Collected Fictions (10 page)

"From that time forth, that figure, sometimes in the dress of the Sudanese, sometimes in uniform, but ever with a veil upon its face, crept always into the visions. Though it was never absent, we could not surmise who it might be. And yet the appearances within the mirror of ink, at first momentary or unmoving, became now more complex; they would unhesitatingly obey my commands, and the tyrant could clearly follow them. In these occupations, both of us, it is true, sometimes became exhausted. The abominable nature of the scenes was another cause of weariness; there was nothing but tortures, garrotes, mutilations, the pleasures of the executioner and the cruel man.

"Thus did we come to the morning of the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmajat. The circle of ink had been poured into the palm, the benzoin sprinkled into the chafing-dish, the invocations burned. The two of us were alone. The Afflicted One commanded me to show him a just and irrevocable punishment, for that day his heart craved to see a death. I showed him soldiers with tambours, the stretched hide of a calf, the persons fortunate enough to look on, the executioner with the sword of justice. The Afflicted One marvelled to see this, and said to me:
It is Abu Kir, the man that slew thy brother Ibrahim, the
man that will close thy life when I am able to command the knowledge to convoke these figures
without thy aid.
He asked me to bring forth the condemned man, yet when he was brought forth the Afflicted One grew still, because it was the enigmatic man that kept the white cloth always before his visage. The Afflicted One commanded me that before the man was killed, his mask should be stripped from him. I threw myself at his feet and said:
Oking of time and substance and peerless essence of the
century, this figure is not like the others, for we know not his name nor that of his fathers nor
that of the city which is his homeland. Therefore, Oking, I dare not touch him, for fear of
committing a sin for which I shall be held accountable.
The Afflicted One laughed and swore that he himself would bear the responsibility for the sin, if sin it was. He swore this by his sword and by the Qur'an. Then it was that I commanded that the condemned man be stripped naked and bound to the stretched hide of the calf and his mask removed from him. Those things were accomplished; the horrified eyes of Yakub at last saw the visage—which was his own face. In fear and madness, he hid his eyes. I held in my firm right hand his trembling hand and commanded him to look upon the ceremony of his death. He was possessed by the mirror; he did not even try to turn his eyes aside, or to spill out the ink. When in the vision the sword fell upon the guilty neck, he moaned and cried out in a voice that inspired no pity in me, and fell to the floor, dead.

"Glory to Him Who does not die, and Who holds within His hand the two keys, of infinite Pardon and infinite Punishment."

(From Richard Francis Burton,
The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa)*

MAHOMED'S DOUBLE

Since the idea of Mahomed is always connected with religion in the minds of Mahomedans, therefore in the spiritual world some Mahomed or other is always placed in their view. It is not Mahomed himself, who wrote the Koran, but some other who fills his place; nor is it always the same person, but he is changed according to circumstances. A native of Saxony, who was taken prisoner by the Algerines, and turned Mahomedan, once acted in this character. He having been a Christian, was led to speak with them of the Lord Jesus, affirming that he was not the son of Joseph, but the Son of God himself. This Mahomed was afterwards replaced by others. In the place where that representative Mahomed has his station, a fire, like a small torch, appears, in order that he may be distinguished; but it is visible only to Mahomedans.

The real Mahomed, who wrote the Koran, is not at this day to be seen among them. I have been informed that at first he was appointed to preside over them; but being desirous to rule over all the concerns of their religion as a god, he was removed from his station, and was sent down to one on the right side near the south. A certain society of Mahomedans was once instigated by some evil spirits to acknowledge Mahomed as a god, and in order to appease the sedition Mahomed was raised up from the earth or region beneath, and produced to their view; and on this occasion I also saw him. He appeared like corporeal spirits, who have no interior perception. His face was of a hue approaching to black; and I heard him utter these words, "I am your Mahomed," and presently he seemed to sink down again.

(From Emanuel Swedenborg,
Vera Christiana Religio
[1771])*

The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell

Mark Twain,
Life on the Mississippi.
New York, 1883.

Bernard De Voto,
Mark Twain's America.
Boston, 1932.

The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro

Philip Gosse,
The History of Piracy.
London, Cambridge, 1911.*

The Widow Ching—Pirate

Philip Gosse,
The History of Piracy.
London, Cambridge, 1911.

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

Herbert Asbury,
The Gangs of New York.
New York, 1927.

The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan

Frederick Watson,
A Century of Gunmen.
London, 1931.

Walter Noble Burns,
The Saga of Billy the Kid.
New York, 1925.*

The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

A. B. Mitford,
Tales of Old Japan.
London, 1912.

Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv

Sir Percy Sykes,
A History of Persia.
London, 1915.

---------,
Die Vernichtung der Rose,
nach dem arabischen Urtext übertragen von Alexander Schulz. Leipzig, 1927.

