Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 13

He was undoubtedly talking about anotherDamian,but something made me ask what the young mestizo was yelling.

"Curses," the colonel said, "which is what you yell in charges."

"That may be," saidAmaro,"but he was also yellingViva Urquiza! "*

We fell silent. Finally, the colonel murmured: "Not as though he was fighting at Masoller, but at Cagancha or IndiaMuerta,*a hundred years before."

Then, honestly perplexed, he added: "I commanded those troops, and I'd swear that this is the first time I've heard mention of anyDamian."

We could not make him remember.

InBuenos Aires,another incident was to make me feel yet again that s.h.i.+ver that the colonel's forgetfulness had produced in me. Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Mitch.e.l.l's English bookshop, I came uponPatricioGannon one afternoon, standing before the eleven delectable volumes of the works of Emerson. I asked him how his translation of "The Past" was going. He said he had no plans to translate it; Spanish literature was tedious enough already without Emerson. I reminded him that he had promised me the translation in the same letter in which he'd written me the news ofDamian'sdeath. He asked who this"Damian"was. I told him, but drew no response. With the beginnings of a sense of terror I saw that he was looking at mestrangely, so I bluffed my way into a literary argument about the sort of person who'd criticize Emerson -a poet more complex, more accom- plished, and unquestionably more remarkable, I contended, than poor Edgar AllanPoe.

There are several more events I should record. In April I had a letter fromCol. Dionisio Tabares;he was no longer confused-now he remem- bered quite well theEntre Rios boywho'd led the charge at Masoller and been buried by his men that night at the foot of the hill. In July I pa.s.sed throughGualeguaychu;I couldn't manage to findDamian'srun-down place-n.o.body remembered him anymore. I tried to consult the store- keeper, Diego Abaroa, who had seen him die; Abaroa had pa.s.sed away in the fall. I tried to call to mindDamian'sfeatures; months later, as I was brows- ing through some alb.u.ms, I realized that the somber face I had managed to call up was the face of the famous tenor Tamberlick, in the role of Otello.

I pa.s.s now to hypotheses. The simplest, but also the least satisfactory, posits twoDamians-the coward who died inEntre Riosin 1946, and the brave man who died at Masoller in 1904. The problem with that hypothesis is that it doesn't explain the truly enigmatic part of it all: the curious com- ings and goings of Col. Tabares' memory, the foregetfulness that wipes out the image and even the name of the man that was remembered such a short time ago. (I do not, cannot, accept the even simpler hypothesis-that I might have dreamed the first remembering.) More curious yet is thesuper- natural explanation offered byUlrike von Kuhlmann.PedroDamian,Ul- rikesuggests, died in the battle, and at the hour of his death prayed to G.o.d to return him toEntre Rios.G.o.d hesitated a second before granting that fa- vor, and the man who had asked it was already dead, and some men had seen him killed. G.o.d, who cannot change the past, although He can change the images of the past, changed the image of death into one of uncon- sciousness, and the shade of the man fromEntre Riosreturned to his nativeland. Returned, but we should recall that he was a shade, a ghost. He lived in solitude, without wife, without friends; he loved everything, possessed everything, but from a distance, as though from the other side of a pane of gla.s.s; he "died," but his gossamer image endured, like water within water. That hypothesis is not correct, but it ought to have suggested the true one (the one that today Ibelieve to be the true one), which is both simpler and more outrageous. I discovered it almost magically in Pier Damiani's trea- tise t.i.tledDe omnipotentia,which I sought out because of two lines from Canto XXI of theParadiso- two lines that deal with a problem of ident.i.ty. In the fifth chapter of his treatise, Pier Damiani maintains, against Aristotle and Fredegarius of Tours, that G.o.d can make what once existed never to have been. I read those old theological arguments and began to understand the tragic story of don PedroDamian.This is the way I imagine it: Damianbehaved like a coward on the field of Masoller, and he dedicated his life to correcting that shameful moment of weakness. He returned toEntreRios;he raised his hand against no man, he "marked"

