ll not be able to avoid it tonight. But remember, you have
no head for it."

Daoud was about to retort sharply, but he swallowed the impulse. Such
unnecessary advice was the cardinal's way of allaying his terror. He had
never told Ugolini about the training in resistance to drugs he had
undergone with Sheikh Saadi. Al-koahl, the intoxicating element in wine,
could affect his body but not his mind.

* * * * *

"This is a very dangerous practice," Sheikh Saadi said as he crouched
over a small cooking pot suspended on a tripod above a low fire. "But it
is now a necessary one for you."

Whatever was bubbling in the pot gave off a strange, cloying odor that
Daoud found frightening and seductive at the same time. They were in the
inner garden of Saadi's small house in al-Fustat, the oldest quarter of
El Kahira.

Daoud half sat, half reclined on a pile of cushions. He leaned back and
saw that the stars were fewer and the sky was lighter. They had been up
all night drinking kaviyeh.

The liquid Saadi was brewing now smelled nothing like kaviyeh. Studying
the simmering, sweet-smelling liquid, Saadi seemed satisfied. He took
the pot off the fire and set it on a stone.

Still on his knees, the sheikh swung around to smile at Daoud. In the
firelight his face was many shades of brown and black. But his beard, in
the years Daoud had known him, had gone from gray to a white as pure as
the wool from which the Sufi took their name.

"Kneel and compose your mind," said Saadi.

Daoud rose from a sitting position to his knees. As Saadi had taught
him, and as he had practiced for many years, he visualized his mind as
an empty pool, walled with tiles. A fountain sprang up in the center of
the pool and filled it slowly with clear water. The walls of the pool
disappeared, and there was nothing but clear water in all directions,
stretching away to infinity.

Saadi seemed to know when Daoud had reached the vision of infinity, and
he spoke again.

"Think of God."

Daoud saw a mountain, a flame, the sun. None of those were God. At last
he saw the blackness of the spaces between the stars. There in the
infinite lightlessness was the dwelling place of God, like the Black
Stone in the Qa'aba. He saw the darkness that veiled God, and he locked
the idea of God in his mind.

"Now, hold the thought of God, and drink."

Saadi held a silver cup to his lips. The liquid was sweet and thick. He
swallowed, and