"Salomon saith. There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had and imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion."
FRANCIS BACON: Essays
LVIII.
 |
| Jorge Luis Borges |
The tale is portrayed as an autobiographical story narrated by a Roman soldier, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, in the ancient Egyptian town of Thebes, under the reign of the emperor Diocletian. A sleepless night, an obscure man, shredded in mystery, wounded, finds refuge in his camp, and on his death bed tells Rufus about a river whose waters bestow
immortality on whoever drinks from it. The river is nearby a place
called the City of the Immortals. Determined to find it, Rufus sets out
with his soldiers. The harsh conditions of the trip cause
many of his men to desert and eventually Rufus flees and wanders through the desert, to escape his own man's mutiny and plot to kill him.
Suddenly, as Rufus wakes up from a nightmare, he finds himself constrained in a small crevice on the side of the mountain. Down below, runs a polluted stream and Rufus jumps down to drink from it, after which he falls asleep with exhaustion. Over the next few days, Rufus begins to explore the surroundings, discovering the legendary City of the Immortals. While the city itself is abandoned, a community of cave-dwellers troglodytes inhabits the outskirts. The City of the Immortals is an incommensurable labyrinth with dead-end alleys and passages, inverted stairways, and many puzzling, nonsensical architectural constructions. Rufus, horrified and repulsed by it, describes the city it as "a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull in which teeth, organs and heads monstrously pullulate in mutual conjunction and hatred."
Original Version in Spanish:
Suddenly, as Rufus wakes up from a nightmare, he finds himself constrained in a small crevice on the side of the mountain. Down below, runs a polluted stream and Rufus jumps down to drink from it, after which he falls asleep with exhaustion. Over the next few days, Rufus begins to explore the surroundings, discovering the legendary City of the Immortals. While the city itself is abandoned, a community of cave-dwellers troglodytes inhabits the outskirts. The City of the Immortals is an incommensurable labyrinth with dead-end alleys and passages, inverted stairways, and many puzzling, nonsensical architectural constructions. Rufus, horrified and repulsed by it, describes the city it as "a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull in which teeth, organs and heads monstrously pullulate in mutual conjunction and hatred."
Original Version in Spanish:
