Places Of The Mind

Starfarers, 19.

"She found Zeyd at prayer, prostrated toward a Mecca he could not face and that by now perhaps existed only in his heart." (p. 159)

 In space, it will not be possible to bury bodies with feet toward the East. See here.

However, some places subsist in our imaginations:

we all keep an "appointment in Samara," even if it is not in Samarra (Maugham's personified death is feminine, like Gaiman's);

something is rotten in the state of Denmark, even if we are not in Denmark;

all roads lead to Rome even if it is not Rome;

England was once described as the "Mecca" of the pop world (etc);

"Samaritans" are no longer necessarily from Samaria;

"Hiroshima," "Nagasaki" and "Dunblane" have come to mean events, not just places (in a work by Alan Moore, "London" gains the same significance);

in 1976, someone said, "It is forty years since Spain," meaning, of course, the Civil War, not the country.

You can probably think of other transfigured place names.

Zeyd can continue to prostrate toward Mecca.

There is a Muslim story in which a man has saved to go on pilgrimage but, at the last moment, uses the money to pay for an expensive operation for a friend so that he cannot go to Mecca. His other friends, returning, congratulate him on making such a good pilgrimage and, to his surprise, assure him that, while they were in Mecca, they saw him there many times...