On the next day came the potter whose shop was in the same street as that of the baker. ‘In the five years of our marriage,’ he said to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘my wife had not been able to conceive. At the end of the first day’s work after the building of the tower she came here and stepped on every tile that was in the pattern, saying while she did so the names of Allah. For seven evenings she came here and did this. Now is her womb quickened with life. I beg that this wholly inadequate offering be incorporated in one of your tiles dedicated to Allah, The Generous One.’
Bembel Rudzuk sighed. ‘Having accepted the money of the baker I cannot refuse yours,’ he said. ‘I shall do with it as you request.’
‘Wonderful are the ways of Allah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk after the potter had gone. ‘For such a little time was Hidden Lion permitted to go its uncorrupted way! Yesterday I did a foolish thing and today I am forced to continue in my foolishness. Already is the integrity of the work marred physically and spiritually. Two of the tiles have been mutilated for this primitive good-luck commerce and now there will be no end to it. Yesterday the Imam scowled at me; today he will laugh: I have become a vendor of good-luck charms.’
‘Then don’t let them give you any more money,’ I said.
‘Too late,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I must go on as I have begun. Striving too hard after wisdom has made me a fool.’
The visits of the baker and the potter made us aware that Hidden Lion had a life of its own in those evening hours when we were not there. The pregnancy of the potter’s wife reminded me that it had not been days but weeks since the tiles had begun to cover the square. People had been walking on the tiles, dancing on them, kissing them, counting them, contemplating them, acting in various special ways upon them, doing whatever they were moved by the place, the pattern, and the desire of their hearts to do. In the days that followed it was not single visitors who came but several at once, then more and more who waited patiently to tell Bembel Rudzuk how their wishes had been gratified and to give him their offering large or small for the work.
The Imam and the Rabbi were often to be seen observing what was going on. Bembel Rudzuk was right: the Imam, although not actually laughing, was smiling broadly. The Rabbi had on his face a particularly Jewish look: the pensive look of a man who while smiling almost fondly at people who are being childish is at the same time well aware that these childish people may at any moment require his life of him.
Firouz, a few days after his instructions as to dress, horses, and weapons, was reminded by the Rabbi’s yellow turban and belt that I was not similarly distinguishable. He questioned me about this with some severity and I told him that as a eunuch I could not count myself a member of the Jewish congregation. He then asked the Rabbi if that was so. The Rabbi, buttoning me with his eye, said that it was so. I expected Firouz to say that exclusion from the congregation did not cancel my Jewish status in dhimma matters but he did not say that; he looked thoughtful and he never broached the subject again.
At this time the pattern was still expanding, it had not yet covered the whole square. Children, I noticed, were particularly fond of walking and dancing the shape of the unfinished edges. It became evident to me that the forward edge of a pattern’s visible expansion is attractive, it excites in people and in things a desire to shape themselves to it, to meet it and move with its advance. I speak of the forward edge of the pattern’s visible expansion because I had become more and more strongly aware that the visual manifestation of a pattern comes only after the pattern is already in existence and already infinite: the visible expansion is only a finite tracing of what, being infinite, cannot further expand.
It was at this time also that I noticed that Hidden Lion in its abstractness was capable of activating in my vision more than the serpents, pyramids, lions, and enclaves of apparent disorder that I have described: there rose up from the motion and consciousness of the pattern an apparition of Jerusalem, a phantom of place unseen. It was that Jerusalem of my ignorance, that inn-sign Jerusalem of coarse and vivid colour, the solid geometry of its forms tawny-stoned, golden-domed, purple-shadowed, the aerial geometry of its light and shade rising with the forms transparently upon the air over Hidden Lion. Sometimes it was there, sometimes not. I was uncertain of the meaning of this apparition; sometimes I thought one thing, sometimes another. Sometimes I tried to move my mind away from it.
Firouz of course remained attentive to our activities. Seeing people give money to Bembel Rudzuk and seeing the money then mortared into the tiles he said to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘What is this commerce that you do with your geomancy? What do you give for this money that you take?’
Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘It is not a commerce of my choosing but I don’t know how to stop it; to refuse this money that is offered gratefully to Allah would be to deny the giver a part in the pattern.’
‘Will you accept money from me as well?’ said Firouz.
‘For what?’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘What have you had from this pattern?’ He didn’t say the pattern’s name, we only used that between us. To everyone else it was simply ‘the pattern’.
‘One night I stood at the top of your tower,’ said Firouz, ‘and there came to me a thought of great profundity.’
I didn’t like to think of Firouz at the top of our tower, I didn’t like to think of any thought that might have come to him there. Clearly Bembel Rudzuk didn’t want to take the money, he didn’t want to accept Firouz into the membership of Hidden Lion but he didn’t feel easy about saying no. ‘Your profound thought,’ he said to Firouz, ‘surely it would have come to you anywhere.’
‘Indeed not,’ said Firouz; ‘it came to me while I was contemplating the inwardness and outwardness of this particular pattern; I am convinced that it could not have come to me anywhere else. You have taken money from anyone who has offered it to you, I have seen you do it. Am I alone to be excluded from this multiplicity of people who have become unified with your pattern?’
‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk miserably, ‘I have no wish to exclude you.’
Firouz took Bembel Rudzuk’s hand and pressed a piece of gold into it. ‘You see how I value this,’ he said. ‘To have my own tile in this great pattern! Tell me, what is the name of it?’
‘The name of what?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘The name of this pattern,’ said Firouz. ‘This design that is so mystical in the simplicity of its complexity, surely it has a name?’
‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who am I to put a name to a pattern? Let each person who looks at it think of it with or without a name as Allah wills.’
‘Your humility is overwhelming,’ said Firouz. ‘It flattens me utterly. And yet, modest as you are, probably when you think of this pattern you think of it with a name.’
Bembel Rudzuk shrugged. ‘Mostly I don’t think of it, I simply become absorbed in it thoughtlessly.’
‘Ah!’ said Firouz. ‘Thoughtless absorption! Yes, yes, I understand that absolutely: one simply becomes one with the everything, one is free for a time from the burden of one’s self. What bliss! And yet, and yet — returning to the world and its burdens one puts names to things. So it is that I have lost myself in this pattern, but returning to the world I look at this abstraction with which I have merged; I turn my head this way and that way, I see twisting serpents, moving pyramids; suddenly there leaps forward the face of a lion, then it is gone again. “Ah!” say I, “I have been with Hidden Lion!’” With that he did his regular heel-turn and walked turningly away, but stopped after only a few steps and turned back towards us. ‘I was forgetting to ask,’ he said, ‘what name of Allah you’ll be writing on the underside of my tile.’