The remark was quite spontaneous, but it hurt Isa very much, particularly as he was usually unlucky at card games; so much so that he had had to withdraw a hundred pounds from the bank to cover his losses.

Ibrahim Khairat asked Shaikh As-Salhubi about Abd al-Halim Pasha Shukri.

“He went abroad at the right time,” the Shaikh replied, “and with the appropriate excuse. He won’t be coming back, of course.”

“It’s no better than it is here,” said Samir Abd al-Baqi. “The foreign policy page reads like the obituaries!”

“Then the world really is threatened by total destruction,” Abbas Sadiq said.

“It’s threatened by destruction,” said Isa as he dealt the hand, “whether it’s war or peace!”

“You only philosophize when you’re feeling in low spirits,” Shaikh As-Salhubi said with a laugh. “Maybe your flood of good luck is drying up!”

Isa lost the round even though he had three tens. “One word from you,” he told the Shaikh angrily, “would bring a whole town bad luck.”

“Rubbish!” As-Salhubi replied with a laugh. “I’ve chased the present generation with my blessed words since the day it was born. And just look what’s happened to it!”

Isa put his whole heart and soul into the game. He enjoyed the ardor, hope, enthusiasm, and absorption of it all with a languid vitality. Everything was forgotten, even history and the disasters which it had brought with it. He joined pleasure in its crazy existence. There was at least seven pounds on the table. He pinned his hopes on a solitary ace and then drew a card. There was the ace smiling at him with its red face. But then Ibrahim threw down his flush like a thunderbolt. His nervous system leapt several times, just as it had done on the day when the dissolution of the political parties was announced. He wondered what his wife was doing at that moment; would she be talking to her mother? Maybe the old woman would be telling her that they had accepted their particular problem, but it did not seem to have accepted them. He’s out of work, she would be saying, expelled because of his bad reputation; and he doesn’t worship God either. Too bad for Qadriyya if she got in his way. She had been married several times and was barren, naturally barren, and she was at least ten years older than him too!

When he came to himself again, Shaikh As-Salhubi was carrying on with what he had been saying earlier. “That’s why we’re in the age of fundamental principles,” he was saying, “just like the days when the great religions were in conflict with each other!”

“What hope have the small nations got in life,” asked Samir Abd al-Baqi, “if the great nations don’t disagree with each other?”