The shadow of the umbrella's stem had moved.
Hamza had been sitting with his back against the same steel stem since the afternoon prayer, with his small Quran shut on his knees. The shadow had lain where it always lay, a short dark stub on the marble beside his left foot. He had looked at it a thousand times that year without seeing it. Now it reached past his foot. He watched it, and it did not stop. It went on growing across the marble toward the next row of tiles, slowly, the way the hand of a clock moves when you stare at it. When he looked up, the sun was not where it had been.
It had gone down the sky a hand's width toward the west.
He got up. All over the courtyard people were getting up. A sweeper stood with his broom held across his chest. Two old men had stopped in the middle of an argument and stood with their mouths open, looking up. Nobody spoke. Hamza saw a woman by the women's gate cover her face with both hands, and then take them away again to look.
The sun went on down.
It took the whole of the afternoon, as it should have done every afternoon for a year. The light went yellow, then deeper. The marble under Hamza's bare feet, which had held the same heat for a year, began to cool. Shadows came out of everything and stretched east across the courtyard, longer and longer. The stems threw them, and the people, and the pigeons on the ledges. The minarets lay in long blue bars across the roofs of the hotels. An old man started to weep out loud. Then other people were weeping, and some were laughing, and most stood in the long shadows and watched.
At the hour the sun touched the black hills to the west, the umbrellas moved.
All of them, all at once. Two hundred and fifty canopies on their steel stems shuddered, and their motors whined, and they began to close. The yellowed cloth folded inward, petal on petal, and drew up toward the tops of the stems. It made a sound over the whole courtyard like a great many birds settling. Hamza stood under his and watched the cloth come down round its stem like a hand closing. The sky opened above him, and it was orange, and it was moving.
Then the call to the sunset prayer began from the minarets, at its true hour for the first time in a year.
The man giving the call got as far as the second Allah is greatest and his voice broke. There was a silence over the whole city. Hamza heard a car horn a long way off, and a child, and his own breath. Then the voice came back, rough, and went on to the end. The whole courtyard went into rows.
Night came the way he had half forgotten it came, a little at a time and then all at once.
By the night prayer the sky over Medina was black, and full of stars. He had not seen a star in a year. He stood on the hostel roof with the others after the prayer and could not stop looking up. There were too many. They went all the way down to the hills. The air had gone cold, truly cold. The boys from Kano and Khartoum stood with their arms wrapped round themselves, laughing at their own shivering.
Below in the streets nobody was asleep. People sat on their steps and on the roofs of their cars. Somewhere a baby was screaming and would not stop. The Sudanese student said it was the babies born in the long day, who had never seen dark. Their mothers didn't know how to tell them it was all right.
Out past the city's lamps, past the black lip of the lava field, the camp on the salt had lit its fires.
There were hundreds of them. They lay along the flats in long uneven rows, orange in the dark, the way a city looks from an aeroplane. Hamza could not see the tents or the orchards or the lorries. He could see only the fires. Between them, very faintly, people moved in front of the light. The smoke went straight up into the cold.
He went down to the dormitory.
Bassam's bed was stripped. Somebody had taken his pillow. Bassam had said he would call when he'd seen the man, and he had not called. Hamza sat on his own bed in the dark. The foil was still taped to the window, and there was no light behind it now to keep out. He got up and pulled it off in one long tearing sheet.
He took out his phone. He had rung his mother after the third shaking, and she had rung him back twice since. Each time he had told her he was safe, and it had been true.
He looked at her name with the little crescent moon after it. Then he switched the phone off and put it in his pocket.
He knew the hadith. His teacher had read it to the circle in the courtyard a month ago, with the stick across his knees. A man would come out of the city to the one camped on the salt marsh. He would be the best of people or one of the best, and he would say to his face what he was. Hamza had sat on the carpet and thought of the scholars in the front row with their white beards. He had not thought of himself. He did not think of himself now. He thought of Bassam's bag going down the white road in the stream. He thought of the boy from the hostel's second floor with his mattress on his head, and the phone-shop man who called him "the scholar". They were out there among the fires. Somebody ought to say it to them, to the man's face, where they could hear.
He filled a bottle of water from the cooler on the landing and went down the stairs.
The western road was empty. The streetlamps were on, every one of them, burning for the first time in a year. They made pools on the tarmac with dark between. He walked from pool to pool with his hands in his pockets and his breath going white.
At the roundabout the petrol station's canopy was lit and empty. The tyre shop had its shutter down. Beyond them, over the road, stood the concrete arch with the city's name on it in green lights. The students called it the gate. He stopped under it.
The rows were there.
He felt them as he always had, across the road at the height of a man, shoulder to shoulder. It was the same held breath, a crowd he could not see. In the dark they felt closer. His shoulders squared without his asking. His feet came together.
The dog was lying at the foot of the last lamp post, as it had lain all year. It lifted its head and looked at him, then put it down again on its paws, facing outward.
Hamza stood at the line for a long time. He said the ten verses, all of them, in Arabic, out loud, his voice small under the arch. At the tenth he stopped and said it again in Arabic. "Our Lord, grant us from Yourself mercy and prepare for us from our affair right guidance."
Then he stepped forward.
The rows did not hold him. They did not part, either. He walked into them and through them. For the space of three steps he felt them on either side of him, close, like the shoulders of men in a full row turning a little to let a latecomer through to the front. Then they were behind him, and he was out on the road. The tarmac was cold under his shoes, and ahead of him it went down off the edge of the lava onto the white salt.
He left the tarmac and walked onto the marsh.
The fires spread out in front of him across the whole of the dark. He walked toward the largest. At this distance it was a coal, a smear of orange low on the flat ground. Then it was larger. He could see shapes against it, people sitting in rings. In the middle of the rings something sat on a chair facing the flames, a man's shape, very still.
The shape turned its head. In all that dark, across all that salt, one eye caught the firelight and turned toward him.