The lorry in front stalled on the steepest bend, and three hundred people behind it stopped walking and sat down in the road.
Muhammad went up past them. Men were already putting stones behind the back wheels. The driver had his head on the steering wheel. In the open bed, under a tarpaulin rigged on poles for shade, Halima lay propped on rolled bedding with a notebook on her chest and a pencil in her hand, and she was counting.
"Four hundred and twelve on foot," she said, when she saw him. "I counted them past the culvert. Nineteen vehicles. Two donkeys." She coughed. "One of the donkeys is lame."
"You're meant to be resting."
"I am resting. This is how I rest."
Her face was thinner than it had been in the gymnasium, and the skin under her eyes had gone the colour of a bruise. The doctor in the third lorry said the light had broken her body's clock. He said the body would mend once the light let it. He did not say when. Muhammad climbed up on the wheel and checked the cloth over her water bottle was wet. Then he got down and helped the men push.
The road had climbed all day by the clock. It ran up between terraces of dead vines and broken stone walls. The sun stood over it as it had stood for most of a year, so that the shadows of the walkers lay short and black at their feet like spilled ink. Nobody looked up at it any more. They walked with their heads down and their scarves over their mouths. They carried children and water and bedding. Some of them had walked from the gymnasium. More had joined at the wells along the way, family by family, until he had stopped being able to say how many there were and had given the count to Halima, who could.
When the lorry caught and lurched forward, a boy walked out of the crowd to walk beside him. He was fifteen and tall for it. He carried a walking stick that was too short for him, with a rubber foot worn down on one side.
Sheikh Yusuf had leaned on that stick for twenty years. They had buried him beside the road nine weeks ago, at an hour the column had agreed by the clock to call night, in hard ground among the stones. The boy had picked the stick up off the mattress when the men lifted the old man down, and he had not put it down since.
Muhammad had said the funeral prayer over the old man standing in the road with the lorries idling behind him. He had said it without hurrying. Afterwards he had walked the next stretch alone at the back of the column, because he did not trust his face. Halima had sent a child back to him with a bottle of water and a note in her square hand that said only, "Drink this."
They reached the top of the ridge at the hour of the afternoon prayer.
Muhammad stood at the edge of the road with the others coming up behind him, and looked down.
The city lay in the bowl of the plain below, larger than he had pictured it, white and brown under the white sky, with smoke going straight up from it in a few places because there was no wind to bend it. Around it lay the orchards. He had heard of them all his life. Half of them were green, a dark heavy green. Every tree was in leaf, and some were in fruit out of season. The other half were grey sticks on grey ground. The line between the two ran through the orchards and into the city itself. It went street by street, as if someone had gone over the map with a brush.
Minarets stood up out of the roofs everywhere. He tried to count them and lost count. Some were square and old, some round and new, some white, some the colour of sand. He looked at the eastern side of the city for a long time. Then he made himself stop looking. The hadith had named a white minaret east of the city and had not named it for him, and it was not his to guess which one it was. He would know it if he was meant to.
Behind him somebody gave the call to prayer for the afternoon, by the clock, in a young man's voice that cracked on the high notes. The column spread out along the ridge. Men laid their mats on the stones, facing south, the way they had faced all the way up the road. He stood in the front row because they put him there. The boy with the stick stood at the end of the row and laid the stick down along the edge of his mat.
Muhammad led them in the afternoon prayer, reciting the Opening silently in Arabic, as that prayer is recited. Below the ridge the city lay without a sound.
After the prayer a shepherd came up the slope with nine thin goats and stood watching them, leaning on his crook. He was about twelve. He told them, when they asked, that the man on the road had sent people to the city in the spring with grain and water. The districts that took the grain were the green ones. The old city and the quarter by the great mosque had shut their doors. He said that his father said the man was not coming here yet. He had gone south, toward the holy cities, where everyone knew he could not go in.
"Why go where you can't go in?" the boy said, and spat. "My father says he wants to be seen trying."
They made the night on the ridge the way they had made it every day on the road. Ropes went up between the lorries and the stone walls, and blankets went over the ropes. The children were put under them at the hour of the night prayer whether they slept or not. Under the blankets the light came through brown and dim, like light through closed eyelids. People lay in rows. Somebody's baby cried and was walked up and down. Further along, a woman was reciting the first ten verses of the chapter of the Cave under her breath, over and over, the way people recited them now on every road.
Muhammad sat at the open end with his back against a wall, where he could see the slope and the city. He had prayed the night prayer. He would sleep later.
The boy came and sat down beside him with the stick across his knees, the way his grandfather used to hold it.
For a long time he said nothing. Muhammad let him. Then the boy said, looking at the city and not at him:
"He thought it would end."
"He did."
"He told me the day before. He said, 'I'll see a sunset again, you'll see.' And he didn't." The boy turned the stick a quarter turn, the way the old man used to. "Everybody down there in the green bits thinks the man's holding the sun up. My mother's cousin said it on the phone. She said, 'He holds it, and he'll let it go when everybody's said yes.' How do you know he isn't?"
Muhammad thought about how to answer. The boy did not need an argument. He had sat with his grandfather through two months of arguments.
"Because we were told about it before it came," he said. "The companions asked the Messenger of Allah how long he would stay on the earth. He told them forty days. A day like a year, then a day like a month, then a day like a week, and the rest of his days like their days." He nodded at the white sky over the city. "This is the first one. He didn't tell them about a day that never ends. He told them what comes after it."
The boy was quiet.
"So it ends."
"A year has an end," Muhammad said. "Your grandfather was right about that. He was only early. It will end, because the Prophet said it would."