(1941)

The eight stories* in this book require no great elucidation. The eighth ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is a detective story; its readers will witness the commission and all the preliminaries of a crime whose purpose will not be kept from them but which they will not understand, I think, until the final paragraph. The others are tales of fantasy; one of them—"The Lottery in Babylon"—is not wholly innocent of symbolism. I am not the first author of the story called " The Library of Babel"; those curious as to its history and prehistory may consult the appropriate page of
Sur,*
No.59, which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus and Lasswitz, Lewis Carroll and Aristotle. In "The Circular Ruins," all is unreal; in "Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote"
the unreality lies in the fate the story's protagonist imposes upon himself. The catalog of writings I have ascribed to him is not terribly amusing, but it is not arbitrary, either; it is a diagram of his mental history....

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle's procedure in
Sartor Resartus,
Butler's in
The Fair Haven
—though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on
imaginary
books. Those notes are "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain."

J. L. B.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house on Calle Gaona, in Ramos Mejia*; the encyclopedia is misleadingly titled
The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
(New York, 1917), and is a literal (though also laggardly) reprint of the 1902
Encyclopœdia Britannica.
The event took place about five years ago.

Bioy Casares* had come to dinner at my house that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book's readers—a
very
few—might divine the horrifying or banal truth. Down at that far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discovered (very late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar:
Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind.
I asked him where he'd come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded in
The
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia,
in its article on Uqbar.

The big old house (we had taken it furnished) possessed a copy of that work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Uppsala; on the first of Volume XLVII, "Ural-Altaic Languages"—not a word on Uqbar. Bioy, somewhat bewildered, consulted the volumes of the Index. He tried every possible spelling: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr ... all in vain. before he left, he told me it was a region in Iraq or Asia Minor. I confess I nodded a bit uncomfortably; I surmised that that undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction that Bioy had invented on the spur of the moment, out of modesty, in order to justify a fine-sounding epigram. A sterile search through one of the atlases of Justus Perthes reinforced my doubt.

The next day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aires. He told me he had the article on Uqbar right in front of him—in Volume XLVI* of the encyclopedia. The heresiarch's name wasn't given, but the entry did report his doc-trine, formulated in words almost identical to those Bioy had quoted, though from a literary point of view perhaps inferior. Bioy had remembered its being "copulation and mirrors are abominable,"while the text of the encyclopedia ran
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion
or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and
proclaim it.
I told Bioy, quite truthfully, that I'd like to see that article. A few days later he brought it to me—which surprised me, because the scrupulous cartographic indices of Hitter's
Erdkunde
evinced complete and total ignorance of the existence of the name Uqbar.

The volume Bioy brought was indeed Volume XLVI of the
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.
On both the false cover and spine, the alphabetical key to the volume's contents (Tor-Upps) was the same as ours, but instead of 917 pages, Bioy's volume had 921. Those four additional pages held the article on Uqbar—an article not contemplated (as the reader will have noted) by the alphabetical key. We later compared the two volumes and found that there was no further difference between them. Both (as I believe I have said) are reprints of the tenth edition of the
Encyclopœdia Britannica.
Bioy had purchased his copy at one of his many sales.

We read the article with some care. The passage that Bioy had recalled was perhaps the only one that might raise a reader's eyebrow; the rest seemed quite plausible, very much in keeping with the general tone of the work, even (naturally) somewhat boring. Rereading it, however, we discovered that the rigorous writing was underlain by a basic vagueness. Of the fourteen names that figured in the section on geography, we recognized only three (Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum), and they interpolated into the text ambiguously. Of the historical names, we recognized only one: the impostor-wizard Smerdis, and he was invoked, really, as a metaphor. The article seemed to define the borders of Uqbar, but its nebulous points of reference were rivers and craters and mountain chains of the region itself. We read, for example, that the Axadelta and the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun mark the southern boundary, and that wild horses breed on the islands of the delta. That was at the top of page 918. In the section on Uqbar's history (p. 920), we learned that religious persecutions in the thirteenth century had forced the orthodox to seek refuge on those same islands, where their obelisks are still standing and their stone mirrors are occasionally unearthed. The section titled "Language and Literature" was brief. One memorable feature: the article said that the literature of Uqbar was a literature of fantasy, and that its epics and legends never referred to reality but rather to the two imaginary realms of Mle'khnas and Tlön.... The bibliography listed four volumes we have yet to find, though the third—Silas Haslam's
History of the Land Called Uqbar
(1874)—does figure in the catalogs published by Bernard Quaritch, Bookseller.
[1]

The first,
Lesbare und lesenswer the Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien,
published in 1641, is the work of one Johannes Valentinus Andrea. That fact is significant: two or three years afterward, I came upon that name in the unexpected pages of De Quincey (
Writings,
Vol. XIII*), where I learned that it belonged to a German theologian who in the early seventeenth century described an imaginary community, the Rosy Cross—which other men later founded, in imitation of his foredescription.