The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavoured to pry into the depth of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see.

  “Proceed,” I said; “herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchesi—”

  “He is an ignoramus,” interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite. In its surface were two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet, horizontally. From one of these depended a short chain, from the other a padlock. Throwing the links about his waist, it was but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key I stepped back from the recess.

  “Pass your hand,” I said, “over the wall; you cannot help feeling the nitre. Indeed, it is very damp. Once more let me implore you to return. No? Then I must positively leave you. But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power.”

  “The Amontillado!” ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered from his astonishment.

  “True,” I replied; “the Amontillado.”

  As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.

  I had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low moaning cry from the depth of the recess. It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with the more satisfaction, I ceased my labours and sat down upon the bones. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble rays upon the figure within.

  A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated—I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall; I replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I re-echoed—I aided—I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still.

  It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I had completed the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth tier. I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato. The voice said—

  “Ha! ha! ha!—he! he! he!—a very good joke indeed—an excellent jest. We shall have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo—he! he! he!—over our wine—he! he! he!”

  “The Amontillado!” I said.

  “He! he! he!—he! he! he!—yes, the Amontillado. But is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone.”

  “Yes,” I said, “let us be gone.”

  “For the love of God, Montresor!”

  “Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”

  But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud—

  “Fortunato!”

  No answer. I called again—

  “Fortunato—”

  No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in reply only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!

  The Tiger of Chao-ch‘êng

  P’U Sung Ling was the author of a huge collection of tales and legends, as familiar in China as the Arabian Nights. Biographical details are scanty, but we know that in 1651 he was a graduate of ten years’ standing. His great work has been translated as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, or Lao Tse.

  At Chao-ch‘êng there lived an old woman more than seventy years of age, who had an only son. One day he went up to the hills and was eaten by a tiger, at which his mother was so overwhelmed with grief that she hardly wished to live. With tears and lamentations she ran and told her story to the magistrate of the place, who laughed and asked her how she thought the law could be brought to bear on a tiger. But the old woman would not be comforted, and at length the magistrate lost his temper and bade her begone. Of this, however, she took no notice; and then the magistrate, in compassion for her great age and unwilling to resort to extremities, promised her that he would have the tiger arrested. Even then she would not go until the warrant had been actually issued; so the magistrate, at a loss what to do, asked his attendants which of them would undertake the job. Upon this one of them, Li Nêng, who happened to be gloriously drunk, stepped forward and said that he would; whereupon the warrant was immediately issued and the old woman went away. When our friend, Li Nêng, got sober, he was sorry for what he had done; but reflecting that the whole thing was a mere trick of his master’s to get rid of the old woman’s importunities, did not trouble himself much about it, handing in the warrant as if the arrest had been made. ‘Not so,’ cried the magistrate, ‘you said you could do this, and now I shall not let you off.’ Li Nêng was at his wits’ end, and begged that he might be allowed to impress the hunters of the district. This was conceded; so collecting together these men, he proceeded to spend day and night among the hills in the hope of catching a tiger, and thus making a show of having fulfilled his duty.

  A month passed away, during which he received several hundred blows with the bamboo, and at length, in despair, he betook himself to the Ch’êng-huang temple in the eastern suburb, where, falling on his knees, he prayed and wept by turns. By-and-by a tiger walked in, and Li Nêng, in a great fright, thought he was going to be eaten alive. But the tiger took no notice of anything, remaining seated in the doorway. Li Nêng then addressed the animal as follows:— ‘O tiger, if thou didst slay that old woman’s son, suffer me to bind thee with this cord;’ and, drawing a rope from his pocket, threw it over the animal’s neck. The tiger drooped its ears, and allowing itself to be bound, followed Li Nêng to the magistrate’s office. The latter then asked it, saying, ‘Did you eat the old woman’s son?’ to which the tiger replied by nodding its head; whereupon the magistrate rejoined, ‘That murderers should suffer death has ever been the law. Besides, this old woman had but one son, and by killing him you took from her the sole support of her declining years. But if now you will be as a son to her, your crime shall be pardoned.’ The tiger again nodded assent, and accordingly the magistrate gave orders that he should be released, at which the old woman was highly incensed, thinking that the tiger ought to have paid with its life for the destruction of her son.