no one,* he sought no reputation for bravery, but in the fields ofnancay,dealing with the brushy wilderness and the skittish livestock, he hardened himself. Little by little he was preparing himself, unwittingly, for the miracle. Deep inside himself, he thought: If fate brings me another battle, I will know how to deserve it. For forty years he awaited that battle with vague hopefulness, and fate at last brought it to him, at the hour of his death. It brought it in the form of a delirium, but long ago the Greeks knew that we are the shadows of a dream. In his dying agony, he relived his battle, and he acquitted himself like a man - he led the final charge and took a bullet in the chest. Thus, in 1946, by the grace of his long-held pa.s.sion, PedroDamiandied in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between the winter and spring of the year 1904. TheSumma Theologicadenies that G.o.d can undo, unmake what once existed, but it says nothing about the tangled concatenation of causes and effects - which is so vast and so secret that it is possible that not asingle re- mote event can be annulled, no matter how insignificant, without canceling the present. To change the past is not to change a mere single event; it is to annul all its consequences, which tend to infinity. In other words: it is to create two histories of the world. In what we might call the first, PedroDamiandied inEntre Riosin 1946; in the second, he died at Masoller in 1904. This latter history is the one we are living in now, but the suppression of the former one was not immediate, and it produced the inconsistencies I have reported. InCol. Dionisio Tabareswe can see the various stages of thisprocess: at first he remembered thatDamianbehaved like a coward; then he totally forgot him; then he recalled his impetuous death. The case of the storekeeper Abaroa is no lessinstructive; he died, in my view, because he had too many memories of don PedroDamian.

As for myself, I don't think I run a similar risk. I have guessed at and recorded a process inaccessible to humankind, a sort of outrage to rational- ity; but there are circ.u.mstances that mitigate that awesome privilege. For the moment, I am not certain that I have always written the truth. I suspect that within my tale there are false recollections. I suspect that PedroDamian(if he ever existed) was not called PedroDamian,and that I re- member him under that name in order to be able to believe, someday in the future, that his story was suggested to me by the arguments ofPier Dami-ani.Much the same thing occurs with that poem that I mentioned in the first paragraph, the poem whose subject is the irrevocability of the past. In 1951 or thereabouts I will recall having concocted a tale of fantasy, but I will have told the story of a true event in much the way that naive Virgil, two thousand years ago, thought he was heralding the birth of a man though he had foretold the birth of G.o.d.

PoorDamian!Death carried him off at twenty in a war he knew noth- ing of and in a homemade sort of battle-yet though it took him a very long time to do so, he did at last achieve his heart's desire, and there is per- haps no greater happiness than that.

Deutsches Requiem

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.

Job 13:15

My name is Otto DietrichzurLinde.One of my forebears,Christoph zurLinde,died in the cavalry charge that decided the victory ofZorndorf.Dur- ing the last days of 1870, my maternal great-grandfather,Ulrich Forkel,was killed in the Marchenoir forest by French sharpshooters; Captain DietrichzurLinde,my father, distinguished himself in 1914 at the siege of Namur, and again two years later in the crossing of the Danube.

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tis significant thatzurLindehas omitted his most ill.u.s.trious forebear, the theo- logian and Hebraist Johannes Forkel (1799-1846), who applied Hegel's dialectics to Christology and whose literal translation of some of the Apocrypha earned him the censure of Hengstenberg and the praise ofThiloand Gesenius.[Ed.]

As for myself, I am to be shot as a torturer and a murderer. The court has acted rightly; from the first, I have confessed my guilt. Tomorrow, by the time the prison clock strikes nine, I shall have entered the realms of death; it is natural that I should think of my elders, since I am come so near their shadow- since, somehow, I am they.

During the trial (which fortunately was short) I did not speak; to ex- plain myself at that point would have put obstacles in the way of the verdict and made me appear cowardly. Now things have changed; on this night that precedes my execution, I can speak without fear. I have no desire to be par- doned, for I feel no guilt, but I do wish to be understood. Those who heed my words shall understand the history of Germany and the future history of the world. I know that cases such as mine, exceptional and shocking now, will very soon be unremarkable. Tomorrow I shall die, but I am a symbol of the generations to come.

