Several of them rushed forward to cast the blasphemer down from the pulpit, but the latter drew himself up to his full height and marched down the steps at a majestic pace, sending his assailants further into retreat with every stride. As he made his way through the astonished crowd, the faithful got a closer look at him and cried out: ‘The man is blind! The hand of God is upon him!’ Hakim recognized the old man he had formerly met on the square of Roumeliah and, as sometimes happens when a stray occurrence in one’s waking life suddenly triggers an unexpected rhyme with an incident from a forgottten dream, in a flash he saw his twofold life – his day-to-day existence and his ecstatic visions – come together as one. His mind, however, tried to fend off this new realization, so without further ado he strode out of the mosque, got on his horse, and rode off towards his palace.

He sent for the vizier, but Argevan was nowhere in sight. As it was the time of evening when it was his habit to go and consult the stars on Mount Mokatam, the caliph set off for the observatory tower and made his way to its uppermost level, where the pierced dome of the cupola indicated the twelve houses of the planets. Saturn, Hakim’s own birth star, was pale and murky; Mars, the planet from which Cairo derived its name,7 was blood-red, a sure indication of war and danger. Hakim went back down to the first level of the tower, where there was a cabbalistic table which had been set up by his grandfather Moëzzeldin. In the middle of a circle rimmed with the names of all the countries of the earth written in Chaldean there was a bronze statue of a horseman holding a lance. Ordinarily he held the lance upright, but when an enemy nation was advancing on Egypt, he would lower it and point to the country from which the attack was coming. Hakim saw that the horseman was pointing in the direction of Arabia. ‘So it’s the Abbasids again,’ he exclaimed, ‘those degenerate sons of Omar! We gave them a good whipping in Baghdad! But what do I have to fear from these infidels at the present? I’m armed with thunder!’

As he thought the matter over, however, he realized that he was in fact merely his former mortal self; the hallucinatory state that had convinced him he was a god no longer gave him confidence in his superhuman powers.

‘Well,’ he said to himself, ‘let’s see what kind of counsel the ecstasies of hashish might provide.’ And he set off for the okel to inebriate himself once again with that wondrous paste which may well be the ambrosia of legend – food of the gods.

The trusty Yousouf was already there when he arrived, gazing dreamily out upon the waters of the Nile; they were dull and sluggish and had ebbed so low that drought and famine were a near certainty. ‘Brother,’ Hakim said to him, ‘are you dreaming of your loves? If so, tell me who your mistress is and, by my word, you shall have her.’

‘If only I knew!’ said Yousouf. ‘The nights have been so suffocatingly hot ever since the khamsin started blowing that I never meet her golden cangia on the Nile. But even if I saw her again, would I dare ask who or what she is? Sometimes I suspect that it was all an illusion created by this damned weed. It may well be affecting my rational powers… so much so that I can no longer even distinguish between dream and reality.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Hakim with concern. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he said to his companion: ‘Well, so what? Tonight let’s just forget about life again.’

Once the hashish had begun to take effect, the two friends, strangely enough, would more or less come to inhabit the same body of ideas and impressions. Yousouf often imagined that his companion was leaving the unworthy earth behind to soar into the sky; reaching out his hand from on high, he would draw him into the heavens through the whirl of planets and milky galaxies strewn with stars. As they approached Saturn, the planet grew in size, racing through the firmament girded by its luminous ring and orbited by its seven moons. But what words could express what transpired once they had arrived in this heavenly homeland of their dreams? Human language can only formulate sensations consonant with our nature; in this divine dream, however, the conversations between the two friends drew on names that were no longer of this earth.

At the height of ecstasy, their bodies now slumped into utter inertia, Hakim suddenly writhed around and shouted: ‘Eblis! Eblis!’8 At that very moment, a detachment of soldiers led by Argevan battered down the door of the okel; the vizier ordered them to search the room and seize all the infidels who, in violation of the caliph’s ordinances, were indulging in hashish and fermented drinks. ‘You demon!’ shouted the caliph as he returned to his senses, ‘I’ve been looking for you; I’m after your head! You are the one responsible for the famine! It was you who arranged for the reserves in the state granaries to be distributed to your underlings! On your knees! If you dare open your mouth, you’re dead!’

Argevan scowled; then his glowering face broke into a frosty smile.

‘This madman thinks he’s the caliph! Cart him off to the Moristan!’ he said to the guards with a look of disdain.

As for Yousouf, he had already slipped away in his cangia, aware that there was abolutely nothing he could do for his friend.

The Moristan now adjoins the mosque of Kalaoum, but in those days it was a huge prison, one portion of which was reserved for raving lunatics – for though Orientals treat the mad with respect, they none the less stop short at allowing potentially dangerous individuals to wander free. When Hakim awoke in a dark cell the following morning, he immediately understood that it would be futile to fly into a rage or claim that beneath his simple fellah’s clothing he was indeed the caliph. Besides, the place already boasted five caliphs and a number of gods, so there was no advantage to be had in claiming this particular title. Having spent the better part of the night trying to break free from his chains, Hakim had moreover become all too convinced that, as a god imprisoned in the feeble body of a mortal, it was his fate – like the majority of Buddhas of India and other incarnations of the Supreme Being – to be abandoned to the malice of mankind and the physical laws of force. He even recollected having been in this very situation on previous occasions. The thing he most feared, however, was flagellation, for this was the standard cure administered in those days against excesses of the imagination.9 When the hakim (doctor) finally visited him in the course of his rounds, he was accompanied by a colleague who seemed to be a foreigner. Hakim was being extremely cautious, so he displayed no surprise at the visit; upon being questioned, he merely replied that as a result of overindulging in hashish he had temporarily taken leave of his senses but now felt perfectly normal again. The doctor conferred with his colleague, whom he treated with the utmost deference. The latter shook his head, observing that it was not unusual for lunatics to have lucid moments during which they managed to fake their way to freedom by the most artful subterfuges. He saw no point, however, in preventing this particular inmate from taking some exercise in the courtyard.

‘Are you also a doctor?’ the caliph asked of the foreigner.

‘This,’ said the asylum physician, ‘is the prince of science, the great Ibn-Sina (Avicenna). He has just arrived from Syria and is honouring the Moristan with a visit.’

The illustrious name of Avicenna, held in veneration as the most learned doctor in the world and widely considered by the uneducated to be a magician capable of working the most extraordinary of wonders, made a profound impression on the caliph. Sending all caution to the winds, he cried out to him: ‘Look at me! Here I am just as Aïssé (Jesus) was, abandoned to this mortal body, too human and too impotent to stave off the machinations of hell, and doubly unrecognized as caliph and god.