Collected Stories

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni)

  a huge white dome rising in air and of vast compass. I walked all around it, but found no door thereto, nor could I muster strength or nimbleness by reason of its exceeding smoothness and slipperiness. So I marked the spot where I stood and went round about the dome to measure its circumference which I found fifty good paces.

  Moments later, a huge cloud hid the sun from him and lifting my head . . . I saw that the cloud was none other than an enormous bird, of gigantic girth and inordinately wide of wing . . .

  The bird was a Rukh and the white dome, of course, was its egg. Sindbad lashes himself to the bird’s leg with his turban, and the next morning is whisked off into flight and set down on a mountaintop, without having excited the Rukh’s attention. The narrator adds that the Rukh feeds itself on serpents of such great bulk that they would have made but one gulp of an elephant.’

  In Marco Polo’s Travels (III, 36) we read:

  The people of the island [of Madagascar] report that at a certain season of the year, an extraordinary kind of bird, which they call a rukh, makes its appearance from the southern region. In form it is said to resemble the eagle but it is incomparably greater in size; being so large and strong as to seize an elephant with its talons, and to lift it into the air, from whence it lets it fall to the ground, in order that when dead it may prey upon the carcass. Persons who have seen this bird assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces in extent, from point to point; and that the feathers are eight paces in length, and thick in proportion.

  Marco Polo adds that some envoys from China brought the feather of a Rukh back to the Grand Khan. A Persian illustration in Lane shows the Rukh bearing off three elephants in beak and talons; ‘with the proportion of a hawk and field mice,’ Burton notes.

  The Salamander

  Not only is it a small dragon that lives in fire, it is also (according to one dictionary) ‘an insectivorous batrachian with intensely black smooth skin and yellow spots.’ Of these two characters, the better known is the imaginary, and the Salamander’s inclusion in this book will surprise no one. In Book X of his Natural History, Pliny states that the Salamander ‘is so intensely cold as to extinguish fire by its contact, in the same way that ice does’; later he thinks this over, observing sceptically that if what magicians said about the Salamander were true, it would be used to put out house fires. In Book XI, he speaks of a four-footed, winged insect called the ‘pyrallis’ or ‘pyrausta’ living ‘in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire’; if it comes out into the air and flies a short distance, it will instantly die. The Salamander in man’s memory has incorporated this now forgotten animal.

  The phoenix was used as an argument by theologians to prove the resurrection of the flesh; the Salamander, as a proof that bodies can live in fire. In Book XXI of the City of God by St Augustine, there is a chapter called Whether an earthly body may possibly be incorruptible by fire, and it opens in this way:

  What then shall I say unto the unbelievers, to prove that a body carnal and living may endure undissolved both against death and the force of eternal fire. They will not allow us to ascribe this unto the power of God, but urge us to produce it to them by some example. We shall answer them that there are some creatures that are indeed corruptible, because mortal, and yet do live untouched in the middle of the fire.

  Poets, also, flock to the Salamander and phoenix as devices of rhetorical emphasis. Quevedo in the sonnets of the fourth book of his Spanish Parnassus, which ‘celebrates the exploits of love and beauty,’ writes:

  Hago verdad la Fénix en la ardiente Llama, en que renaciendo me renuevo; Y la virilidad del fuego pruebo,Y que es padre y que tiene descendiente.La Salamandra fría, que desmiente Noticia docta, a defender me atrevo, Cuando en incendios, que sediento bebo, Mi corazón habita y no los siente.[I testify to the truth of the Phoenix in burning flames, since I also burn and renew myself, and I prove the maleness of fire, which can be a father and have offspring.I dare as well defend the cold Salamander, refuted by men of learning, since my heart dwells in fires, which thirstily I drink, and feels no pain.]

  In the middle of the twelfth century, a forged letter supposedly sent by Prester John, the king of kings, to the Emperor of Byzantium, made its way all over Europe. This epistle, which is a catalogue of wonders, speaks of gigantic ants that dig gold, and of a River of Stones, and of a Sea of Sand with living fish, and of a towering mirror that reflects whatever happens in the kingdom, and of a sceptre carved of a single emerald, and of pebbles that make a man invisible or that light up the night. One of its paragraphs states: ‘Our realm yields the worm known as the salamander. Salamanders live in fire and make cocoons, which our court ladies spin and use to weave cloth and garments. To wash and clean these fabrics, they throw them into flames.’

  Of these indestructible linens or textiles, which are cleansed by fire, there is mention in Pliny (XIX, 4) and in Marco Polo (I, 39). The latter attests that the Salamander is a substance, not an animal. Nobody, at first, believed him; goods woven of asbestos and sold as the skins of Salamanders were an unanswerable proof of the Salamander’s existence.

  Somewhere in his Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini writes that at the age of five he saw a tiny animal like a lizard playing in the fire. He told this to his father, who said that the animal was a Salamander and gave his son a sound beating so that the remarkable vision, seldom vouchsafed to man, would stick forever in the boy’s memory.