  Next morning, however, when she opened the door of her cottage, there lay a dead deer before it; and the old woman, by selling the flesh and skin, was able to purchase food. From that day this became a common event, and sometimes the tiger would even bring her money and valuables, so that she became quite rich, and was much better cared for than she had been even by her own son. Consequently, she became very well-di
sposed to the tiger, which often came and slept in the verandah, remaining for a whole day at a time, and giving no cause of fear either to man or beast. In a few years the old woman died, upon which the tiger walked in and roared its lamentations in the hall. However, with all the money she had saved, she was able to have a splendid funeral; and while her relatives were standing round the grave, out rushed a tiger and sent them all running away in fear. But the tiger merely went up to the mound, and after roaring like a thunder-peal, disappeared again. Then the people of that place built a shrine in honour of the Faithful Tiger, and it remains there to this day.

  How We Arrived at the Island of Tools

  François Rabelais, French satirical writer. Born in Chinon about 1494, died in Paris in 1553. He was a cleric who practised medicine in various cities in southern France. He travelled extensively throughout France and Italy. Most famous for Pantagruel and Gargantua (1532-1564). He also published Topographiae Antiquae Romae Epistola (1534), Supplicatio pro Apostasia (1535) and La Sciomachie (1549).

  We ballasted our stomachs well, and sailed on, the wind at our stern; with our main mizzen aloft, we reached Tool Island in less than two days. It was deserted land with a vast number of trees bearing hoes, mattocks, pickaxes, scythes, sickles, spades, trowels, hatchets, pruning bills, saws, shears, adzes, scissors, pincers, shovels, augers and wimbles. Others bore daggers, poniards, dirks, knives, scimitars, broadblades, cutlasses, rippers, knives and arrows.

  Did you wish a tool or weapon, you had but to shake the tree: it fell at your feet like a plum. What is more, it fell snugly to earth to meet a hollow stalk of scabbard-grass which enclosed it like a sheath. You had to take care it did not land on your head, on your foot or on any other part of your body, since, to be sheathed properly, it fell point downward. It might thus seriously wound any one who was not spry.

  Below another kind of tree—I don’t know its name—I saw various species of tall grasses that looked like pikestaves, lancehilts, spear-shafts, halberdshafts, partisan hafts, handles and stakes. These grew all the way up to the trees, where heads, steels, points, helves, blades and hafts met; the trees furnishing the appropriate blade for each wooden utensil, as carefully as fond mothers provide coats for infants ere they grow out of swaddling clothes.

  In order to convince you that Plato, Anaxagoras and Democritus (no mean philosophers!) were right when they assigned intellect and feeling to plants, I must add that these trees were in reality animals, if you will. How did they differ from beasts? They had skin, flesh, tissues, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, glands, bones, marrow, humors, matrices, brains and articulation. These were not immediately apparent, as in the case of animals, but existed and functioned none the less, as Theophrastus proved in his Treatise on Plants. These trees differed from animals merely in that their heads (i.e. trunks) grew downwards, their hair (i.e. roots) was invisible, their feet (i.e. branches) kicked out into the air. These trees, in other words, looked like a man or beast standing on his head.

  From leagues hence, and weeks aforetime, you, O my beloved venereals, feel, in your sciatic legs and rheumatic shoulders, the coming of rain, wind and calm. Your very bones presage a change of weather. So these trees, through root, stock, sap and gum, sensed the kind of staff growing beneath them, and prepared a blade to suit it.

