Another time, when Ibrahim was writing about the theory of dynastic cycles, which was held in common by both Chinese and Islamic historians and philosophers, his wife had brushed it all aside like a piece of botched embroidery: 'That's just thinking of history as if it were the seasons of a year. It's a most simple-minded metaphor. What if they are nothing at all alike, what if history meanders like a river for ever, what then?'

And soon afterwards Ibrahim wrote in his 'Commentary on the Doctrine of the Great Cycle in History':

Ibn Khaldun, the most influential of Muslim historians, speaks of the great cycle of dynasties in his 'Muqaddimah', and most of the Chinese historians identify a cyclic pattern in history as well, beginning with the Han historian Dong Zhongshw in his 'Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals', a system which indeed was an elaboration of Confucius himself, and which was elaborated in its turn by Kang Yuwei, who in his 'Commentary on the Evolution of Rites' speaks of the Three Ages, each of which, Disorder, Small Peace and Great Peace, go through internal rotations of disorder, small peace and great peace, so that the three become nine, and then eighty one when these are recombined, and so on. And Hindu religious cosmology, which so far is that civilization's only statement on history as such, speaks also of great cycles, first the kalpa which is a day of Brahma, said to be 4,320,000,000 years long, divided into fourteen manvantaras, each of which is divided into seventy one maha yugas, length 3,320,000 years. Each maha yuga or Great Age is divided into four ages, Sarya yuga, the age of peace, Treta yuga, Dvaparayuga and Kali yuga, said to be our current age, an age of decline and despair, awaiting renewal. These spans of time, so vastly greater than those of the other civilizations, seemed to many earlier commentators excessive, but it must be said that, the more we learn of the antiquity of the Earth, with stone seashells found on mountaintops, and layers of rock deposits enjambed perpendicularly to each other, and so on, the more the introspections of India seem to have pierced through the veil of the past most accurately to the true scale of things.

But in all of them, in any case, the cycles are only observed by ignoring most of what has been recorded as actually happening in the past, and are very probably theories based on the turning of the year and the return of the seasons, with civilizations seen as leaves on a tree, going through a cycle of growth and decay and new growth. It may be that history itself has no such pattern to it, and that civilizations each create a unique fate that cannot be read into a cyclic pattern without doing damage to what really happened in the world.

Thus the extremely rapid spread of Islam seems to support no particular cyclic pattern, while its success perhaps resulted from it proposing not a cycle but a progress towards God, a very simple message resisting the great urge to elaboration that fills most of the world's philosophies in favour of comprehensibility by the masses.

Kang Tongbi was also writing a great deal at this time, compiling her anthologies of women's poetry, arranging them into groups and writing commentaries on what they meant in the aggregate. She also began, with her husband's help, a 'Treatise on the History of the Women of Hunan', in which her thoughts very often reflected, or commented on, those of her husband, just as his did hers; so that later scholars were able to collate the writings of the two during their Lanzhou years, and construct of them a kind of ongoing dialogue or duct.

Kang's opinions were her own, however, and often would not have been agreed with by Ibrahim. Later that year, for instance, frustrated by the irrational nature of the conflict now tearing the region apart, and fearful of greater conflict to come, feeling as if they were living under a great storm cloud about to burst on them, Kang wrote in her 'Treatise':

So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.

Ibrahim read this in manuscript and shook his head, sighing. 'I have married one wiser than myself,' he said to his empty room. 'I am a lucky man. But sometimes I wish that I had chosen to study not ideas, but things. Somehow I have drifted outside the range of my talent.'

Every day news of more Qing suppression of Muslims came to them. Supposedly the Old Teaching was favoured over the New Teaching, but ignorant and ambitious officials arrived from the interior, and mistakes were made more than once. Ma Wuyi, for instance, the successor to Ma Laichi, not to Ma Mingxin, was ordered to move with his adherents west to Tibet. Old Teaching to new territory, people said, shaking their heads at the bureaucratic mistake, which was sure to get people killed. It became the third of the Five Great Errors of the suppression campaign. And the disorder grew.

Eventually a Chinese Muslim named Tian Wu rallied the jahriyas openly, to revolt and free themselves from Beijing. This happened just north of Gansu, and so everyone in Lanzhou stockpiled again for war.

Soon the banners came, and like everything else the war had to move through the Gansu Corridor to get from east to west. So though much of the fighting took place far away in eastern Gansu, the news of it in Lanzhou was constant, as was the movement of troops through town.

Kang Tongbi found it unnerving to have the major battles of this revolt happening east of them, between them and the interior. It was several weeks before the Qing army managed to put down Tian Wu's force, even though Tian Wu had been killed almost immediately. Soon after that, news came that Qing general Li Shiyao had ordered the slaughter of over a thousand jahriya women and children in east Gansu.

Ibrahim was in despair. 'Now all the Muslims in China are jahriya in their hearts.'

'Maybe so,' Kang said cynically, 'but I see it doesn't keep them from accepting jahriya lands confiscated by the government.'

But it was also true that jahriya orders were springing up everywhere now, in Xizang, Turkestan, Mongolia, Manchuria, and all the way south to distant Yunnan. No other Muslim sect had ever attracted so many adherents, and many of the refugees streaming in from the wars to the far west became jahriya the moment they arrived, happy after the confusions of Muslim civil war to join a straightforward jihad against infidels.

Even during all this trouble, in the evenings Ibrahim and the heavily pregnant Kang would retire to their verandah and watch the Tao River flow into the Yellow River. They talked over the news and their day's work, comparing poems or religious texts, as if these were the only things that really mattered. Kang tried to learn the Arabic alphabet, which she found difficult, but instructive.