  To the alchemists the Salamander was the spirit of the element fire. In this symbol and in an argument of Aristotle’s, preserved for us by Cicero in the first book of his On the Nature of the Gods, we find the reason why men believed in the Salamander of legend. The Sicilian physician Empedocles of Agrigentum had formulated the proposition of the four ‘roots,’ or elements of matter, whose opposition and affinity, governed by Discord and Love, made up the cosmic process. There is no death; there are only particles of ‘roots,’ which the Romans were to call ‘elements,’ and which are either falling apart or coming together. These elements are fire, earth, air, and water. They are eternal and none is stronger than any other. Now we know (now we think we know) that this doctrine is false, but men once thought it valuable, and it is generally held that it was on the whole beneficial. Theodor Gomperz has written that ‘The four elements which make up and support the world, and which still survive in poetry and in popular imagination, have a long and glorious history.’ The system demanded parity: since there were animals of earth and water, animals of fire were needed. For the dignity of science it was essential that Salamanders exist. In a parallel fashion, Aristotle speaks of animals of the air.

  Leonardo da Vinci had it that the Salamander fed on fire and in this way renewed its skin.

  The Satyrs

  Satyrs was the Greek name for them; Rome called them Fauns, Pans, and Sylvans. In the lower part of the body they were goats; their torso, arms, and head were human. Satyrs were thickly covered with hair and had short horns, pointed ears, active eyes, and hooked noses. They were lascivious and fond of their wine. They attended Bacchus in his rollicking and bloodless conquest of India. They set ambushes for nymphs, relished dancing, and their instrument was the flute. Country people paid homage to them, offering them the first fruits of the harvest. Lambs were also sacrificed in their honour.

  In Roman times, a specimen of these demigods was surprised asleep in his mountain den in Thessaly by some of Sulla’s soldiers, who brought him before their general. The Satyr uttered inarticulate sounds and was so loathsome to the eyes and nostrils that Sulla had him at once sent back to the wilderness.

  A memory of the Satyrs lived on in the medieval image of devils. The word ‘satire’ seems to have no connection with satyr; most etymologists trace satire back to satura lanx, a composite dish, hence a mixed literary composition, like the writings of Juvenal.

  Scylla

  Before becoming a monster and then turned into rocks, Scylla was a nymph with who
m Glaucus, one of the sea gods, had fallen in love. In order to win her, Glaucus sought the help of Circe whose knowledge of herbs and incantations was well known. But Circe became attached to Glaucus on sight, only she was unable to get him to forget Scylla, and so to punish her rival she poured the juice of poisonous herbs into the fountain where the nymph bathed. At this point, according to Ovid (Metamorphoses, XIV, 59-67):

  Scylla comes and wades waist-deep into the water; when all at once she sees her loins disfigured with barking monster-shapes. And at the first, not believing that these are parts of her own body, she flees in fear and tries to drive away the boisterous, barking things. But what she flees she takes along with her; and, feeling for her thighs, her legs, her feet, she finds in place of these only gaping dogs’ heads, such as a Cerberus might have. She stands on ravening dogs, and her docked loins and her belly are enclosed in a circle of beastly forms.

  She then found herself supported by twelve feet, and she had six heads, each with three rows of teeth. This metamorphosis so terrified her that she threw herself into the strait separating Italy and Sicily, where the gods changed her into rocks. During storms, sailors speak of the dreadful roaring of the breakers when driven into the uneven cavities of the rock.

  This legend is also found in the pages of Homer and Pausanias.

  The Sea Horse

  Unlike most other imaginary animals, the Sea Horse is not a composite creature; it is no more than a wild horse whose dwelling place is the sea and who comes ashore only on moonless nights when the breezes bring him the smell of mares. On some undetermined island maybe Borneo the herders hobble the king’s finest mares along the coast and hide themselves underground. Here Sindbad saw the stallion that rose from the sea, watched it leap on to the female, and heard its cry.

  The definitive edition of the Book of a Thousand and One Nights dates, according to Burton, from the thirteenth century; in this same century lived the cosmographer Zakariyya al-Qaswini who in his treatise Wonders of Creation wrote these words: ‘The sea horse is like the horse of dry land, but its mane and tail grow longer; its colour is more lustrous and its hooves are cleft like those of wild oxen, while its height is no less than the land horse’s and slightly larger than the ass’s.’ He remarks that a cross between the sea and land species produces a very beautiful breed, and singles out a certain dark pony ‘with white spots like pieces of silver.’

  An eighteenth-century Chinese traveler, Wang Tai-hai, writes:

  The sea horse usually appears along the coast in search of a mare; sometimes he is caught. His coat is black and shining, his tail is long and sweeps the ground. On dry land he goes like any other horse, is very tame, and in a day can travel hundreds of miles. But it is well not to bathe him in the river, for as soon as he sees water he recovers his ancient nature and swims off.