I was born inMarienburg in1908. Two pa.s.sions, music and metaphysics, now almost forgotten, allowed me to face many terrible years with bravery and even happiness. I cannot list all my benefactors, but there are two names I cannot allow myself to omit: Brahms and Schopenhauer. Fre- quently, I also repaired to poetry; to those two names, then, I would add an- other colossal Germanic name: William Shakespeare. Early on, theology had held some interest for me, but I was forever turned from that fantastic discipline (and from Christianity) by Schopenhauer with his direct argu- ments and Shakespeare and Brahms with the infinite variety of their worlds. I wish anyone who is held in awe and wonder, quivering with ten- derness and grat.i.tude, transfixed by some pa.s.sage in the work of these blessed men- anyone so touched-to know that I too was once transfixed like them-I the abominable.

Nietzsche andSpenglerentered my life in 1927. A certain eighteenth-century author observes that no man wants to owe anything to his contem- poraries; in order to free myself from an influence that I sensed tobe oppressive, I wrote an article t.i.tled"Abrechnung mit Spengler,"wherein I pointed out that the most unequivocal monument to those characteristics that the author called Faustian wasnot Goethe's miscellaneous drama2

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Other nations live naively, in and for themselves, like minerals or meteors; Ger- many is the universal mirror that receives all others-the conscience of the world(dasWeltbewutsein).Goethe is the prototype of that ec.u.menical mind. I do not criticize him, but I do not see him as the Faustian man of Spengler's treatise.

but rather a poem written twenty centuries ago, theDe rerumnatures*I did, however, give just due to the sincerity of our philosopher of history, his radi- cally German(kerndeutsch)and military spirit. In 1929 I joined the party.

I shall say little about my years of apprentices.h.i.+p. They were harder for me than for many others, for in spite of the fact that I did not lackvalor, I felt no calling for violence. I did, however, realize that we were on the threshold of a new age, and that that new age, like the first years of Islam or Christianity, demanded new men. As individuals, my comrades were odious to me; I strove in vain to convince myself that for the high cause that had brought us all together, we were not individuals.

Theologians claim that if the Lord's attention were to stray for even one second from my right hand, which is now writing, that hand would be plunged into nothingness, as though it had been annihilated by a lightless fire. No one can exist, say I, no one can sip a gla.s.s of water or cut off a piece of bread, without justification. That justification is different for every man;I awaited the inexorable war that would test our faith. It was enough for me to know that I would be a soldier in its battles. I once feared that we would be disappointed by the cowardice of England and Russia. Chance (or des- tiny) wove a different future for me-on March 1, 1939, at nightfall, there were riots in Tilsit, which the newspapers did not report; in the street be- hind the synagogue, two bullets pierced my leg, and it had to be ampu- tated.

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It is rumored that the wound had extremely serious consequences.[Ed.]

Days later, our armies entered Bohemia; when the sirens announced the news, I was in that sedentary hospital, trying to lose myself, forget my- self, in the books of Schopenhauer. On the windowsill slept a ma.s.sive, obese cat-the symbol of my vain destiny.

In the first volume ofParergaundParalipomena,I read once more that all things that can occur to a man, from the moment of his birth to the mo- ment of his death, have been predetermined by him. Thus, all inadvertence is deliberate, every casual encounter is an engagement made beforehand, every humiliation is an act of penitence, every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more cunning consolation than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes; that individual theology reveals a secret order, and in a marvelous way confuses ourselves with the deity. What unknown purpose (I thought) had made me seek out that eve- ning, those bullets, this mutilation? Not the fear of war-I knew that; some- thing deeper. At last I believed I understood. To die for a religion is simpler than living that religion fully; battling savage beasts in Ephesus is less diffi- cult (thousands of obscure martyrs did it) than being Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ; a single act is quicker than all the hours of a man. The battle and the glory areeasy; Raskolnikov's undertaking was more difficult than Napoleon's. On February 7, 1941, I was madesubdirectorof the Tarnowitz concentration camp.