  To be sure, all things, God excepted, are subject to error: even Nature is not exempt, since Nature, too, produces deformities and monstrosities. Occasionally, these trees wrought amiss. A pikestaff, growing high aloft the earth, rose to meet a tool-bearing tree, and found itself accidentally fastened, not to a metal head, but to a broom. (What matter? That grotesque implement would serve the better to scour the chimney.) A spearshaft, pushing up from the ground, might meet a pair of garden shears? (Very good: it would serve to trim trees and rid the garden of caterpillars!) The haft of a halberd found itself joined to the blade of a scythe, with results I can describe only as hermaphroditic in appearance. (Why worry? It would do yeoman service in the mowing season.)

  Verily, to put one’s trust in the Lord is a noble thing!

  We returned to the ships. On our way, I glimpsed, behind God knows what bushes, God knows what people, doing God knows what, and God knows how. They were sharpening God knows what blades, which they held in God knows what place, and wielded to God knows what advantages . . .

  The Music On The Hill

  Saki (pseudonym of H. H. Munro), English writer born at Akyab, Burma, died in 1916 in World War I in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. His work includes The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900), Not So Stories (1902), When William Came (1913), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), The Stories of Saki (1930).

  Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent Ironside might have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcester fight. She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of small struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her, and usually she had just managed to come through winning. And now she felt that she had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltoun, ‘Dead Mortimer’ as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its group of satellite watering-places and ‘settling him down,’ in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was his country house.

  ‘You will never get Mortimer to go,’ his mother said carpingly, ‘but if he once goes he’ll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney—’ and the dowager had shrugged her shoulders.

  There was a sombre almost savage wildness about Yessney that was certainly not likely to appeal to town-bred tastes, and Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more sylvan than ‘leafy Kensington.’ She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. Distrust of town-life had been a new thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she called ‘the Jermyn-Street-look’ in his eyes as the woods and heather of Yessney had closed in on them yesternight. Her will-power and strategy had prevailed; Mortimer would stay.

  Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuschia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered.

  ‘It is very wild,’ she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; ‘one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out.’

  ‘The worship of Pan never has died out,’ said Mortimer. ‘Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.’

  Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as mere aftergrowths, but it was at least something new and hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on any subject.

  ‘You don’t really believe in Pan?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘I’ve been a fool in most things,’ said Mortimer quietly, ‘but I’m not such a fool as not to believe in Pan
when I’m down here. And if you’re wise you won’t disbelieve in him too boastfully while you’re in his country.’

  It was not till a week later, when Sylvia had exhausted the attractions of the woodland walks round Yessney, that she ventured on a tour of inspection of the farm buildings. A farmyard suggested in her mind a scene of cheerful bustle, with churns and flails and smiling dairymaids, and teams of horses drinking knee-deep in duck-crowded ponds. As she wandered among the gaunt grey buildings of Yessney manor farm her first impression was one of crushing stillness and desolation, as though she had happened on some lone deserted homestead long given over to owls and cobwebs; then came a sense of furtive watchful hostility, the same shadow of unseen things that seemed to lurk in the wooded combes and coppices. From behind heavy doors and shuttered windows came the restless stamp of hoof or rasp of chain halter, and at times a muffled bellow from some stalled beast. From a distant corner a shaggy dog watched her with intent unfriendly eyes; as she drew near it slipped quietly into its kennel, and slipped out again as noiselessly when she had passed by. A few hens, questing for food under a rick, stole away under a gate at her approach. Sylvia felt that if she had come across any human beings in this wilderness of barn and byre they would have fled wraith-like from her gaze. At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon a living thing that did not fly from her. Astretch in a pool of mud was an enormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman’s wildest computation of swine-flesh, and speedily alert to resent and if necessary repel the unwonted intrusion. It was Sylvia’s turn to make an unobtrusive retreat. As she threaded her way past rickyards and cowsheds and long blank walls, she started suddenly at a strange sound—the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and equivocal. Jan, the only boy employed on the farm, a tow-headed, wizen-faced yokel, was visibly at work on a potato clearing half-way up the nearest hill-side, and Mortimer, when questioned, knew of no other probable or possible begetter of the hidden mockery that had ambushed Sylvia’s retreat. The memory of that untraceable echo was added to her other impressions of a furtive sinister ‘something’ that hung around Yessney.