  Ethnologists have looked for the origin of this Islamic fiction in the Greco-Roman fiction of the wind that makes mares fertile. In the third book of the Georgics, Virgil has set this belief to verse. Pliny’s explanation (VIII, 67) is more rigorous:

  It is known that in Lusitania in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and along the Tagus, mares, when a west wind is blowing, stand facing towards it and conceive the breath of life; this produces a foal, and this is the way to breed a very swift colt, but it does not live more than three years. The historian Justinus ventures the guess that the hyperbole ‘sons of the wind,’ applied to very fast horses, gave rise to this fable.

  The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard

  Along the banks of the Huisne, an otherwise peaceful stream, there roamed during the Middle Ages a creature that became known as the Shaggy Beast (La velue). This animal had somehow managed to survive the Flood despite its exclusion from the Ark. It was the size of a bull, and it had a snake’s head and a round body buried under long green fur. The fur was armed with stingers whose wound was deadly.

  The creatures also had very broad hooves that were similar to the feet of the tortoise, and its tail, shaped like a serpent, could kill men and cattle alike. When its anger was aroused, the Shaggy Beast shot out flames that withered crops. At night it raided stables. Whenever the farmers attempted to hunt it down, it hid in the waters of the Huisne, causing the river to flood its banks and drown the valley for miles.

  The Shaggy Beast had a taste for innocent creatures, and devoured maidens and children. It would choose the purest of young womanhood, some Little Lamb (L’agnelle). One day, it waylaid one such Little Lamb and dragged her, mauled and bloody, to its lair in the riverbed. The victim’s sweetheart tracked the monster, and with a sword sliced into the Shaggy Beast’s tail, its only vulnerable spot, and cut it in two. The creature died at once. It was embalmed and its death was celebrated with fifes and drums and dancing.

  The Simurgh

  The Simurgh is an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge; Burton compares it with the eagle which, according to the Younger Edda, has knowledge of many things and makes its nest in the branches of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.

  Both Southey’s Thalaba (1801) and Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) speak of the Simorg Anka; Flaubert reduces the bird’s status to that of an attendant to the Queen of Sheba, and describes it as having orange-coloured feathers like metallic scales, a small silver-coloured head with a human face, four wings, a vulture’s talons, and a long, long peacock’s tail. In the original sources the Simurgh is a far more important being. Firdausi in the Book of Kings, which compiles and sets to verse ancient Iranian legends, makes the bird the foster father of Zal, father of the poem’s hero; Farid al-Din Attar, in the twelfth century, makes it a symbol of the godhead. This takes place in the Mantiq al-Tayr (Parliament of Birds). The plot of this allegory, made up of some 4,500 couplets, is striking. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their present anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means ‘thirty birds’; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the mountain or range of mountains that ring the earth. At the outset, some of the birds lose heart: the nightingale pleads his love for the rose; the parrot pleads his beauty, for which he lives caged; the partridge cannot do without his home in the hills, nor the heron without his marsh, nor the owl without his ruins. But finally, certain of them set out on the perilous venture; they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.

  Edward Fitzgerald translated portions of the poem under the playful title The Bird-parliament; A bird’s-eye view of Faríd-Uddín Attar’s Bird-parliament.

  The cosmographer al-Qaswini, in his Wonders of Creation, states that the Simorg Anka lives for seventeen hundred years and that, upon the coming of age of its son, the father burns himself on a funeral pyre. ‘This,’ observes Lane, ‘reminds us of the phoenix.’

  Sirens

  Through the course of time the image of the Sirens has changed. Their first historian, Homer, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us what they were like; to Ovid, they are birds of reddish plumage with the faces of young girls; to Apollonius of Rhodes, in the upper part of the body they are women and in the lower part seabirds; to the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry), ‘half woman, half fish.’ No less debatable is their nature. In his classical dictionary Lemprière calls them nymphs; in Quicherat’s they are monsters, and in Grimal’s they are demons. They inhabit a western island, close to Circe’s, but the dead body of one of them, Parthenope, was found washed ashore in Campania and gave her name to the famed city now called Naples. Strabo, the geographer, saw her grave and witnessed the games held periodically in her memory.

 
The Odyssey tells that the Sirens attract and shipwreck seamen, and that Ulysses, in order to hear their song and yet remain alive, plugged the ears of his oarsmen with wax and had himself lashed to the mast. The Sirens, tempting him, promised him knowledge of all the things of this world:

  For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.

  A legend recorded by the mythologist Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca, tells that Orpheus, aboard the Argonauts’ ship, sang more sweetly than the Sirens and that because of this these creatures threw themselves into the sea and were changed into rocks, for their fate was to die whenever their spell went unheeded. The sphinx, also, threw herself from a precipice when her riddle was solved.

  In the sixth century, a Siren was caught and baptized in northern Wales, and in certain old calendars took her place as a saint under the name Murgen. Another, in 1403, slipped through a breach in a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of her death. Nobody could make out her speech, but she was taught to weave and she worshipped the cross as if instinctively. A chronicler of the sixteenth century argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave and that she was not a woman because she was able to live in water.