The ground by the road was hard under the first few inches, and Muhammad had to stand on the shovel with both feet to get it in.
He had started at the dawn prayer's end with the men from the front trucks. There had been no order. He had taken a shovel off the back of the water tanker and walked to the first of them, a man in a padded jacket lying on his side on the verge, and begun to dig, and the others had come and dug beside him. Now there was a row of low mounds along the east side of the road, and the sun was a hand's breadth over the hills, and the row was not a quarter done.
They washed none of them and prayed over none of them. These had died on the road behind their master. That was between them and Allah. But they had mothers, and they were lying in the sun, and the road had to be used.
Ibrahim came along the verge with his exercise book.
"Four hundred and twelve between the culvert and here," he said. "I've stopped counting the ones in the fields. I can't see them all."
"Write what you can see."
"That's what I've done."
Muhammad nodded and went on digging. The back of Ibrahim's left hand was covered in blue figures, smudged into one another, the times of yesterday written over the times of the day before.
"You should wash that," Muhammad said.
Ibrahim looked at his hand as if he had forgotten it was his.
"Not yet," he said.
By mid-morning the people had begun to go to the gate.
Muhammad did not see who went first. He was at the end of the row of graves with the shovel when he straightened his back and saw them on the road: a few at first, villagers out of the orchards and the low houses of the town, then men from the column, then whole families. They walked in a slow line up the road toward the arch. They did not hurry. Some of them carried children. One old man was being pushed in a wheelbarrow by his grandsons.
He stayed where he was.
He had asked the son of Maryam to lead the prayer at the white minaret, and been declined, and led it with him in the row behind. He had not turned round to look, then or since. He kept back from the gate now in the same way and for the same reason. He did not want to stand nearer than he had been given.
From where he stood he could see the arch, pale in the sun, and the line of people going toward it, and at its head a place where the line stopped and each one in turn stood still for a moment and then stepped aside. He could see colour there, and nothing else at that distance.
He did not need to see more. He had read it aloud to Sheikh Yusuf's circle a year ago in the long day, in a room with foil on the windows, when the old sheikh was alive and they had been arguing about how to estimate the hours of a day that would not end. The companions had asked about the prayer, and the Prophet had told them. He had read them the rest of the hadith that night too, all of it, because Yusuf had asked him to. Then a people whom Allah had protected would come to the son of Maryam, and he would wipe their faces and inform them of their ranks.
Yusuf had wept at that line. Muhammad had thought, then, that it was the long light, that the old man was tired.
He set the shovel blade down in the dirt and leaned on the handle and watched the line move.
The old woman came back down the road a little before noon.
She walked slowly, with a stick, alone. She was small and bent and wore the black of the villages in the hills above Damascus, and she had come with the column on the roof of a bus because she would not be left behind. Muhammad had seen her the day before, sitting on the bus roof with her stick across her knees, eating bread.
Her face was wet. She had not wiped it. She came down the verge toward the row of graves and stopped in front of him and looked up at him.
"You're the one who led the prayer," she said.
"I am."
"He wiped my face." She touched her cheek with two fingers, very lightly, as if it were wet paint. "He told me my rank."
Muhammad waited.
She looked at him for a long time, and he saw that she was deciding something.
"I won't tell you what it was," she said. "It's mine."
"It's yours," he said.
She nodded, satisfied, and went on down the road toward the buses with her stick, and did not wipe her face.
He stood with that for a while. Seventy years in a village in the hills, he thought, and bread on a bus roof. He did not know her name.
Behind him one of the young men who had been digging said something in a low voice, and another answered him, and then they were both quiet. Nobody was digging. They were all watching the line on the road. Some of them had put down their shovels and were walking toward it.
Muhammad let them go.
Ibrahim did not go. He stood at the end of the row of graves with the exercise book held against his chest and watched the others walk up the road.
"You can go," Muhammad said.
"I took a house from him. In the long day. I lived in it." Ibrahim did not look away from the gate. "I'll go when they've all been."
Muhammad did not tell him what to do. He picked up the shovel and went back to the grave he had left half dug. After a moment Ibrahim put the exercise book in his pocket, took up a shovel somebody had dropped on the verge, and dug beside him.
The runner came at the noon prayer's time.
He was a boy from the Hauran, sixteen or so, with a cough, and he came running down the road from the direction of the gate so fast that he had to grab the side of the water tanker to stop. He could not speak at first. Muhammad gave him water from the tap at the back of the tanker, in his own cupped hands, and the boy drank, and coughed, and drank again.
Then he told it.
He told it badly, out of order, and Muhammad made him tell it again, and the second time it came out straight. The boy had been near the front of the line. The ones nearest the gate had heard it given. Allah had revealed to the son of Maryam that He had brought out from among His servants a people whom no one had the power to fight, and that he was to take the believers safely up to the mountain of Tur.
The boy stopped. He was looking at Muhammad's face to see what the words meant, because he did not know.
Muhammad knew. He had known for a year, since the night with Yusuf's circle, and for longer than that, since he was nineteen and Sheikh Bashir had put the book of trials in front of him and made him read it twice. He had read it to the end. He had read the line after the line about Tur.
Around him the men had stopped walking. Ibrahim had come back along the verge with his exercise book closed on one finger. The old woman had stopped by the buses and turned round. The graves lay in their row in the sun, a quarter done.
Muhammad looked past them all, to the north and east, where the hills went up brown into a white sky, slope after slope, as far as he could see.
Then Allah would send Gog and Magog, the Prophet had said, and they would swarm down from every slope.