam said.
He walked past the lamp post. Hamza said his name. Bassam went twenty paces out along the road, turned with his arms spread, and walked back. Nothing had held him. He came back to the post still grinning, with sweat at his hairline.
"See? It's for him. We can go where we like."
"Don't do that again."
"Why? You think they'll keep me out?" He laughed. Under the laugh his face had gone the colour of the gravel. He got back into the pickup before Hamza did and sat with both hands on the wheel, and for a while he didn't start the engine.
The umbrellas in the courtyard of the Prophet's Mosque had not folded since the sun stopped.
There were two hundred and fifty of them, white canopies on steel stems, built to open at dawn and close at sunset. For most of a year there had been no sunset to close them for. Someone in the mosque's administration had decided early on to leave them open. The fabric had gone the yellow of old paper. Under it the marble stayed cool, the way it was laid to, and students sat on it in circles with their books open while the sweepers worked at hours they took from the clock on the wall.
Hamza's teacher held his circle at the eastern edge, by a pillar near the gate where the pilgrims from Chad and Mali liked to sit. He was an old Moroccan with no front teeth and a stick across his knees, which he slapped on the carpet whenever a student dropped a vowel. Twelve students sat round him today. In the spring there had been thirty.
He read them the hadith from Bukhari that every circle in the city was reading that month. Hamza had heard it four times now and still leaned forward for it. The Prophet had said there would be no town the Dajjal would not enter except Mecca and Medina, and no road into them without angels standing in rows, guarding it against him. Then Medina would shake with its people three times, and Allah would drive out of it every unbeliever and every hypocrite.
The teacher closed the book on his finger.
"Three times," he said. "So when it shakes the first time, nobody runs into the street shouting that the world has ended. The world has not ended. We were told about it." He tapped the stick once on the carpet. "And when it shakes, look at your own heart before you look at your neighbour's."
A boy from Kano asked what a hypocrite would feel. The teacher said he couldn't say, since he had never been allowed to look inside one. A few of them laughed. Bassam, sitting beside Hamza, did not.
Afterwards Hamza sat with his back against an umbrella's stem and his small Quran on his knees and went through the ten verses again under his breath, in Arabic: the opening of the chapter of the Cave. He'd had them by heart since the winter. He read them off the page anyway, because his teacher said a man who stops looking at the page starts reciting his own memory. They told of the youths who went into the cave and asked their Lord for mercy, and slept. He had loved those verses before there was any reason to. Now there was a reason, and he tried not to love them for it.
His phone buzzed, the cheap local one he had bought so the family could reach him. It was his mother. He let it ring out because of the courtyard, then read the message she sent after.
"Your father asked me today who the boy in the hall photograph is. I told him. Call me when you can. Eat something."
He read it twice. He put the phone face down on the marble, found his place at the fourth verse, lost it, and found it again.
The news came up the hostel stairs at what the clock called eleven at night.
They kept the dormitory dark the way the whole city had learned to, with foil taped over the windows and towels along the bottom of the door and a fan turning overhead. There were eight beds. Bassam's was by the window. Hamza lay on his back with his eyes shut, trying to persuade his body that it was night, when the Sudanese student from the floor below put his head round the door without knocking.
"They're on the salt," he said. "The whole camp. Go up on the roof."
They went up in their undershirts. The roof was white and hot underfoot, and the sun hit them like an oven door opening. Half the hostel was already there, lined along the western parapet with their hands over their eyes.
Out past the last houses and the black lip of the lava field, the flat ground to the north-west glittered. At first Hamza took it for water. Then he saw that the glitter was windscreens, hundreds of them, more than he could count. Tents were going up between them in pale squares, among lorries, under a haze of dust that hung in the windless air. It ran along the horizon further than he could follow. At its near edge lay a long stripe of green, on salt where nothing had ever grown.
Nobody on the roof said much. Someone's radio said the camp had come down the old road from the north in the night that wasn't a night, laid itself out on the flats, and stopped.
"He's not coming in," Bassam said. "He can't, can he? So." He said it like a man pointing out that the sea has a shore.
Hamza went down before the others. He lay on his bed with the fan going and the foil on the window lit gold at its edges. He recited the ten verses once more. At the tenth, where the youths ask for mercy, his breath went slow and even, the way it always did there.
The water in the glass by his bed trembled.
He watched it. Rings went out from the centre to the rim, small and then larger. The glass walked an inch along the floor tile with a dry click. The fan's pull chain began to swing. Somewhere below, a door banged by itself and went on banging.
Then the bed rose under his back, and the building rose with it, and the whole of Medina shook.