Carrying out the duties attendant on that position was not something I enjoyed, but I never sinned by omission. The coward proves himself among swords; the merciful man, the compa.s.sionate man, seeks to be tested by jails and others' pain. n.a.z.ism is intrinsically amoral act, a stripping away of the old man, which is corrupt and depraved, in order to put on the new. In bat- tle, amid the captains' outcries and the shouting, such a transformation is common; it is not common in a crude dungeon, where insidious compas - sion tempts us with ancient acts of tenderness. I do not write that word "compa.s.sion" lightly: compa.s.sion on the part of the superior man isZarathustra's ultimate sin. I myself (I confess) almost committed it when the famous poet David Jerusalem was sent to us from Breslau.

Jerusalem was a man of fifty; poor in the things of this world, perse- cuted, denied, calumniated, he had consecrated his genius to hymns of hap- piness. I think I recall that in theDichtung der Zeit, AlbertSorgelcompared him to Whitman. It is not a happy comparison: Whitman celebrates the uni- versea priori, in a way that is general and virtually indifferent; Jerusalem takes delight in every smallest thing, with meticulous and painstaking love. He never stoops to enumerations, catalogs. I can still recite manyhexameters from that profound poem t.i.tled "Tse Yang, Painter of Tigers," which is virtu- ally striped with tigers, piled high with transversal, silent tigers, riddled through and through with tigers. Nor shall I ever forget the soliloquy"RosenkranzTalks with the Angel," in which a sixteenth-century London moneylender tries in vain, as he is dying, to exculpate himself, never suspect- ing that the secret justification for his life is that he has inspired one of his clients (who has seen him only once, and has no memory even of that) to create the character Shylock. A man of memorable eyes, sallow skin, and a beard that was almost black, David Jerusalem was the prototypical Sephardic Jew, although he belonged to the depraved and hated Ashken.a.z.im. I was severe with him; I let neither compa.s.sion nor his fame make me soft. I had realized many years before I met David Jerusalem that everything in the world can be the seed of a possible h.e.l.l; a face, a word, a compa.s.s, an adver- tis.e.m.e.nt for cigarettes-anything can drive a person insane if that person cannot manage to put it out of his mind. Wouldn't a man be mad if he con- stantly had before his mind's eye the map of Hungary? I decided to apply this principle to the disciplinary regimen of our house, and .. .

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Here, the excision of a number of lines has been unavoidable.[Ed.]

In late 1942, Jerusalem went insane; on March 1, 1943, he succeeded in killing himself.

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In neither the files nor the published work ofSorgeldoes Jerusalem's name ap- pear. Nor does one find it in the histories of German literature. I do not, however, think that this is an invented figure. Many Jewish intellectuals were tortured in Tarnowitz on the orders of Otto DietrichzurLinde,among them the pianistEmma Rosenzweig."David Jerusalem" is perhaps a symbol for many individuals. We are told that he died on March i, 1943; on March i, 1939, the narrator had been wounded at Tilsit.[Ed.]

I do not know whether Jerusalem understood that if I destroyed him, it was in order to destroy my own compa.s.sion. In my eyes, he was not a man, not even a Jew; he had become a symbol of a detested region of my soul. I suffered with him, I died with him, I somehow have been lost with him; that was why I was implacable.

Meanwhile, the grand days and grand nights of a thrilling war washed over us. In the air we breathed there was an emotion that resembled love. As though the ocean were suddenly nearby, there was a tonic and an exultation in the blood. In those years, everything was different-even the taste of one's sleep. (I may never have been happy, but it is common knowledge that misery requires paradises lost.) There is no man who does not long for plenitude-the sum of the experiences of which a man is capable; there is no man who does not fear being defrauded of a part of that infinite inheri- tance. But my generation has had it all, for first it was given glory, and then defeat.

