Including Medina and Mecca, which grew in population rapidly as the haj approached, and shepherds poured into town with their flocks, tradesmen with their wares – clothing, travelling equipment to replace things broken or lost, religious scripts, mementos of the haj, and so on. In the final month of preparation the early pilgrims began to arrive, long strings of camels carrying dusty, happy travellers, their faces alight with the feeling Bistami remembered from the year before, a year which seemed to have gone so fast and yet his own haj at the same time seemed as if it were on the far side of a great abyss in his mind. He could not call up in himself the feeling that he saw on their faces. He was no pilgrim this time, but a resident, and he found himself feeling some of the residents' resentment, that his peaceful village, like a big madressa really, was swelling to a ridiculous engorgement, as if a great family of enthusiastic relatives had descended on them all at once. Not a happy way of thinking of it, and Bistami set himself guiltily to a full round of prayers, fasting, and aid of the influx, especially those exhausted or sick: leading them to khittas and finas and caravanserai and hostelries, throwing himself into a routine to make himself feel he was more in the spirit of the haj. But daily exposure to the ecstatic faces of the pilgrims reminded him how far he was from that. Their faces were alight with God. He saw how clearly faces revealed the soul, they were like windows into a deeper world.

So he hoped that his pleasure at greeting the pilgrims from Akbar's court was obvious on his face. But Akbar himself had not come, nor any of his immediate family, and no one in the group looked at all happy to be there, or to see Bistami. The news from home was ominous. Akbar had become critical of his ulema. He received Hindu rajas, and listened sympathetically to their concerns. He had even begun openly to worship the sun, prostrating himself four times a day before a sacred fire, abstaining from meat, alcohol and sexual intercourse. These were Hindu practices, and indeed on every Sunday he was initiating twelve of his amirs in his service. The neophytes placed their heads directly on Akbar's feet during this ceremony, an extreme form of prostration known as sijdah, a form of submission to another human being that was blasphemous to Muslims. And he had not been willing to fund much of a pilgrimage; indeed, he had had to be convinced to send any at all. He had sent Shaikh Abdul Nabi and Malauna Abdulla as a way of exiling them, just as he had Bistami the year before. In short, he appeared to be falling away from the faith. Akbar, falling away from Islam!

And, Abdul Nabi told Bistami bluntly, many at the court blamed him, Bistami, for this change in Akbar. It was a matter of convenience only, Abdul Nabi assured him. 'Blaming someone who is far away is safest for all, you see. But now they have it that you were sent to Mecca with the idea of reforming you. You were babbling about the light, the light, and you were sent away, and now Akbar is worshipping the sun like a Zoroastrian or some pagan from the ancient times.'

'So I can't return,' Bistami said.

Abdul Nabi shook his head. 'Not only that, but I judge that it isn't even safe for you to stay here. If you do, the ulema may accuse you of heresy, and come and take you back for judgment. Or even judge you here.'

'You're saying I should leave here?'

Abdul Nabi nodded, slowly and deeply. 'Surely there are more interesting places for you than Mecca. A qadi like you can find good work to do, anywhere the ruler is a Muslim. Nothing will happen during the haj, of course. But when it's over.

Bistami nodded and thanked the shaikh for his honesty.

He realized that he wanted to leave anyway. He didn't want to stay in Mecca. He wanted to go back to Akbar, and the timeless hours in Chishti's tomb, and live in that space for ever; but if that was not possible, he would have to begin his tariqat again, and wander in search of his real life. He recalled what had happened to Shams when the disciples of Rumi got tired of Rumi's infatuation with his friend. Shams had disappeared, never to be seen again, some said tied to rocks and thrown in a river. If people in Fatepur Sikri thought that Akbar had found his Shams in Bistami – which struck Bistami as backwards – but they had spent a lot of time together, more than seemed explicable; and no one else knew what had gone on between them in those meetings, how much it had been a matter of Akbar teaching the teacher. It is always the teacher who must learn the most, Bistami thought, or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

The rest of that haj was strange. The crowds seemed huge, inhuman, possessed, a pestilence consuming hundreds of sheep a day, and all the ulema like shepherds, organizing this cannibalism. Of course one could not speak of these things, but only repeat some of the phrases that had burned their way into his soul so deeply, 0 he who is He, 0 he who is He, Allah the Merciful the Compassionate. Why should I be afraid? God sets all in action. No doubt he was supposed to continue his tariclat until he found something more. After the haj one was supposed to move on.

The Maghribi scholars were the friendliest he knew, they exhibited the sufi hospitality at its finest, as well as a keen curiosity about the world. He could go back up to Isfahan, of course, but something drew him westwards. Clarified as he had been in the realm of light, he did not care to go back to the richness of the Iranian gardens. In the Quran the word for Paradise, and all of Mohammed's words for describing Paradise, came out of Persian words; while the word for Hell, in the very same suras, came from Hebrew, a desert language. That was a sign. Bistami did not want Paradise. He wanted something he could not define, a human challenge of some indefinable kind. Say the human was a mix of material and divine, and that the divine soul lived on; there must then be some purpose to this travel through the days, some movement up towards higher realms of being, so that the Khaldunian model of cycling dynasties, moving endlessly from youthful vigour to lethargic bloated old age, had to be altered by the addition of reason to human affairs. Thus the notion of the cycle being in fact a rising gyre, in which the possibility of the next young dynasty beginning at a higher level than the last time around was acknowledged and made a goal. This is what he wanted to teach, this is what he wanted to learn. Westwards, following the sun, he would find it, and all would be well.

Everywhere he went seemed the new centre of the world. When he was young, Isfahan had seemed the capital of everywhere; then Gujarat, then Agra and Fatepur Sikri; then Mecca and the black stone of Abraham, the true heart of all. Now Cairo appeared to him the ultimate metropolis, impossibly ancient, dusty and huge. The Marnlukes walked through the crowded streets with their retinues in train, powerful men wearing feathered helmets, confident in their mastery of Cairo, Egypt and most of the Levant. When Bistami saw them he usually followed for a while, as did many others, and he found himself both reminded of Akbar's pomp, and struck by how different the Marnlukes were, how they formed a jati that was brought into being anew with each generation. Nothing could be less imperial; there was no dynasty; and yet their control over the populace was even stronger than a dynasty's. It could be that everything Khaldun had said about dynastic cycling was rendered irrelevant by this new system of governance, which had not existed in his time. Things changed, so that even the greatest historian of all could not speak the last word.

Thus the days in the great old city were exciting. But the Maghribi scholars were anxious to begin their long journey home, and so Bistami helped them prepare their caravan, and when they were ready, he joined them continuing westwards on the road to Fez.