The earth under the leader's place was beaten flat. It was cold through his socks. Muhammad stood on it with the rows at his back and his face to the direction of prayer.
Behind him he could hear the rows breathing. Thousands of men, and behind the men the women under the arcade, and behind them the children, all waiting on the second call. The muezzin was giving it from the foot of the minaret now, not from the top. His voice was hoarse from the cold. The exercise book was in the inside pocket of Muhammad's coat, against his ribs, with Ibrahim's numbers in it. Nine hundred fires. Twenty thousand under arms. Four hundred carts. He had read them over once after the night prayer and then put the book away. There was nothing more the numbers could tell him.
He had not slept, and had not expected to. On the rug in the schoolmaster's office he had asked Allah for what he always asked before a hard day: to be shown the next step and not the whole road. Then, near two, he had gone out and walked along the front row by the east gate where the young men lay on their blankets. He had not woken them. He had counted them, as a teacher counts heads on a trip. Sixty-one. He had prayed for each of them by the colour of his blanket, because he did not know all their names.
The call reached its last phrases. He raised his hands to begin.
Behind him the rows moved.
He felt it before he heard it. It was a change in the air at his back, the way a congregation changes when a man faints in it. Then a sound went through the men, not words, a drawing of breath. He lowered his hands but did not turn at once. In a school gym he had led prayers with children crying and a generator failing, and learned not to turn for every sound.
Then a man in the front rank said very low in Arabic, "Allah is the greatest," and it was not the opening of a prayer. Muhammad turned his head.
The white minaret stood above the square on the eastern side, pale against a sky that was just beginning to grey.
He saw what the Messenger of Allah had said would be seen. He saw it from far off, across the whole width of the square. Two garments dyed with saffron. Hands resting on the wings of two angels. The head lowered, and drops fell. The head raised, and drops scattered like pearls. Then the heads of the eastern rows closed over the sight.
He did not look for more. His teacher, Sheikh Bashir, had taught him the hadith of the white minaret in the mountains when he was nineteen, sitting on the bench outside the old man's door. He had told him then that a man who is given a sign is given exactly enough of it. Muhammad had not understood that for a long time. He understood it now. There was nothing missing from what he had seen.
He stepped back out of the leader's place.
He did it without deciding to, the way a man steps back from a doorway when someone older comes to it. The front rank parted on his right to let him stand among them. At the eastern edge of the rows men were moving aside, a lane opening through them, and the lane came toward the front.
He kept his eyes down, on the beaten earth, on the line scratched in it with a stick, on his own feet in their grey socks. He would have liked to see a great deal more. His eyes stayed where they were until the lane had reached the front rank.
Then he asked the newcomer to come forward and lead them in the prayer.
The newcomer declined. He said that some of them were leaders over others, an honour from Allah for this nation.
That was all. It was what the Prophet had said would be said. Muhammad had read it a hundred times. Still he stood a moment with the words on him like water. He had come a long way to stand in the place he had stepped out of. He had not asked for it. He had told Sheikh Yusuf on the first day that it was not his to say what he was. Yusuf was in the ground beside the road north now, at an hour they had guessed was night. Muhammad wished, plainly and for one breath, that the old man had been here to hear this.
Then he went back to the leader's place.
He raised his hands and said in Arabic that Allah is the greatest, and the square behind him went still.
He recited the Opening. He recited it the way Sheikh Bashir had taught him, at the pace of a man walking, each word given its weight and no more. After it he recited a short chapter he had loved since boyhood. It was the same one he had recited alone in a school detention room on the first morning after the door opened. His voice did not shake. He was surprised by that. Then he thought that it was not his to be surprised by. The voice was doing what it had been made for.
He bowed, and heard the rows bow behind him, a sound like one long breath let out. He went down into prostration with his forehead on the cold earth. The earth smelled of dust and of the washing water that had dripped from a thousand chins.
Somewhere behind him the newcomer was praying in the rows. Muhammad did not turn. It was not a thing to turn and see. He knew it the way he knew the rows were there, the way a man at the front of a column knows the column.
Two units, as every dawn. He sat. He gave the greeting of peace to the right, and to the left, and the prayer was finished.
He stood up and faced them.
The square was full to its edges with men kneeling, and none of them had moved. Their faces were turned toward him and past him. Some were wet. In the third row he saw the young man from Medina, Layla al-Mansour's son, Hamza, sitting very upright with his hands on his knees. At the back, near the arcade, he saw Ibrahim standing with a cigarette packet half out of his pocket. He seemed to have forgotten he had put his hand there.
Beyond the wall the camp's fires were still burning in the grey light. He could not see them from here, but he knew where they were.
He took the exercise book out of his coat and gave it to the nearest captain, the dentist from Homs.
"Keep that," he said. "We won't need it today."
He went down the line of the front rank. He did not raise his voice. There was no need. The square was so quiet that his ordinary voice carried to the arcade.
"Stand up," he said. "We go out now. Open the east gate."
The men stood, all of them at once, with a sound of cloth and knees.
At the east gate the bar came off with a long groan of old iron. The great doors were drawn back on the plain, and the grey morning came in through them with the smell of wet barley and woodsmoke. The front row went out first, unarmed, into the open. Out on the plain the followers' barley stood green under its own grey cloud. Beside it the dry ground lay white and cracked, the line between them as straight as a ruler. The fires of the camp were smoking in the still air. Men were standing up beside them to look. Muhammad went out behind the front row on foot. The army came after him, and the city emptied itself through the gate toward the camp.