It was raining on the salt.
Hamza could see it from the hostel roof with his hand over his eyes: a grey curtain hanging over the camp on the flats, soft at its edges, moving a little as he watched. Over Medina the sky was white and empty, as it had been for a year. Between the two lay four miles of black lava field and a road. On the far side of the road the green had spread since the first shaking. It was orchards now, real ones, rows of something dark and leafy, and among them the windscreens flashed.
Bassam sat on the parapet with his legs over the drop and his phone in both hands.
"Look," he said, and held it out.
It was a photograph of a kitchen table in Irbid. Tomatoes in a plastic bowl, six of them, red, with water still on them. His mother's hand at the edge of the frame.
"She hasn't had a tomato in a year," Bassam said. "Nobody on our street had. The envoys came in the spring. Half the street said yes. Now there's a garden behind the mosque." He took the phone back and looked at it again. "She says my father is putting on weight."
Hamza said nothing. His own mother sent photographs too: the clinic's blackout curtains, a cat on the stairs, the hall photograph his father no longer recognised. He had not shown them to Bassam.
"Get off the wall," he said. "If it shakes you'll go over."
"It won't shake," Bassam said. "It did that once. Things do things once."
That night, in the foil dark of the dormitory, Hamza did what his teacher had told them and looked at his own heart before his neighbour's. He didn't like all of it. He had dreamed twice that week of his mother's kitchen with a bowl of apricots on the table, and in the dream he had eaten them without asking where they came from. He lay and listened to Bassam breathing by the window, and recited the ten verses, and fell asleep before the tenth.
It shook during the afternoon prayer.
Hamza was in the fourth row of the old part of the Prophet's Mosque, under the painted domes, standing between a Malaysian pilgrim and a boy from his own circle. The imam had said Allah is greatest for the bowing, and the whole row was going down together, hands to knees, when the floor slid under them like the deck of a boat.
The chandeliers swung. Dust came down in a fine sift from somewhere high up and hung in the light from the windows. A long groan went through the building, stone moving against stone, and under it Hamza heard a sound he would remember afterwards more than the groan: hundreds of men breathing in at the same moment and not one of them moving out of the row.
The imam's voice held. He said the words of the rising. They rose. The floor shook again, smaller, and settled. They went down into prostration, and Hamza's forehead on the carpet felt the last tremors pass through the ground of the city and away, like a lorry going by.
After the final greeting he sat back on his heels. His hands were shaking. The Malaysian pilgrim beside him was weeping without any sound and saying something over and over in his own language.
Men were getting up all over the mosque. Most of them stood, looked at the domes, sat down again, and began their remembrance. Some did not sit down. Hamza watched them go, a scattering of men walking a little faster than men walk in a mosque, picking up their sandals at the racks without stopping to put them on.
Outside it was already a stream.
He came out through the gate onto the plaza with his sandals in his hand and saw it running west down the street toward the ring road. Cars nose to tail with their hazard lights on. Families on foot pulling suitcases on wheels that rattled over the paving. A man pushing an old woman in a wheelchair, both of them in their best clothes. Hamza knew faces in it. The man from the phone shop who sold him credit and called him "the scholar". A lecturer from the university who had once given a talk on the hadith of the long day. A boy from the hostel's second floor, carrying his mattress on his head. Hamza looked for shame in their faces and couldn't find it. Most of them looked relieved, like people walking out of a hospital where they had been kept too long.
Nobody stopped them. Two policemen at the junction stood back against a wall and waved the traffic through with their hands, as they would for a funeral. One of them was crying too.
An old woman in a black cloak caught his sleeve on the plaza steps. She had to tip her head right back to see his face.
"That was the second?" she said.
"The second."
"Then there's one more," she said, as if he had told her the time of a bus, and let go of him and went back inside.
Hamza stood on the plaza and watched the stream for a long time. He didn't try to count it.
Bassam had his bag on the bed when Hamza came into the dormitory, and he was folding his clothes into it, which he never did. He usually stuffed them.
"Don't," Hamza said.
"I'm going to see my mother."
"Your mother's in Irbid."
"My mother," Bassam said, and put a shirt in, and folded the next one with great care, "is fed. My father is putting on weight. My sisters are fed. The man fed them. You've watched it raining on him for a week." He pressed the shirt flat. "I'm going to go out there and look at him. That's all. Look at him. Then I'll know."
"You know already. You heard the hadith four times."
"I heard old men read it." Bassam zipped the bag. His hands were steady. "You read those ten verses twenty times a day like they're a lock on a door. Do you know what you're keeping out? You've never even looked at him."
"I don't have to look at him. I was told what I'd see."
"Told," Bassam said. He sat down on the bed beside the bag, suddenly, as if his legs had decided it. "Listen. If I stay, and it shakes the third time, and I get thrown out anyway with the rest of them, in front of everybody, in front of you." He looked at the floor. "I'd rather walk."
Hamza had a better answer than the first one, and it would not come. He stood in the doorway with his sandals still in his hand.
They walked to the roundabout together because Bassam asked him to, and because Hamza could not think of a way to refuse that would not sound like a judgement. Neither of them said much. Once Bassam laughed at nothing and said his uncle would tell the whole of Irbid that Medina had shaken him out like a rug. Hamza didn't laugh. After a moment Bassam stopped too. The road was full. Cars passed them with children's faces at the back windows. At the last lamp post the dog was still lying on the verge with its chin on its paws, facing out, and people stepped round it without looking down.
Hamza stopped at the post. The rows stood across the road exactly as they had: that held breath, those squared shoulders, a crowd he could not see. People walked out through them and did not slow.
Bassam went on three steps, stopped, and dug in his pocket.
"The pickup," he said, and threw the keys underhand. Hamza caught them against his chest. "Give it back to my uncle's friend. Tell him the clutch is going."
"Bassam."
"I'll call you," Bassam said, "when I've seen him."
He turned and went out along the white road with his bag on his shoulder, and the stream took him in. For a while Hamza could pick him out by the bag. Then there were too many bags.