In October or November of 1942, my brotherFriedrichdied in the sec- ond Battle of El Alamein, on the Egyptian sands; months later, an aerial bombardment destroyed the house we had been born in; another, in late 1943, destroyed my laboratory. Hounded across vast continents, the Third Reich was dying; its hand was against all men, and all men's hands against it. Then, something remarkable happened, and now I think I understand it. I believed myself capable of drinking dry the cup of wrath, but when I came to the dregs I was stopped by an unexpected flavor-the mysterious and al- most horrific taste of happiness. I tested several explanations; none satisfied me.I feel a contentment in defeat, I reflected, because secretly I know my own guilt, and only punishment can redeem me. ThenI feel a contentment in de- feat, I reflected,simply because defeat has come, because it is infinitely con- nected to all the acts that are, that were, and that shall be, because to censure or deplore a single real act is to blaspheme against the universe. I tested those ar- guments, as I say, and at last I came to the true one.

It has been said that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists. That is equivalent to saying that there is no debate of an abstract nature that is not an instance of the debate between Aristotle and Plato.

Down through the centuries and lat.i.tudes, the names change, the dialects, the faces, but not the eternal antagonists. Likewise, the history of nations records a secret continuity. When Arminius slaughtered the legions of Varus in a swamp, when he slashed their throats, he did not know that he was a forerunner of a German Empire; Luther, the translator of the Bible, never suspected that his destiny would be to forge a nation that would destroy the Bible forever;Christoph zurLinde,killed by a Muscovite bullet in 1758, somehow set the stage for the victories of 1914; Hitler thought he was fighting fora nation, but he was fighting forall nations, even for those he attacked and abomi- nated. It does not matter that hisego wasunaware of that; his blood, hiswill, knew. The world was dying of Judaism, and of that disease of Judaismthat is belief in Christ; we proffered it violence and faith in the sword. That sword killed us, and we are like the wizard who weaves a labyrinth and is forced to wander through it till the end of his days, or like David, who sits in judgment on a stranger and sentences him to death, and then hears the revelation:Thou art that man. There are many things that must be de- stroyed in order to build the new order; now we know that Germany was one of them. We have given something more than our lives; we have given the life of our beloved nation. Let others curse and others weep; I rejoice in the fact that our gift is...o...b..cular and perfect.

Now an implacable age looms over the world. We forged that age, we who are now its victim. What does it matter that England is the hammer and we the anvil? What matters is that violence, not servile Christian acts of timidity, now rules. If victory and injustice and happiness do not belong to Germany, let them belong to other nations. Let heaven exist, though our place be in h.e.l.l.

I look at my face in the mirror in order to know who I am, in order to know how I shall comport myself within a few hours, when I face the end. My flesh may feel fear; Imyself donot.

Averroes'Search

S'imaginant que la tragedie n'est autre chose que l'art de louer....

Ernest Renan,Averroes,48 (1861)

Abu-al-WalidMuhammad ibn-Ahmad ibn-Rushd (it would take that long name, pa.s.sing through "Benraist" and "Avenris" and even"Aben Ra.s.sad"and"FiliusRosadis," a hundred years to become"Averroes")was at work on the eleventh chapter of his workTahfutal-Tahafut("Destruction of the Destruction"), which maintains, contrary to the Persian ascetic al-Ghazzali, author of theTahfut al-Falsifah("Destruction of Philosophers"), that the deity knows only the general laws of the universe, those that apply not to the individual but to the species. He wrote with slow a.s.surance, from right to left; the shaping of syllogisms and linking together of vast paragraphs did not keep him from feeling, like a sense of wonderful well-being, the cool, deep house around him. In the depths of the siesta, loving turtledoves purred throatily, one to another; from some invisible courtyard came the murmur of a fountain; something in the flesh ofAverroes,whose ancestors had come from the deserts of Arabia, was grateful for the steadfast presence of the water. Below lay the gardens of flowers and of foodstuffs; below that ran the bustling Guadalquivir; beyond the river spread the beloved city ofCordoba,as bright as Baghdad or Cairo, like a complex and delicate instru- ment; and, encirclingCordoba(this,Averroescould feel too), extending to the very frontier, stretched the land of Spain, where there were not a great many things, yet where each thing seemed to exist materially and eternally. His quill ran across the page, the arguments, irrefutable, knitted to- gether, and yet a small worry cloudedAverroes'happiness. Not the sort of worry brought on by theTahfut,which was a fortuitous enterprise, but rather a philological problem connected with the monumental work that would justify him to all people-his commentary on Aristotle. That Greek sage, the fountainhead of all philosophy, had been sent down to men toteach them all things that can be known; interpreting Aristotle's works, in the same way theulemas interpret the Qur'an, was the hard task that Ave-rroeshad set himself. History will record few things lovelier and more mov- ing than this Arab physician's devotion to the thoughts of a man separated from him by a gulf of fourteen centuries. To the intrinsic difficulties of the enterprise we might add thatAverroes,who knew neither Syriac nor Greek, was working from a translation of a translation.

