The Last of the Angels Read Online Free PDF

however, objected to this idea, explaining instead that the flag represented leadership and that he would become a police officer. The boy’s father asked him to keep this dream quiet and to refrain from telling it to anyone.
    Qadriya Musa, in point of fact, when disclosing her hopes that her son would become a deputy lieutenant, was merely disclosing her envy for the good fortune enjoyed by the household of the gravedigger’s daughter Husniya, who had worked herself to the bone until her son became a deputy lieutenant. Then jugs of oil, sacks of rice and wheat, coops of chickens, and baskets of eggs began to arrive at her home every day as bribes offered to her son. These were always delivered by uniformed policemen. In fact, over and beyond that, Deputy Lieutenant Najib, who was no more than twenty, would always arrive in a Jeep that brought him to the door of his home, while every policeman he encountered, even those he did not know, saluted him smartly. All this had generated widespread envy, and the hearts of neighborhood girls pounded whenever he passed. They would deliberately peek out at the street or raise the curtain normally blocking the doorway of their home, hopeful that his eye would light on one of them and that he would send his mother to ask for her hand in marriage.
    No matter how it might be, the statement that the boy Burhan Abdallah had not understood at the time was destined to influence his later life. It was true that the three men with long beards and white robes had said that in his dream, but he had heard it previously in a fog-shrouded, magical valley where he had found himself on opening a secret box bequeathed by his ancestors, for he had stumbled upon a wooden chest in a forgotten corner of his home. The boy was really an artful fellow and even thought of himself as an original thinker. He was fascinated by his father’s prediction that he would be a prophet, since he considered himself worthy of such a mission because he had memorized the whole Qur’an in only a few months. During that time, from observing the letters and discovering their relationship to the spoken words, he had learned to read and write, although he had not confided this secret to anyone, especially since neither of his parents was well placed to discover this fact because neither of them had ever learned to read or write. Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri, for his part, spent most of his time placing the feet of student troublemakers in a foot press so he could beat their soles with his stick.
    Burhan Abdallah came upon that amazing chest by accident. There was a large chamber in the house with two marble benches, as was typical, and a dirt entryway served as a kitchen. This earth-floored foyer stretched back to a dark, decaying room that had no natural light. Alongside the large chamber was a kind of abandoned storeroom, which hardly anyone entered, since it was overrun by scorpions. Above this abandoned pantry was an upper room, which was stuccoed with gypsum and which had two small, square windows opening on the street. Reached by broken stone steps, the upper room was also abandoned, even though light entered it during the day. Spread across one side were bits and pieces of strange and discarded items left there for years or perhaps even a century. No one in the household had ever thought of investigating these forgotten artifacts. The room was simply there, offering neither threat nor benefit. Perhaps no one felt like cleaning away the dust of the past, but another, more important consideration was the fact that this part of the house was swarming with jinn and therefore forgotten, as if it did not exist.
    The boy—who had never seen a jinni—stealthily slipped away once, however, and climbed to the upper room, thinking that he might find the house’s good jinni, about whom his mother had told him tales, for every home has a good jinni guarding it. Although this escapade was not devoid of