“…people began to devour one another.”

He had not been able to return to the duty house that night, but rather wandered the midnight world with his grim escort and wide-eyed donkey boy like ghosts weeping over a dead world, come back to visit a place they did not recognize from the bright days of their life. They visited the Merchants’ Quarter, but none of the servants who answered the many well-barred wooden doors or well-guarded curtained doors, admitted to being the doorman of the Morocco Bengar el Fez.

The House of Lamb itself was closed by night, and was an eatery that entertained only the richest men of Cairo, serving—even into the depths of the famine—choice goats, lambs and kids brought living before the dining party at great expense from the far reaches of the world. Babyrs had eaten there himself and knew the Moroccan on sight if not by name. Although he offered to take Abd al-Latif back to the eatery in the coming day, the doctor declined, wanting to speak with the Commandant first about investigating such a touchy matter.

The Commandant had returned the next day and burned 36 flesh-eaters at the stakes, an event which Abd al-Latif had avoided witnessing by going out calling on his patients, many of them being women who related tales of rascals and beggars and ruffians diving, jumping, running, and fighting to seize their babies. He took the drastic step of admonishing all husbands of households who could not afford servants to go to the market for their daily needs—such as clean water which was brought in on camelback—while the mother and child remained safely locked away.

He did find that the flesh-eating mania was still chiefly afflicting the poor, but that some cousins and uncles were not being trusted near the children of their relatives, and that many elderly members of affluent families had gone missing, though their sons and daughters had not reported them missing to the City Guard.

The wealthy, the Good People of Cairo, were becoming suspect.

“Are these man pies or dog pies?”

The adhan’s call came in the predawn, summoning him to prayer.

He had noticed that Shamballah Ali no longer prayed.

It was the first day after the Commandant’s return. The air was still heavy with agonizing death. Determined to avoid the road lined with stakes by taking the back alley into the city with Niko and Babyrs, he rose with a start, and then recalled his duty to pray.

To his surprise, as he woke, he noticed Shamballah Ali was not staring at him with the one unblinking eye as he habitually did. Ali was paging through his book, slowly, methodically, unblinkingly, regarding the pages of Sina’s medical text like the eye of an ancient infidel idol.

Put aback by this, and noticing that Shamballah seemed not to have noticed him waking, he began to dress for prayer.

He took a small drink of opium water, mindful to regulate his dosage, and still the insane man had an eye only for the book.

He oriented himself toward Mecca and kneeled upon his mat and tried his utmost to remember God. He was distracted by the slow turning of the pages, each page turned on a 16 count, meaning this insane, semi-literate one-eyed former slaver was reading a line a second of the most sublime medical text produced by man’s hand!

‘God forgive me, but I must quit this room. I am sick to my soul that his madness might infect me.’

He rose and dressed for the day, and still the insane man had an eye only for the book, turning each and every page every 16 seconds.

‘Why, I did not even know that Shamballa Ali could read. He had always maintained a slave for reading and writing.’

He stepped away into the doorway, and still, the silent madman continued to read.

‘I suppose someone must read Sina these days, as I have lost the heart for it.’

He stopped at the top of the ladder and listened, and yes, on a 16 count the page turned.

‘Oh God what has my life come to, praying on this ladder instead of my mat, missing my poor Ibrahm and old Uncle Ibis—both perhaps perished or suffering out there along the terrible road, and of whom the Commandant’s men say there is no sign, as if they vanished! Have I sinned so? Is this my punishment for studying the body rather than the Koran?’

A page turned again in the room that he might never be able to sleep soundly in again, and he hurried down the ladder like a servant boy himself.