Halima's hand was hot and dry, and Muhammad held it while he wet the cloth again.
The tent had been pitched under an old terebinth so that she would have shade, but the shade had shifted off her an hour after the sun came up and had not come back. The sun had been rising for four days. It stood low over the eastern ridge now at the height it stands at a little after the dawn prayer, and the light came in under the tent wall long and yellow and lay across her blanket. She had stopped being able to bear light in the second month of the long day. She had borne it for ten months more.
"Still morning," she said, without opening her eyes.
"Still morning."
"How long?"
"A month, if it is like the other."
She made a sound that in a well woman would have been a laugh. He laid the cloth on her forehead and she turned her face into it.
Below them, through the open tent flap, he could see the slope of the hill and the camp spread down it among the olive terraces, perhaps nine thousand people now, and below the camp the haze, and in the haze the city. Damascus lay along the plain with its minarets standing out of it like reeds out of a pond. He had looked at it every day since they came over the ridge. He had not taken the people down. The road was shut, and they had been tired, and he had not yet seen the reason to go.
He heard running.
A boy was coming up the terrace path two steps at a time, eleven or twelve, one of the water carriers, with his sandals in one hand and a phone held up in the other like a lamp. He was shouting before he reached the tent. Men were getting up from their places along the path and turning to watch him go by.
The voice note had come through more than twenty phones. Muhammad could tell from the sound, which had been recorded and played and recorded again until it had a hiss under it like rain on a roof. A man was speaking in the Arabic of the Hijaz, fast, out of breath, with wind behind him.
He played it twice for the people near the tent. Then he stood on a terrace wall so more of them could hear and played it again, with the phone held up and its small speaker turned outward, and the boy who had brought it stood at the bottom of the wall with his arms folded as if he were guarding it.
The man on the recording said he was in Medina. On the first night, when the sun went down at last, a student from the mosque had walked out of the city alone toward the camp on the salt marsh. He had stood in front of the one-eyed man and said to his face that he was the Dajjal whom the Messenger of Allah had told them about. The one-eyed man killed him in front of the whole camp. Then he gave him life again. The student got up and swore by Allah that he knew him now better than before. The one-eyed man tried to kill him a second time and could not. At dawn they threw the student out on the road. Some of the people from the camp walked after him. He was in the city now. He was alive.
The recording ended with the man saying the name of Allah, twice, and then a click.
Nobody spoke. Nine thousand people on a hillside, and Muhammad could hear a goat's bell two terraces down.
He got down from the wall. He did not want to stand above them for what came next. He stood on the terrace among them, and the ones at the back pressed closer to hear, and he told them what he knew.
"The Messenger of Allah told the companions about this," he said. "It is in the collection of al-Bukhari. The Dajjal would come and would be forbidden the roads into Medina. He would camp on the salt ground outside it. A man would come out to him, the best of people or one of the best, and say this to his face. The Dajjal would kill him and give him life. The man would swear by Allah that now he knew his reality better than before. And when the Dajjal tried to kill him again, he would not be given the power."
He stopped there. There was more he could have said. There was a great deal people said about this man and that man, rumours carried up the roads along with the voice notes, and he had refused all year to repeat any of it. He gave them only what the Messenger of Allah had given.
"It was told to us so that we would know it when it happened," he said. "It has happened."
An old man near the front sat down on the terrace stones and put his face in his hands. A woman began to recite the opening chapter of the Quran, low, and others took it up around her. Somewhere further down the hill somebody shouted the words of the testimony of faith out over the olives, and a dog barked back.
Muhammad watched the men along the terrace wall. They had been sitting there for three weeks with their rifles across their knees, guarding a camp of the sick and the old under a sun that would not move, and they had been sitting the way men sit who are waiting to be told that they have lost. Now one of them stood up. Then the man beside him. Muhammad watched them stand, one after another along the wall, without anyone telling them to, the way men stand in rows when the prayer is called.
They came down off the hill in the long morning of the fifth day by estimate, nine thousand people on foot and on donkeys and in a few trucks that still had fuel, with the sick on stretchers in the middle and Halima among them under a sheet rigged on poles. Muhammad walked at the front. He had told them there was water in the orchards on the plain, which was true, and that the hill could not feed them another week, which was also true. He had not told them the rest.
The rest was a minaret he had never seen, east of the city, white. It was in the long hadith of the Dajjal that he had read with Sheikh Bashir in the mountains when he was nineteen. He did not know when. He did not know if he would see it. He knew that the hadith put the end of this matter near Damascus, and that from the hill he could not even see the east side of the city.
The orchards were half dead from the long light, apricot trees with their leaves curled and brown, but the irrigation channels still ran. The people spread out among the trees and put their hands in the water. He left Halima's stretcher in the deepest shade they could find and walked on up the road toward the city with one companion, a schoolteacher from Homs who had carried the refuge's water accounts for a year.
The road into Damascus was shut with four lorries parked nose to tail across it and a steel gate welded between the middle two. Men stood on the lorry roofs with rifles. They had been there, he guessed, since the Dajjal's envoys first came up the roads from the east with their rain. The men watched him come the whole length of the last straight, and none of them raised a rifle.
He stopped in front of the gate. An officer in a faded uniform looked down at him from the roof of the second lorry, a heavy man with grey in his beard and his collar undone in the heat.
"Who are you?"
"Muhammad, son of Abdullah," he said. "We are nine thousand, from the south. We have sick people and no food. We are not his."
The officer looked at him a long time. He looked at the schoolteacher with his ledger under his arm. He looked past them, down the road, at the orchards where the refuge had spread out among the dead apricot trees, and at the smoke from the first cooking fires going straight up in the still air.
Then he looked at Muhammad again, and something in the heavy face gave way. The officer's lips moved on the name, once, as if he were checking it against something he had been told.
He turned and called down to someone on the far side of the lorries.
Chains rattled. Somewhere behind the steel a motor coughed and caught. The gate shuddered on its rollers, and then it began to move, swinging slowly outward across the road toward them, and through the widening gap Muhammad saw the city's first street, empty, swept, with the sun lying along it.