Chapter Two: The Paper of Tyranny and the Paper of Waking Up

Third: Pharaoh — he failed in ease, then the paper was handed back to him and he failed in hardship

Korah failed one question. Pharaoh failed the whole paper, then the replacement paper, then the last minute.

His first failure was in ease. He was given a kingdom, and rivers running beneath him, and armies, and a dread of him in men's chests; and he did not say what Solomon said, and he did not even say what Korah said. Korah credited the favour to himself; Pharaoh climbed a step higher than that in failing: he gathered the people and called out among them what no man in his senses says:

And this is as far as a candidate's conceit can carry him: not to cheat, not to tear up his paper, but to stand on the platform and announce that he is the one who set the questions.

Then a second door was opened for him. When the tongue of blessing does no good, another tongue comes: his people were seized with drought and a shortage of fruit, year after year, not to wipe them out but to remind them:

Hardship here is not the end of the reckoning; it is the bell struck in the middle of the time. A living heart wakes at the sound and goes back over its paper. But he read the hardship backwards: he took Moses and those with him for an evil omen, and made the affliction an argument against the man warning him instead of against himself. So he failed in hardship as he had failed in ease, and for the same reason: he would not admit that anyone was above him.

Then came the last minute. The water closing over, the army behind him, and the road that others had crossed by now shut. And there, with no choice left in front of him, he said at last what he had never said in his whole life. And the answer came down on him, no more than a single word and a reminder of what had gone before:

This is one of the hardest sentences in the archive of the hall. Not because it turned faith away, but because it turned the timing away. The very same words, said an hour earlier, would have been accepted; said with the hand already closed on the paper, they became ink that is not marked.

And between his two failures there is a lesson for everyone sitting in the hall: a man whom kindness does not wake is rarely woken by deprivation. The trouble was not in the kind of paper handed out, but in a hand that writes the same answer however the question changes. Had Pharaoh been given ten papers one after another, he would have written his own name at the foot of every one.

Fourth: Pharaoh's magicians — waking up in the last few minutes, and the highest price in this book

In the same hall, under the same false invigilator, and on the same day, sat a group of men who came in with the worst intention there is. They came to beat the truth by trickery, they haggled over their pay before they began, and they were promised a place close to the tyrant. That is the first line on their papers, and the Qur'an did not hide it from them.

Then came the moment that makes their story the most hopeful story in this hall. They saw the sign and they knew it. The men of the craft knew it before anybody else, because nobody knows the limits of a craft like those who work in it, and they know where what hands can make comes to an end and where something of another kind begins. So they fell down in prostration on the spot that had been the stage of their trick a moment before, and declared their faith in a Lord who had not been in their reckoning when they walked in:

Here the scene turned over. The false invigilator sees his own papers torn up in front of everyone, so he threatens with the worst he has: hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, and bodies hung up on the trunks of trees. And it is a serious threat, not a manoeuvre; a man who can carry it out and does not hesitate to.

Their answer was among the most astonishing things ever said by men so new to faith that not one hour of a single day had passed over them:

Then in another place they said still more plainly what they wanted out of this bargain:

Look at what happened in those few minutes. Men who walked in haggling over pay that would not last walked out having struck a completely different bargain: they accepted that their limbs be cut off and their bodies raised on the trunks of trees, in exchange for the first line of their papers being forgiven. They did not ask to be saved from the punishment in front of them; they asked that what lay behind them be erased. And this is the highest price paid in this book: not money, not standing, not time, but whole bodies, paid over in a single hour, for a certainty a few minutes old.

And they did not ask for delay or for a lighter sentence, and they did not say: give us until we have left, and then we will believe in secret. They declared it in the place where they had gone wrong, and in front of the crowd they had gone wrong in front of; and that on its own is one of the doors of correction: that the truth be given back from where it was taken.

And so they stand as an argument against everyone who says: it is too late, the black line has run too long, and there is no room left in the time. They and Pharaoh are in the same scene, and between them they draw the line exactly: the difference between what is accepted and what is turned away is not how much black has gone before, but where the turning back stands in relation to the bell.