Long before the Flood, he remembered – now that he had reassumed the role of archangel, the full range of archangelic memory and wisdom was apparently being restored to him, little by little – a number of angels (the names Semjaza and Azazel came first to mind) had been flung out of Heaven because they had been lusting after the daughters of men, who in due course gave birth to an evil race of giants. He began to understand the degree of the danger from which he had been saved when he departed from the vicinity of Alleluia Cone. O most false of creatures! O princess of the powers of the air! – When the Prophet, on whose name be peace, had first received the wahi, the Revelation, had he not feared for his sanity? – And who had offered him the reassuring certainty he needed? – Why, Khadija, his wife. She it was who convinced him that he was not some raving crazy but the Messenger of God. – Whereas what had Alleluia done for him? You're not yourself, I don't think you're really well. – O bringer of tribulation, creatrix of strife, of soreness of the heart! Siren, temptress, fiend in human form! That snowlike body with its pale, pale hair: how she had used it to fog his soul, and how hard he had found it, in the weakness of his flesh, to resist... enmeshed by her in the web of a love so complex as to be beyond comprehension, he had come to the very edge of the ultimate Fall. How beneficent, then, the Over-Entity had been to him! – He saw now that the choice was simple: the infernal love of the daughters of men, or the celestial adoration of God. He had found it possible to choose the latter; in the nick of time.

He drew out of the right-hand pocket of his overcoat the book that had been there ever since his departure from Rosa's house a millennium ago: the book of the city he had come to save, Proper London, capital of Vilayet, laid out for his benefit in exhaustive detail, the whole bang shoot. He would redeem this city: Geographers’ London, all the way from A to Z.

On a street corner in a part of town once known for its population of artists, radicals and men in search of prostitutes, and now given over to advertising personnel and minor film producers, the Archangel Gibreel chanced to see a lost soul. It was young, male, tall, and of extreme beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair oiled down and parted in the centre; its teeth were made of gold. The lost soul stood at the very edge of the pavement, its back to the road, leaning forwards at a slight angle and clutching, in its right hand, something it evidently held very dear. Its behaviour was striking: first it would stare fiercely at the thing it held in its hand, and then look around, whipping its head from right to left, scrutinizing with blazing concentration the faces of the passers-by. Reluctant to approach too quickly, Gibreel on a first pass saw that the object the lost soul was clutching was a small passport-sized photograph. On his second pass he went right up to the stranger and offered his help. The other eyed him suspiciously, then thrust the photograph under his nose. ‘This man,’ he said, jabbing at the picture with a long index finger. ‘Do you know this man?’

When Gibreel saw, staring out of the photograph, a young man of extreme beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair, oiled, with a central parting, he knew that his instincts had been correct, that here, standing on a busy street corner watching the crowd in case he saw himself going by, was a Soul in search of its mislaid body, a spectre in desperate need of its lost physical casing – for it is known to archangels that the soul or ka cannot exist (once the golden cord of light linking it to the body is severed) for more than a night and a day. ‘I can help you,’ he promised, and the young soul looked at him in wild disbelief. Gibreel leaned forward, grasped the ka's face between his hands, and kissed it firmly upon the mouth, for the spirit that is kissed by an archangel regains, at once, its lost sense of direction, and is set upon the true and righteous path. – The lost soul, however, had a most surprising reaction to being favoured by an archangelic kiss. ‘Sod you,’ it shouted, ‘I may be desperate, mate, but I'm not that desperate,’ – after which, manifesting a solidity most unusual in a disembodied spirit, it struck the Archangel of the Lord a resounding blow upon the nose with the very fist in which its image was clasped; – with disorienting, and bloody, results.

When his vision cleared, the lost soul had gone but there, floating on her carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his discomfiture. ‘Not such a great start,’ she snorted. ‘Archangel my foot. Gibreel janab, you're off your head, take it from me. You played too many winged types for your own good. I wouldn't trust that Deity of yours either, if I were you,’ she added in a more conspiratorial tone, though Gibreel suspected that her intentions remained satirical. ‘He hinted as much himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar—Neechay question like he did. This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam – O, children of Adam, let not the Devil seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them their clothing that he might show them their shame– but go back a bit and you see that it's a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century BC, asks: “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn't until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’ This speech was one of which the ‘real’ Rekha would plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or, of all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever since he fell from Bostan was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective, psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. – What, then, was she? It would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his own making – his own accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her ease with the arcana. – But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly, in days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed him? (He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix his thoughts upon his ‘dark age’, that is to say the period during which he had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could make out little more than shadows.) – Or could it be that the material now filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary squat like a toad by Eve's ear in Eden, using his wiles ‘to reach/The organs of her fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams’, had in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia's boudoir, and awoken him from his long waking sleep? – Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner, guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.

His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been able to tolerate pain. ‘Always a cry-baby,’ Rekha laughed in his face, Shaitan had understood more: