The Claridges, New Delhi, India, September 1982: a sprawling whitewashed hotel complex with a palm-lined courtyard and garden, and an India-shaped swimming pool. Arriving late, we slept into the morning. We woke to a slow scraping sound outside the door. I looked out into the corridor. It was the sweepers, elderly men diapered in white loin cloths, squatting as they swept the coir carpets with their bunches of branches. They stepped from foot to foot as they swept, like chickens in a yard, gathering nothing slowly. I closed the door: India would clearly take some getting used to.
A few days later, as I sprawled in a hotel armchair scanning a map of India, my random gaze suddenly lit on a place called Chitor. Chitor?! My heart began to race…
* * * *
Ten years before, we had gone to Minorca for a month during the off-season, The tramontana winds howled. We had rented one of the eerily empty villas for next to nothing and hunkered down in poverty. Shutters banged and scavenging dogs roamed the beach. The island had been deserted by tourists, but we caught the occasional glint of a lone voyeur’s binoculars.
Convinced that I had a novel in me, I typed 250 pages over the next month, inventing freely as I went along. The central pillar of the narrative, such as it was, involved four characters climbing up a (symbolic, metaphysical) spiral staircase within a tower. I based my description of the tower on a decrepit old folly I had visited in Scotland years before. I even used its name: Thoric Tower.
The holiday ended and reality intruded. We moved to Geneva, and I got a job. The novel hung peacefully in a filing cabinet, but for years it continued to polarize my random thoughts and reading. I accumulated notes about towers, made jottings on abstruse metaphysics, and so on. And inevitably it began to fade completely from my imagination.
But one day, I opened Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings to the first Being:
If you want to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world, you must climb to the top of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. There, standing on a circular terrace, one has a sweep of the whole horizon. A winding stairway gives access to this terrace, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb up. The tale runs:
On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir.
But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims. At each level the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant.
The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion; and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveller climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor.
People say that its tentacles are visible only when it reaches the middle of the staircase. It is also said that it can see with its whole body and that to the touch it is like the skin of a peach. In the course of the centuries, the A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.
That’s the full story as printed in my English edition of the book, and there is an attribution: “This legend is recorded by C.C. Iturvuru in an appendix to his now classic treatise On Malay Witchcraft (1937).“ In the original edition, I found a different attribution: “El capitán Burton registra la leyenda del A Bao A Qu en una de las notas de su versión de las Mil y una noches.“ (“Captain Burton records the legend of A Bao A Qu in one of the notes to his version of The Thousand and One Nights”). I will return to these two attributions later.
The story was definitely one for my files: a tower, metaphysics, a Being trapped in its story. It fitted snugly into my literary pretensions. And, as I thought about it, I suddenly realized that “Thoric” and “Chitor” were anagrams. This fluke helped to embed the story. Like a seed stuck in a tooth, A Bao A Qu stayed with me, and I worried at it.
* * * *
So that map spoke to me in the lobby at Claridges Hotel: a place called Chitor actually existed in the Mewar province of Rajasthan, some 600 kilometres south of Delhi.
I got out my guide books: Chitor’s main claim to fame was a splendid series of military defeats, or “sacks”. The first was in 1303, when the Alauddin Khilji, king of Delhi, besieged the town in an attempt to capture Padmini, the wife of the Rajput noble Bhim Singh. When the situation in the Fort became untenable, Bhim Singh and his men dressed for martyrdom in saffron turbans and robes, opened the gates and rode out to their deaths. Meanwhile the noblewomen, including Padmini, heaped up a great funeral pyre and jumped into the flames in a ritual suicide known as jauhar. This haunting disaster proved to be the stuff of legend, and went into songs and tales tracing the vivid decline of Rajput fortunes.
In 1535, the trick was repeated. By then, Chitor had become the local capital. The besieger this time was Bahadur Shah, the Sultan of Gujarat: 32,000 Rajput warriors rode out of the gates to their deaths in their saffron robes, and 13,000 Rajput women committed jauhar in the Fort. The numbers and logistics are preposterous, but that is what legend says.
The final sack of Chitor took place in 1568, when the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great turned his hand to reducing the excitable Rajputs. As twice before, 8,000 saffron-robed warriors rode out to their deaths, while the noblewomen leapt into the flames. While this was happening, the Rajput leader, Udai Singh, slipped off to Udaipur, where he established his new capital – and peace finally descended on Chitor, which never troubled the history books again.
Colourful though it was, the historical literature on Chitor made no mention of an A Bao A Qu. This was not really a big surprise. Although some of the stories in the Book of Imaginary Beings refer to well-known fictional “Beasts” (the Basilisk, Behemoth, Cerberus, etc.), many are new fictions dreamed up by Borges expressly for the Book – fictional fictions, as it were. A Bao A Qu now appeared to be one of these.
But, as I read on in my guide book, lulled by the sluggish historical narrative, I came to a simple declarative sentence: “There is a famed Tower of Victory in Chitor,” said the text calmly. A real Chitor and a real Tower of Victory?
So Borges had planted his story in a genuine location. How strange. By the time the Book was published, Borges was 55 and had gone completely blind. At that point in his life, apart from a decade in Europe during his adolescence, he had almost never been out of Argentina. So where did Borges find the details of the Tower of Fame at Chitor? He could only have visited India as an armchair traveller, looking over the place through the medium of the printed page. Was he really reading the histories of Rajasthan?
* * * *
For the next few weeks we concentrated on finding somewhere to live in Delhi, moving in, buying furniture. I joined three other office newcomers in a car pool, hitching rides to work with them for the first few months until my car arrived, and then taking my turn to do the office run. We became friends, and decided to drive out to Rajasthan together in convoy during the next school holiday. We would travel together as far as Jaipur, and then they would return to Delhi, and we would head for Chitor.
In the weeks before the journey, I kept turning up further bits of lore. For instance, I learned that the Nihangs, the elite corps/suicide squads of Sikh armies, use the phrase “conquering the fort of Chitor” in their slang as a euphemism for “taking a shit”. The Nihangs obviously considered themselves enviously big guys (“shooing off a tiger” was Nihang slang for “pissing”).
A local guidebook provided “a famous epigram” related to Chitor: Gadh to Chittorgarh aur sab Gadhiya. This means, roughly, “You could conquer all of the forts in the world before you could conquer Chitor”. This is either refusing to fact the facts about this most often conquered fort, or a suggestion that it is impossible to conquer anything, since nothing ever stays conquered.
I also learned about Devi Singh, Thakur of Chitora, who “was said to have killed a number of men in a hideous manner, but no charges were brought against him.” The result is that “ … even today, Chitora is another name which old people, superstitiously inclined, do not like to pronounce.”
* * * *
So we joined the convoy to the South in our new slate-blue Volkswagen. With me was my wife Diana and our two-year old son Sebastian, The car was laden with clothing, water bottles, sleeping bags, food, and books. I also brought along my ciné and still cameras, a tripod, and a tape recorder. If I was going to see the most beautiful landscape in the world, I wanted to capture it – and, who knows, there might be an almost-shapeless blue creature to film as well.
We set off in three cars on a Saturday morning in February. Apart from some early mist rolling along the road, it was perfectly clear and cool. As planned, we went in convoy as far as Jaipur, and then parted company from our friends. Leaving the dust and noise of the Pink City behind us, we started on the open road once more.
As the population dropped away, I felt alert and concentrated. This was it – we would be in Chitor by the afternoon. Vegetation and crop fields gradually thinned and gave up, leaving scrubby plains and a low rim of reddish mountains on the horizon. We were crossing India’s principal mica belt – one of the largest in the world. Whole plains reflected the sun as we sped past.
Eventually, we left the Grand Trunk Road and moved into the rural road system. This merely meant less traffic at first, fewer trucks driving you into the gutter. But every 10 km or so, the population mustered itself into towns, with the road as the main drag. We had to move at a watchful, deliberate pace through these towns, because every now and then there was a line of stones laid across the road. We skirted these using the verges, but once I had to stop and drag the stones off the road in order to get through.
At last, Chitor appeared on the horizon to our left, the hilltop plateau visible from miles away. As we approached, we could see the walls of the fort stretching across the plateau, which dropped steeply to the modern town below. Through binoculars, two major towers were visible on the plateau. I knew that one was the Tower of Fame and the other the Tower of Victory.
Running parallel to the road on the left was a railway line, with the town beyond. Our hotel was to the right. An underpass beneath the tracks was the only way from our hotel to Chitor. The hotel was, according to the receptionist, “a minor maharani’s palace” – a beautiful, perfectly symmetrical small Mughal fantasy. A deluxe double room was $2 a night, and we were the only guests.
That evening, preparing for our assault on the towers of Chitor, I unpacked my cameras, tripod, and tape recorder. The equipment was heavy, but I was out to get A Bao A Qu. I wanted to be able to prove that I had found whatever I was going to find.
* * * *
In the morning, we drove through the narrow, curving underpass beneath the railway line. The road continued straight towards the town. Chitor Fort spread across the horizon and grew upwards as we approached. The battlements and ramparts looked impregnable, unbesiegable.
We came to a bridge above the Gambheri river, which flowed through a gorge a hundred feet below, effectively separating Chitor from the rest of the world. The road crossed the bridge in a thin strip of asphalt, but there were wide mud verges and hummocks on either side. The town started beyond in a collection of gaudy blue-and-green flat-roofed houses. The usual garish lettering advertising 1,001 confections decorated the whole street front and, as everywhere, Bollywood muzak screeched from loudspeakers on every telephone pole. Crowds milled as if dazed, everyone lost in thought. We sped through the chaos and headed for the steep road leading to the Fort.
Just before the arch that market the beginning of the ascent, we passed a wasted, demented-looking boy slumped in the dirt. People walked by, intent on their errands, ignoring him. I had a disturbing moment of eye-contact with the boy and his image stayed with me as we drove on.
Chitor Fort is a single flat area of about 700 acres resting on top of a butte rising precipitously out of the flat plain. We ascended the hill in three great zigzags, through seven gates, to the western entrance of Chitor Fort and parked the car. There were few people strolling about the vast open space. Dotted among sparse greenery were ruined walls, the red-brick Fort, some administrative buildings, and, in the distance, the two temples. It was hot, dry, dusty. The place had a quiet, stunned feeling. Even the soft-drink vendors were muted and uninsistent.
We visited the jauhar room of Princess Padmini, Banbeer’s wall, and the palace of Rana Kumbha. I kept scanning the horizon, where the two towers beckoned. Which was the Tower of Victory? We had no guide, so I just chose the taller of the two – which turned out to be the Tower of Fame, which stood taller than the Tower of Victory because it was built on higher ground. Did Borges finally make a mistake?
The Tower of Fame was a Jain temple, and it brimmed with aqueous silence and chinking bells. I toiled to the top with my equipment. As I went up, I recorded my descriptions of each of the seven storeys. There were carvings of naked Jain sages, the 24 tirthankaras, as well as many species of dragon heads: bulging-eyed, some of them sighted, others blind and malevolent. I photographed the view in a panoramic sweep, then did the same with the film camera. A Bao A Qu howled at me as a wind from the far, open side of the platform.
Was this really “the loveliest landscape in the world”? It didn’t feel like it. The Tower of Fame was at the back of the plateau, and you could only see the Eastern approaches to Chitor. In any case, the view was really not remarkable: nothing but empty Rajasthani semi-desert, rocks and scrub. There was no poetry. Even the origins of the tower were crassly pedestrian – it was just a pile of carved stones put up by some rich Jain thanking his gods for commercial success. I came down disappointed.
The enthusiasm of the hunt was fading fast in the face of dusty reality. I doubted that a visit to the Tower of Victory would change that, and it didn’t. As we sat in the shade, chewing sandwiches, I read out the description in the guidebook. On the plus side, the tower was old. It had been built between 1458 and 1468 by Rana Kumba to commemorate his defeat of Mahmud Khilji, a descendent of the Pathan king who had instigated the first sack of Chitor in his lust for Padmini. On the down side, we were tired: I was weighed down by my cameras and tripod, and had the added burden of my young son on my shoulders, squirming unhappily.
We toiled up the circular staircase. It was dark and the walls writhed with stone carvings. Eventually we reached a circular room at the top and sat on a ledge. Turning our backs to what Borges called “the loveliest landscape in the world” our parched conversation turned to cold beers and Italian ice cream. It was time to return to reality. The tower worked no magic on me. I didn’t bother with any filming or photography.
* * * *
Back in the car, we drove down the steep hill with its three zigzags, and passed back through the seven gates. At the outskirts of the town, we found the demented boy again. Now he was lying face-down in the road; some liquid was seeping from his head, staining the pavement. A few children stood in the shade, looking at him – placidly, untroubled. Kids familiar with death.
We continued through the town streets, which were notably crowded. Surely there hadn’t been so many before? And why did they look so angry and defiant?
Driving on, we reached the bridge high above the Gambheri river. A cobblestone barrier had been set up across the asphalt. People at the barrier shouted and pointed back the way we had come, but we knew there was no other way to get to our hotel: we had to go forward. So I drove off the strip of asphalt and steered around the cobblestones. This took us onto the muddy, hummocky ground, where the car promptly stopped with its belly on a hump of mud. I backed up a bit, gunned the engine and drove forward at speed, bouncing off the mud and regaining the road at the far side of the barrier. The people at the barrier let out a collective screech.
The road in front of us was again blocked by the good citizens of Chitor, who waved us back angrily. They started pounding on the car. We gave up and turned around, wild faces shouting and grimacing in every window. Retracing our path, we tried to go up a side road. Men with sticks stopped us, and hammered against the side of the car.
We came to an open space near the railway underpass. Our hotel was only a hundred yards on the other side, tantalizingly close. But suddenly we were mobbed by children. They jumped onto the front and back of the car, their little fists and heels pounding on the roof and sides. They pulled at the door handles, trying to get in.
Panicked, I reversed out fast, scattering children like chaff. At this point, we decided to head back to the Fort. As we drove, people kept on leaping in front of the car, motioning us to stop, to go back, jumping away at the last moment. We got to the bridge and passed the barrier by bucking over the dirt gullies, scraping, stopping and starting again, and crossed the river. We were back in old Chitor and there was no way out: except for the road leading up to the Fort.
In a blind panic, we negotiated the three zigzags at speed, leaving smoking rubber. Hooting fiercely as we charged up the slope, we plastered the seven gates with cowering pilgrims, their arms flung back; and erupted onto the plateau.
* * * *
So there we were, in an ancient walled fort 500 metres above the bleak Rajasthani plain, besieged by thousands of inexplicably furious Rajputs. I suggested that we should hang on in the Fort until nightfall; then I would sneak down and check out the situation. “Don’t forget your saffron turban”, said the wife, who was none too keen on a personal jauhar herself. Our little boy snoozed peacefully on the back seat. He’d managed to fall asleep just as we left the Fort on the way down, and incredibly slept through the riot, the thrashing sticks at his widows and people jumping on the roof of the car right above his head.
Was there another road down? The Suraj Pol, at the back of the Fort, was the only other gap in the battlements, but this was a gate to nowhere – a steep, broken path, remains of what might at one time have been a route practicable by elephant but that now required a hang-glider.
We drove around the romantic mediaeval scenery on a unromantic modern quest, looking for a telephone. Eventually, following a sagging black wire, we reached the Archaeologist’s Office, which boasted the one instrument in the Fort: telephone number 14. A guard helped us find the hotel in a baffling Hindi telephone directory and made the connection for us.
“What’s happening?” I shouted at the receptionist. “I mean, why is the whole town angry – shouting, fighting?”
“There is no problem, sir.”
“What do you mean?” I spluttered. “The whole world wants to kill us!”
“There is no problem any more, sir.”
So we drove down and found that, indeed, there really wasn’t a problem any more. The crowds of half an hour before had magically dispersed. Apart from a few bricks in the railway underpass, there was no sign of any disturbance. We had no trouble getting back to the hotel.
We later learned that what we had driven through was a strike protesting against a tax on manufactured cotton goods. These Luddites wanted to keep using hand looms. The strikers had sealed the railway station so as not to let the manufactured goods through. That explained the little barriers we had found on the roads coming into Chitor – it was called rasta roku (block the roads), a perfectly normal strike methodology in India. Nothing personal.
That night, reflecting on the day’s events, I suddenly realised that, to a Rajput warrior stuck inside Chitor looking frantically from the Tower of Victory (the only one built at the time of the sacks), “the loveliest landscape in the world” was indeed the Rajasthani plain beyond at the hordes besieging him – the barren, scrubby, purple nothingness in the distance. Salvation. The loveliest landscape in the world was anywhere far from here.
Despite this hard-won insight, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had failed utterly. Chitor had kept its secrets, if any; it had remained inviolate. Although I had taken photos and filmed around the Tower of Fame, I had barely glanced at the Tower of Victory. I decided to do that before we left for Udaipur the next day.
* * * *
Early in the morning, before the sun started blazing from the clear blue sky, I set off alone for the Fort. I drove straight to the Tower of Victory, parked my car and extracted my cameras and a tripod. A guard lurking in the shadows at the tower door growled and refused to let me enter with my tripod. Apparently the cameras were OK, the tripod not.
He hadn’t said that yesterday. Muttering weirdly about A Bao A Qu grabbing pilgrims by the ankle, I dropped off the tripod and started up the stairs. It was dark and the air was musty.
At the platform where we had dreamed of ice cream and beer the day before, I got my camera out and peered through the viewfinder, focusing through the murk at the dragon carvings. As I did, a man walked through the wall.
Almost: I hadn’t noticed an opening at the side of the room. In the gloom, the entrance had been invisible, as the carved stone blocks had simply merged. What I had thought was a flat wall instead had depth. If you walked into the wall you came to a further staircase. On our visit the day before, we had thought we were at the top of the tower, but now I realised there was another level. I gathered my things and moved up the steep spiral of stairs, feeling A Bao A Qu hot on my heels.
As I stepped up into the next level, I saw I was still not at the top of the tower. There was at least another floor above me. Light streamed in from a window visible through a hole in the ceiling, some fifteen feet up. The hole was directly above the one through which I had just entered. All the steps that had once joined the two holes were missing (destroyed, as I later learned, when lightning had struck the tower in the 1840s). To dissuade over-ardent pilgrims from further exertions, the authorities had strung barbed-wire across the gap where the stairs should have been. Only an idiot would try to climb to the top now. Anyone trying and falling would go through both stairwells to land on a stone floor thirty feet below.
If you have read this far, you will understand my state of mind: first A Bao A Qu had tried to fob me off with the wrong tower, then it ran the old villagers-with-the-pitchforks routine. A hostile watchman emerging from the shadows, a cleverly disguised entrance (shielded by tentacles?), and now lighting strikes and barbed wire… Yes, the pattern was clear.
* * * *
I had done some rock climbing in the past. Nevertheless, I had never done any climbing over barbed wire, nor had I carried a grotesquely unbalanced load of heavy filming equipment. It was now a part of the unspoken terms of the duel that I had to film the view.
Pondering the best approach, I thought I could climb the wall to the ceiling at the front edge of the stairway hole, and then tread lightly on some barbed wire to skip over to the far wall, where I could grab the bottom stair of the upper room and haul myself up.
Starting with one foot on the head of a monkey carved onto a pillar on one side of the stairwell gap, I pulled myself up the near wall and continued climbing to the ceiling. I stopped at the top to catch my breath. I was sweating and my hands were slipping on the smooth carvings. I looked over to the wall on the other side of the gap, about six feet away, and then I looked down to the flagstones in the room two floors below. The next step was going to be tricky.
The barbed wire had been intended as a barrier. It sagged in the space, held by strands loosely wound around the heads of stone monkeys and dragons. It would not support my weight. I could only rest my foot on it briefly and hop across towards the far wall. There was a remnant of broken stair visible above, which I could reach when I got there, but my immediate concern was finding something to grab as I slammed into the wall.
So I placed one foot lightly onto the barbed wire and shoved off with the other, swinging it across the gap. With the gaping stairwell below me, my cameras on my back, I hit the wall hard. It was a fifty-fifty point. But, before I fell back onto the barbed wire, I managed to grab a carved elephant’s trunk with one hand, and the bottom broken stair with the other. I pulled myself forward, scrabbling against the wall with my feet. I dragged myself onto the stair, got to my knees and crawled up the remaining steps, collapsing onto the floor of the topmost chamber of the Tower of Victory.
* * * *
I was in an octagonal pavilion with four windows. The space was far larger than any I had seen before in either of the towers at Chitor. Two inscribed slabs relating to the genealogy and exploits of Mewari rulers were set into the corners of the solid walls. Stonework lattice windows filled the angled sides of the octagon.
Panting, I immediately sputtered my elation into the tape-recorder. Then I set up the film equipment and recorded the view. I took stills of the inscribed stone tablets. The Tower of Fame stood nearby, around a projection of the plateau. The view from the Tower of Victory was unobstructed, with a circular view of the plain all around Chitor. However many attackers filled the space, you could still always see beyond them.
I spent about 30 minutes at the top, just meditating on the horizon. The wind moaned raptly through the tower, keening. I remembered that A Bao A Qu’s “moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk”. And then it was time to return to non-fiction.