The night before, two doubtful words had halted him at the very portals of the Poetics. Those words were "tragedy" and "comedy." He had come across them years earlier, in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in all of Islam could hazard a guess as to their meaning. He had pored through the pages of Alexander of Aphro-disias, compared the translations of the Nestorian Hunayn ibn-Ishaq and Abu-BashrMata-and he had found nothing. Yet the two arcane words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics-it was impossible to avoid them.Averroeslaid down his quill. He told himself (without conviction) that what we seek is often near at hand, put away the ma.n.u.script of theTahfut,and went tothe shelf on which the many volumes of blind ibn-Sina'sMoqqm,copied by Persian copyists, stood neatly aligned. Of course he had already consulted them, but he was tempted by the idle pleasure of turning their pages. He was distracted from that scholarly distraction by a kind of song. He looked out through the bars of the balcony; there below, in the narrow earthen courtyard, half-naked children were at play. One of them, standing on the shoulders of another, was clearly playing at being a muezzin: his eyes tightly closed, he was chanting the muezzin's monoto- nous cry,There is no G.o.d but Allah. The boy standing motionless and hold- ing him on his shoulders was the turret from which he sang; another, kneeling, bowing low in the dirt, was the congregation of the faithful. The game did not last long-they all wanted to be the muezzin, no one wanted to be the wors.h.i.+ppers or the minaret.Averroeslistened to them arguing in the "vulgar" dialect (that is, the incipient Spanish) of the Muslim ma.s.ses of the Peninsula. He opened Khalil'sKitbal-'Aynand thought proudly that in all ofCordoba(perhaps in all of Al-Andalus) there was no other copy of the perfect work-only this one, sent him byEmir Ya'qubal-Mansur from Tangier. The name of that port reminded him that the traveler abu-al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, who had returned from Morocco, was to dine with him that evening at the home of the Qur'anist Faraj. Abu-al-Hasan claimed to have reached the kingdoms of the Sin Empire [China]; with that peculiar logic born of hatred, his detractors swore that he had never set foot in China and that he had blasphemed Allah in the temples of that land. Thegathering would inevitably last for hours;Averroeshurriedly went back to his work on the Tahfut.He worked until dusk.

At Faraj's house, the conversation moved from the incomparable virtues of the governor to those of his brother the emir; then, out in the gar- den, the talk was of roses. Abu-al-Hasan (having never seen them) said there were no roses like those which bedeck the villas of Andalusia. Faraj was not to be suborned by flattery; he observed that the learned ibn-Qutaybah had described a superb variety ofperpetual rose which grows in the gardens of Hindustan and whose petals, of a deep crimson red, ex- hibit characters readingThere is no G.o.d but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet. He added that abu-al-Hasan must surely be acquainted with those roses. Abu-al-Hasan looked at him in alarm. If he said yes, he would be judged by all, quite rightly, to be the most pliable and serviceable of impos- tors; if he said no, he would be judged an infidel. He opted to breathe that Allah held the keys that unlock hidden things, and that there was no green or wilted thing on earth that was not recorded in His Book. Those words belong to one of the first suras of the Qur'an; they were received with a reverential murmur. Puffed up by that victory of dialectics, abu-al-Hasan was about to declare that Allah is perfect in His works, and inscrutable. ButAverroes,prefiguring the distant arguments of a still-problematic Hume, interrupted.

"I find it less difficult to accept an error in the learned ibn-Qutaybah, or in the copyists," he said, "than to accept that the earth brings forth roses with the profession of our faith."

