The buses came up the southern road in a line, nine of them, and behind the last one the horizon had gone grey.
Muhammad stood on the roof of the girls' school with his hand flat on the warm parapet and counted them in. The road from the south ran straight across the plain to the city's edge, past stripped orchards and the shells of greenhouses, and the buses kept to it nose to tail, too fast, rocking on their springs. Far behind them, low on the land, the cloud was coming. It did not move like weather. It moved like a carpet being pulled.
Ibrahim stood beside him with a pair of borrowed binoculars.
"Four hours," he said. "Less. They've got the lorries in front now."
"And the buses?"
"The buses will make it."
The buses made it. Muhammad went down to the gate to meet them, because he met every convoy, and because the people on them had come a long way on one sentence from him read off a paper on a mosque step. The gate was an old one in a newer wall, and the men holding it had already begun dragging the barrier across. They held it while the buses came through one after another into the square, and the doors sighed open, and people climbed down into the dust with their bags, their children, their old people, looking up at the walls.
He knew her before he knew why. A woman in her forties with a big wheeled suitcase and a schoolteacher's way of counting the people around her. Then he had it. The first recovery with a name. He had thought of her on the morning after the door opened, and of her husband and her son, and had heard nothing of any of them since.
Layla al-Mansour saw him and stopped.
Beside her a young man got down from the bus with a blue school rucksack over one shoulder. He was thin. He stood very still in the middle of the moving square, and people stepped round him without looking.
The driver leaned out of his cab. He had a cigarette he wasn't lighting.
"That's him," the driver said, low. "The one from the marsh road. They're saying it in every town."
Muhammad crossed the square. He greeted Layla with peace and asked after her mother, and she told him, and he could see her waiting for him to turn to her son. He turned to him.
"Hamza," he said. "Peace be upon you. You must be tired."
The young man looked at him a long moment.
"Yes," Hamza said. "I am."
Muhammad asked him nothing else. There would be people enough in this city who wanted to ask. He told them where the families from the south were being housed, and they went.
Behind him the men pulled the barrier the rest of the way across, and it closed.
The camp came round the city the way water comes round a rock.
From the school roof he watched it spread. It took what was left of the third day. Lorries first, then the tents going up in blocks, numbered, orderly, and a white car going up and down the lines. Then the cloud settled over all of it, and the fine rain began, and the camp stood in its own dark wet ring around the walls. Inside the walls the dust lay as it had lain for years. On the camp's side of the ditch, within an hour, there was grass.
At the edge of the camp, too far to make out a face, a figure walked the lines. Muhammad did not use the binoculars. He knew what he would see, and he kept his eyes on the gate below.
The siege had begun. Nobody announced it. The roads were shut, and the people in the city could see the people outside eating, and that was the siege.
The commander came up with the first reckoning before the light changed. Wells inside the walls: forty-one working. Flour for nineteen days at half rations. Medicine for fewer. Muhammad listened to all of it. Then he asked how many of the wells stood in quarters where people had taken something from the camp and were still holding it. The commander did not know. He went to find out.
Halima came up to the roof in the late part of the day with the blanket round her shoulders. She had not been well since the long light. She sat on an upturned crate and coughed and got her breath back.
"The cells want to know about the prayer times," she said. "Whether to keep the estimate. Some of the young ones say the third day must be nearly done. They want to pray by the sky again."
He had been thinking about the same thing all afternoon.
The Prophet had told his companions of these days, and they had asked him about the prayer in the long one, whether a single day's prayers would be enough, and he had told them no, to estimate its extent. He had told them a day like a year, a day like a month, a day like a week, and the rest of his days like their days. He had not told them on which hour the third would end. Muhammad had read the narration to Sheikh Yusuf's circle on the first noon that did not end, and Sheikh Yusuf had been alive then, and nodded.
"Keep the estimate," he said. "Until the sky agrees with it. Then we'll know."
"And if it never agrees?"
"It will. He said it would."
He was on the roof again when it started.
He did not see the moment. It was like the light coming onto the wall on the morning after the door, which he had also failed to catch. He looked at the sun because he had been looking at it for a year, out of the corner of his eye, the way you keep an eye on a pot. It stood where it had stood. He looked at Ibrahim's notes on the parapet. He looked at the sun again, and it was lower.
It was a small difference. A finger's width above the western hills. He did not trust it, and he waited, and he looked again, and it had gone another finger.
Below him, on the other roofs, people were noticing. A woman hanging washing stopped with a sheet in her hands. Two boys on a water tank stood up. Somewhere a man began to laugh and stopped himself, as if it might be bad luck. Someone in the street called up to someone in a window, and the window called to the next one. Out in the camp, beyond the ditch, he saw no one look up at all.
The shadows began to stretch. He had forgotten that shadows did that. The shadow of the parapet crept off the edge of the roof and down the wall, and the shadow of the minaret two streets away laid itself across three houses and then a fourth, long and thin and pointing east.
Ibrahim had his watch on the parapet. He had not said a word for an hour. The muezzin of the mosque by the gate came out on his balcony and stood there, looking at his own watch, and at the sun, and at his watch.
Muhammad said under his breath, in Arabic, the words he began everything with: "In the name of Allah." The sun touched the hills. The edge of it went down behind them, red, swollen, ordinary, the way he had watched it go down behind the ridge above al-Qaryah when he was a boy.
Ibrahim looked at his watch and then at him. He did not need to say the time.
From the balcony by the gate the muezzin lifted his hands to his ears and gave the call to the sunset prayer in Arabic, at the minute the clock had kept for it through all the long days, and for the first time since they began, the sky agreed.