Dispersal; return to camp; the first sips of soup and coffee at sundown; all occurred in a silent cool evening under the evening star. Everyone at such peace. Washed clean inside. Looking around at all the faces, Bistami thought, Oh why don't we live like this all the time? What is important enough to take us away from this moment? Firelit faces, starry night overhead, ripples of song or soft laughter, peace, peace: no one seemed to want to fall asleep, to end this moment and wake up the next day, back in the sensible world.

Akbar's family and haj left in a caravan back to Jiddah Bistami went to the outskirts of town to see them off; Akbar's wife and aunt said goodbye to him, waving from camel back. The rest were already intent on the long journey to Fatepur Sikri.

After that Bistami was alone in Mecca, a city of strangers. Most were leaving now, in caravan after caravan. It was a lugubrious, uncanny sight: hundreds of caravans, thousands of people, happy but deflated, their white robes packed away or revealed suddenly to be dusty, fringed at the foot with brown dirt. So many were leaving that it seemed the city was being abandoned before some approaching disaster, as perhaps had happened once or twice, in time of war or famine or plague.

But a week or two later the ordinary Mecca was revealed, a whitewashed dusty little town of a few thousand people. Many of them were clerics or scholars or sufis or qadis or ulema, or heterodox refugees of one sort or another, claiming the sanctuary of the holy city. Most, however, were merchants and tradespeople. In the aftermath of the haj they looked exhausted, drained, almost stunned it seemed, and inclined to disappear into their blank walled compounds, leaving the remaining outsiders in town to fend for themselves for a month or two. For the remnant ulema and scholars, it was as if they were camping out in the empty heart of Islam, making it full by their own devotions, cooking over fires on the edges of town at dusk, trading for food with passing nomads. Many sang songs through most of the night.

The Persian speaking group was big, and congregated nightly around fires of its khitta on the eastern edge of town, where the canals came in from the hills. Thus they were the first to experience the spate that burst onto the town after storms to the north, which they heard but never saw. A wall of muddy black water slammed down the canals and spread out through the streets, rolling palm trunks and boulders like weapons into the upper half of the town. Everything flooded after that, until even the Kaaba itself stood in water up to the silver ring that held it in place.

Bistami threw himself with great pleasure into the efforts to drain the waters, and then to clean up the town. After the experience of the light in Chishti's tomb, and the supreme experience of the haj, there was little more he felt he could do in the mystic realm. He lived now in the aftermath of those events, and felt himself utterly changed; but what he wanted to do now was to read Persian poetry for an hour in the brief cool of the mornings, then work outside in the low hot winter sun in the afternoons. With the town broken and waist deep in mud, there was a lot of work to be done. Pray, read, work, eat, pray, sleep; this was the pattern of a good day. Day after day passed in this satisfying round.

Then as the winter wore on, he began to study at a sufi madressa established by scholars from the Maghrib, that western end of the world that was becoming more powerful, extending as it was both north into al Andalus and Firanja, and south into the Sahel. Bistami and the others there read and discussed not just Rumi and Shams, but also the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd, and the ancient Greek Aristotle, and the historian Ibn Khaldun. The Maghribis in the madressa were not as interested in contesting points of doctrine as they were in exchanging new information about the world; they were full of stories of the reoccupation of al Andalus and Firanja, and tales of the lost Frankish civilization. They were friendly to Bistami; they had no opinion of him one way or another; they thought of him as Persian, and so it was much more pleasant to be among them than with the Mughalis in the Timurid embassy, where he was regarded uneasily at best. Bistami saw that if his being stationed in Mecca was punishment in the form of exile from Akbar and Sind, then the other Mughalis assigned here had to wonder if they too were in disfavour, rather than honoured for their religious devotion. Seeing Bistami reminded them of this possibility, and so he was shunned like a leper. He therefore spent more and more of his time at the Maghribi madressa, and out in the Persian-speaking khitta, now set a bit higher in the hills above the canals east of town.

The year in Mecca always oriented itself in time to the haj, in just the same way that Islam oriented itself in space to Mecca. As the months passed, all began to make their preparations, and as Ramadan approached, nothing else in the world mattered but the upcoming haj. Much of the effort involved simply feeding the masses that would descend on the town. A whole system had developed to accomplish this miraculous feat, astonishing in its size and efficiency, here on this out of the way corner of a nearly lifeless desert peninsula. Though of course Aden and Yemen were rich, to the south below them. No doubt, Bistami thought as he walked by the pastures now filling up with sheep and goats, mulling over his readings in Ibn Khaldun, the system had grown with the growth of the haj itself. Which must have been rapid: Islam had exploded out of Arabia in the first century after the hegira, he was coming to understand. Al Andalus had been Islamicized by the year 100, the far reaches of the Spice Islands by the year 200; the whole span of the known world had been converted, only two centuries after the Prophet had received the Word and spread it to the people of this little land in the middle. Ever since then people had been coming here in greater and greater numbers.

One day he and a few other young scholars went to Medina, walking all the way, reciting prayers as they went, to see Mohammed's first mosque again. Past endless pens of sheep and goats, past cheese dairies, granaries, date palm groves, then into the outskirts of Medina, a sleepy, sandy, dilapidated little settlement when the haj was not there to bring it alive. In one stand of thick ancient palms, the little whitewashed mosque hid in the shade, as polished as a pearl. Here the Prophet had preached during his exile, and taken down most of the verses of the Quran from Allah.

Bistami wandered the garden outside this holy place, trying to imagine how it had happened. Reading Khaldun had made him understand: these things had all happened. In the beginning, the Prophet had stood in this grove, speaking in the open air. Later he had leaned against a palm tree when he spoke, and some of his followers had suggested a chair. He had agreed to it only as long as it was low enough that there was no suggestion he was claiming any sort of privilege for himself. The Prophet, perfect man that he had been, was modest. He had agreed to the construction of a mosque where he taught, but for many years it had gone roofless; Mohammed had declared there was more important business for the faithful to accomplish first. And then they had made their return to Mecca, and the Prophet had led twenty six military campaigns himself: the jihad. After that, how quickly the word had spread. Khaldun attributed this rapidity to a readiness in people for the next stage in civilization, and to the manifest truth of the Quran Bistami, troubled by something he could not pin down, wondered about this explanation. In India, civilizations had come and gone, come and gone. Islam itself had conquered India. But under the Mughals the ancient beliefs of the Indians endured, and Islam itself changed in its constant contact with them. This had become clearer to Bistami as he studied the pure religion in the madressa. Although sufism itself was perhaps more than a simple return to the pure source. An advance, or (could one say M) a clarification, even an improvement. An effort to bypass the ulemas. In any case, change. It did not seem that it could be prevented. Everything changed. As the sufi junnaiyd at the madressa said, the word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. After the winter's great flood, this image was particularly vivid and troubling. Islam, spreading over the world like a spate of mud, a mix of God and man; it did not seem very much like what had happened to him in the tomb of Chishti, or at the moment of the haj, when it seemed the Kaaba had revolved around him. But even his memory of those events was changing. Everything changed in this world.