"Precisely. Great words and true," said abu-al-Hasan.

"Some traveler, I recall," mused the poet Abd-al-Malik, "speaks of a tree whose branches put forth green birds. I am pained less by believing in that tree than in roses adorned with letters."

"The birds' color," saidAverroes,"does seem to make that wonder easier to bear. In addition, both birds and the fruit of trees belong to the natural world, while writing is an art. To move from leaves to birds is easier than to move from roses to letters."

Another guest indignantly denied that writing was an art, since the original Book of the Qur'an-the mother of the Book- predates the Cre- ation, and resides in heaven. Another spoke of Al-Jahiz of Basra, who had stated that the Qur'an is a substance that can take the form of man or animal-an opinion which appears to agree with that of the people who at- tribute to the Qur'an two faces. Faraj discoursed long on orthodox doc- trine. The Qur'an, he said, is one of the attributes of Allah, even as HisMercy is; it may be copied in a book, p.r.o.nounced with the tongue, or re- membered in the heart, but while language and signs and writing are the work of men, the Qur'an itself is irrevocable and eternal.Averroes,who had written his commentary on theRepublic, might have said that the mother of the Book is similar, in a way, to the Platonic Idea, but he could see that the- ology was one subject utterly beyond the grasp of abu-al-Hasan.

Others, who had come to the same realization, urged abu-al-Hasan to tell a tale of wonder. Then, like now, the world was horrible; daring men might wander through it, but so might wretches, those who falldown in the dust before all things. Abu-al-Hasan's memory was a mirror of secret acts of cowardice.

What story could he tell? Besides, the guests demanded marvels, while the marvelous was perhaps incommunicable: the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it deigns to be described with the same words. Abu-al-Hasan pondered; then, he spoke: "He who wanders through climes and cities," his unctuous voice began, "sees many things worthy of belief. This, for instance, which I have told but once before, to the king of the Turks. It took place in Sin-i Kalal [Canton], where the River of the Water of Life spills into the sea."

Faraj asked whether the city lay many leagues from that wall erected by Iskandar dhu-al-Quarnayn [Alexander of Macedonia] to halt the advance of Gog and Magog.

"There are vast deserts between them," abu-al-Hasan said, with inad- vertent haughtiness. "Forty days must akafila [caravan] travel before catch- ing sight of its towers, and another forty, men say, before the kafila stands before them. In Sin-i Kalal I know of no man who has seen it or seen the man who has seen it."

For one moment the fear of the grossly infinite, of mere s.p.a.ce, mere matter, laid its hand onAverroes.He looked at the symmetrical garden; he realized that he was old, useless, unreal. Then abu-al-Hasan spoke again: "One evening, the Muslim merchants of Sin-i Kalal conducted me to a house of painted wood in which many persons lived. It is not possible to describe that house, which was more like a single room, with rows of cabinet-like contrivances, or balconies, one atop another. In these niches there were people eating and drinking; there were people sitting on the floor as well, and also on a raised terrace. The people on this terrace were playing the tambour and the lute-all, that is, save some fifteen or twenty who wore crimson masks and prayed and sang and conversed among them- selves. These masked ones suffered imprisonment, but no one could see the jail; they rode upon horses, but the horse was not to be seen; they wagedbattle, but the swords were of bamboo; they died, and then they walked again."

"The acts of madmen," said Faraj, "are beyond that which a sane man can envision."

"They were not madmen," abu-al-Hasan had to explain. "They were, a merchant told me, presenting a story."

No one understood, no one seemed to want to understand. Abu-al-Hasan, in some confusion, swerved from the tale he had been telling them into inept explanation. Aiding himself with his hands, he said: "Let us imagine that someoneshows a story instead of telling it-the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, say.* We see them retire into the cav- ern, we see them pray and sleep, we see them sleep with their eyes open, we see them grow while they are asleep, we see them awaken after three hun- dred nine years, we see them hand the merchant an ancient coin, we see them awaken in paradise, we see them awaken with the dog. It was some- thing like that that the persons on the terrace showed us that evening."

"Did these persons speak?" asked Faraj.