The chapter
Behind a barrier of iron and molten copper, sealed in the age of Dhul-Qarnayn, waits the third calamity of the Ten. The Qur'an tells the construction like an engineering report: the two mountains, the people who "could scarcely understand speech," the request, and the method: "Bring me sheets of iron… blow… bring me molten copper to pour over it." Then the builder's disclaimer, the sentence every empire forgets to write: "This is a mercy from my Lord; but when the promise of my Lord comes, He will make it level, and the promise of my Lord is ever true."
The Prophet ﷺ saw the first crack in his own lifetime, and woke from sleep with his face red: "Woe to the Arabs from an evil that has drawn near: today a gap has been opened in the barrier of Yajuj and Majuj like this," and he made a circle of his thumb and finger. Zaynab bint Jahsh asked the question that hangs over every age of outward strength: "O Messenger of Allah, will we be destroyed while the righteous are among us?" He said: "Yes, when filth prevails."
Their release is fixed in the sequence by Muslim 2937: in the era of Isa, after the Dajjal, Allah reveals to him: "I have brought out servants of Mine against whom no one has power to fight, so gather My servants to at-Tur." Then the flood of men: "from every height they swarm." The first companies drink the lake of Tiberias dry; the last say: there was once water here. They reach Jerusalem's mount and shoot their arrows at the sky, and the arrows return stained: "We have conquered the earth and the heaven," they conclude: the creature's arithmetic at its most complete and most wrong.
No army engages them. The prophet of Allah and his companions besieged on the mountain turn to du'a, and Allah ends the unfightable horde with the smallest soldiers among His hosts: naghaf, worms in their necks, "and they fall dead as one soul dies." The earth reeks; the believers cannot descend for the stench and the fat; so Allah sends birds with necks like camels to carry the corpses away, and a rain that washes the earth "until it is left like a mirror." Then the command to the soil: bring out your blessing, and a company shelters under one pomegranate's rind.
The Codex places the lesson beside the first Flood: water drowned the deniers then; a flood of humanity is dissolved by worms now. Scale has never once been the operative variable. "Until, when Yajuj and Majuj are opened, and they, from every height, swarm, and the true promise draws near…" The next verse is the Hour's own vocabulary; after them, the signs stop being events in the world and start being events in the sky.