Going back down over the barbed wire was much worse than coming up. The route up had required me to leap towards a wall. Coming down, I had to start facing the wall, holding on to the bottom steps, and dangle down through the ceiling of the room below. I had to find the foothold and elephant hand-hold and step quickly backwards over the barbed wire to the far wall.
On my first attempt, I couldn’t muster the courage to take that reverse leap into the void, and I pulled myself back up. Sitting on the step, my heart pounding fast, I half-considered waiting for someone to come and help me down. But the place was deserted and I couldn’t stay there forever. Also, going down by my own capacity seemed to be part of the deal… although A Bao A Qu could be planning a broken back for me.
So I tried going down again. Facing the wall, I stepped back onto the barbed wire, jumped towards the foothold, which I found. I groped below for my monkey carving and was down. You could have heard my whoop in the village.
* * * *
I had one further appointment in the town, made through the Archaeological Office the other day. This was to meet a local historian, who I hoped could tell me if the story of a creature inhabiting the Tower of Victory at Chitor was known locally, or if it had just been invented by Borges. How real was the fiction?
The historian was a polite young man, university-educated and well-informed. I introduced myself as a visitor interested in the history of the Fort, and he obligingly gave me the usual potted history – the three sacks, jauhar, and so on.
“Have you heard of the legend of A Bao A Qu?” I eventually interrupted.
He misheard me: “Akbar?” he asked.
The word took my breath away. “Aha,” I muttered. “Yes, that might begin to explain things.” I began to babble out a newly minted theory to the historian. Of course – it was obvious! I pictured how the story of Akbar’s historic sack of Chitor would have been told and retold, garbled and supernaturalized, on its voice-to-ear route from India through Burma, Cambodia, Siam, and the Malay Peninsula. By the time the Chinese whisper arrived among the witches of Malaya, the Emperor Akbar the Great would have metamorphosed into the ghost A Bao A Qu – a spectre who, instead of waiting at the foot of the hill with his armies, waits as a mystical blue form at the foot of the Tower of Victory.
I stopped to allow the historian space for some kind of agreement or confirmation. He took up the offer.
“Perhaps,” he said politely.
* * * *
“El capitán Burton registra la leyenda del A Bao A Qu en una de las notas de su versión de las Mil y una noches.“ (“Captain Burton records the legend of A Bao A Qu in one of the notes to his version of The Thousand and One Nights”). “One of the notes” is sometimes translated as “an Annex”.
According to the leading Borges scholar, Prof Evi Fishburn, “I believe that the edition that Borges consulted was in 16 volumes and 6 Volumes of Supplemental nights (Benares, 1885-88) and the Luristan Edition of 17 Vols – !2 vols of the Nights and & 5 Vols Supplemental Nights.” I spent three days in the British Library going through all the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of footnotes in the many volumes of Burton’s original translation. I went through the books several times but never found a relevant footnote. So after all this, my conclusion – and Borges is chuckling in his grave – is that this story is his invention, along with the footnotes or Annex.
Naturally, I also tried to track down the reference to “C. C. Iturvuru’s” “classic treatise On Malay Witchcraft (1937)”. Once, when I passed through Kuala Lumpur, I went to the National Library of Malaysia and spoke with several of the top librarians there. None of them had heard of this “classic” treatise or could find it in their indexes or holdings. So the conclusion must be that it doesn’t exist, and thus that this attribution is another of those cracking librarian jokes.
There is more joy when it comes to “C.C. Iturvuru”. One of Borges’s Argentinian friends was the writer Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, who started as a journalist and also wrote all manner of stories and scripts. He later became a celebrated art historian. The normal way to refer to Iturvuru would be “C. Córdova Iturburu” rather than C. C. Iturburu, just as one says G. Garcia Marquez and not G. G. Marquez – a little hint that this is a joke attribution.
Among Córdova Iturburu’s more celebrated writings was the film script for Ponchos azules (Blue Ponchos). The film was released in 1942, and it earned him considerable local acclaim. Is it my imagination, or is there a bit of soft blue poncho in A Bao A Qu? Its “almost translucent skin”; the sound it makes, like a “rustling of silk”; that it becomes “worn out and almost shapeless”; and that, “to the touch it is like the skin of a peach”. These could be ponchoistic.
Much moreover, “deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow” as the pilgrim climbs the Tower. Eventually “the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant”.
Bluish?
Quests 