Look! Strangers approaching us through the glowing fog, from the direction of the hidden city, treading through the air, floating over the hillside! And can you see? Shimmering around them: a perfect halo! And what’s that circumscribed within the halo? They’re trailing folded wings behind them!

How the figures loom larger and larger as they approach us, and then how suddenly—when it appears as though they are reaching out to greet us—they take wing and disappear!

No, they’re not angels descended from some heaven, nor visions from some dream world. These radiant fugitives are created by us: they’re merely our shadows cast on the fog, their wings bestowed by these rails that are protecting us from falling off this ledge.

And the glorious halo is a fogbow—like a rainbow, only with the colors tightly braided—produced by the light from the headlights reflecting off the inner surfaces of the millions of tiny droplets of water suspended in the air in front of us, obscuring the hillside, the city, the sky. So tiny that the droplets of water interact with the very particles of light.

But we are minuscule ourselves compared to the universe, and we are innumerous as well, and there is indeed light cast upon us, so perhaps we too can—

Acknowledgments

When I began this novel, I knew that the poetry of John Keats and the words of the Quran would be integral to the development of Ishraaq’s voice. Aside from the explicitly attributed quotes, I’ve allowed myself the license of incorporating lines and phrases inspired by and adapted from these sources, as signs of Ishraaq’s journey.

Imam Zia’s sermon (Part Three, Section 19) is inspired by Abul A’la Maududi’s Towards Understanding Islam. The ideas presented there are Maududi’s, from the opening pages of his masterful treatise on the nature and meaning of Islam, which I read in a translation from the Urdu by Khurram Murad.

The John Keats speech (Part Three, Section 20) is comprised almost entirely of Keats’s own words, a mash-up of various poems and letters. The main ideas are from a letter to his brother and sister-in-law, dated April 21, 1819. Section 18 (Part Three) makes heavy use of his sonnet “To Sleep,” while Section 21 (Part Three) adapts lines from “Endymion,” and Section 35 (Part Three) repurposes “This Living Hand.” Elsewhere, I’ve drawn on lines from “A Song About Myself,” “Endymion,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “After Dark Vapors,” “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?,” “To J. H. Reynolds,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” etc.

For the quotes from the Quran included in the novel, I’ve consulted the Yusuf Ali translation, along with that wonderful online resource Quran.com, which makes available several other translations, as well as the meanings of individual Arabic words. Section 34 (Part Three) is adapted from the surah Al-Kafiroon.