that invisible spirit aboard his unmoving barque. But by degrees the bracken thinned, affording a view of a field that extended as far as Covehithe church. Beyond a low electric fence lay a herd of almost a hundred head of swine, on brown earth where meagre patches of camomile grew. I climbed over the wire and approached one of the ponderous, immobile, sleeping animals. As I bent towards it, it opened a small eye fringed with light lashes and gave me an enquiring look. I ran my hand across its dusty back, and it trembled at this unwonted touch; I stroked its snout and face, and chucked it in the hollow behind one ear, till at length it sighed like one enduring endless suffering. When I stood up, it closed its eye once more with an expression of profound submissiveness. For a while I sat on the grass between the electric fence and the cliff edge. The thin, yellowing blades of grass were bending in the rising wind. The sky was darkening as banks of cloud were piling far out across the sea, which was now streaked with white. All of a sudden, the boat, which for so long had not moved, was gone. The scene reminded me of the story St Mark the evangelist tells, of the country of the Gadarenes, which follows the far better-known account of the calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee. Neatly as the image of the doubting disciples waking their master from his untroubled sleep when the waves beat into the ship fitted the school catechism, there was little understanding of what the story of the mad Gadarene meant. I at least could not recall its ever being read to us in our so-called religious knowledge lessons or at church, much less explained. The raging maniac, of whom it is said that he came out of the tombs where he dwelt, was possessed of so violent an unclean spirit that he could not be bound or tamed. He plucked asunder the chains, and broke the fetters in pieces. Always he was in the mountains, writes St Mark, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. Asked his name, he answered: My name is Legion: for we are many. And he besought the Lord not to send him away out of the country. But the Lord commanded the unclean spirits to enter the herd of swine feeding there. And the swine, some two thousand according to the evangelist, plunged down a steep slope and drowned in the sea. Is this terrible story, I asked myself, as I sat overlooking the German Ocean, the report of a credible witness? If so, does that not mean that in healing the Gadarene Our Lord committed a serious error of judgement? Or was this parable made up by the evangelist, I wondered, to explain the supposed uncleanliness of swine; which would imply that human reasoning, diseased as it is, needs to seize on some other kind that it can take to be inferior and thus desiring of annihilation? As these things were going through my mind I was watching the sand martins darting to and fro over the sea. Ceaselessly emitting their tiny cries, they sped along their flightpaths faster than my eyes could follow them. At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days, I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air. Many years later, in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which was written in 1940 at Salto Oriental in Argentina, I read of how a few birds saved an entire amphitheatre. The sand martins, I now saw, were flying solely at the level that extended from the top of the cliff where I was sitting out into empty space. Not one of them climbed higher or dived lower, to the water below them. Whenever they came towards me, fast as bullets, some seemed to vanish right beneath my feet, as if into the very ground. I went to the edge of the cliff and saw that they had dug their nesting holes into the topmost layer of clay, one beside the other. I was thus standing on perforated ground, as it were, which might have given way at any moment. Nevertheless, I laid my head back as far as I could, as I did as a boy for a dare on the flat tin roof of the two-storey apiary, fixed my eyes on the zenith, then lowered my gaze till it met the horizon, and drew it in across the water, to the narrow strip of beach some twenty yards below. As I tried to suppress the mounting sense of dizziness, breathing out and taking a step backwards, I thought I saw something of an odd, pallid colour move on the shoreline. I crouched down and, overcome by a sudden panic, looked over the edge. A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man stretched full length over another body of which nothing was visible but the legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man's feet twitched like those of one just hanged. Now, though, he lay still, and the woman too was still and motionless. Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils. Filled with consternation, I stood up once more, shaking as if it were the first time in my life that I had got to my feet, and left the place, which seemed fearsome to me now, taking the path that descended from the cliff-top to where the beach spread out on the southerly side. Far off in front of me lay Southwold, a cluster of distant buildings, clumps of trees, and a snow-white lighthouse, beneath a dark sky. Before I reached the town, the first drops of rain were falling. I turned to look back down the deserted stretch I had come by, and could no longer have said whether I had really seen the pale sea monster at the foot of the Covehithe cliffs or whether I had imagined it.
Recalling the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the Argentinian tale I have referred to before, a tale which deals with our attempts to invet secondary or tertiary worlds. The narrator describes dining with Adolfo Bioy Casares in a house in Calle Gaona in Ramos Mejìa one evening in 1935. He relates that after dinner they had a long and rambling talk about the writing of a novel that would fly in the face of palpable facts and become entangled in contradictions in such a way that few readers — very few readers — would be able to grasp the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative. At the end of the passage that led to the room where we were sitting, the author continues, hung an oval, half-fogged mirror that had a somewhat disquieting effect. We felt that this dumb witness was keeping a watch on us, and thus we discovered — discoveries of this kind are almost always made in the dead of night — that there is something sinister about mirrors. Bioy Casares then recalled the observation of one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar, that the disturbing thing about mirrors, and also the act of copulation, is that they multiply the number of human beings. I asked Bioy Casares for the source of this memorable remark, the author writes, and he told me that it was in the entry on Uqbar in the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. As the story goes on, however, it is revealed that this entry is nowhere to be found in the encyclopaedia in question, or rather, it appears uniquely in the copy bought years earlier by Bioy Casares, the twenty-sixth volume of which contains four pages that are not in any other copy of the edition in question, that of 1917. It thus remains unclear whether Uqbar ever existed or whether the description of this unknown country might not be a case similar to that of Tlön, the encylopaedists' project to which the main portion of the narrative in question is devoted and which aimed at creating a new reality, in the course of time, by way of the unreal. The labyrinthine construction of Tlön, reads a note added to the text in 1947, is on the point of blotting out the known world. The language of Tlön, which hitherto no one had mastered, has now invaded the academies; already the history of Tlön has superseded all that we formerly knew or thought we knew; in historiography, the indisputable advantages of a fictitious past have become apparent. Almost every branch of learning has been reformed. A ramified dynasty of hermits, the dynasty of the Tlön inventors, encyclopaedists and lexicographers, has changed the face of the earth. Every language, even Spanish, French and English, will disappear from the planet. The world will be Tlön. But, the narrator concludes, what is that to me? In that peace and quiet of my country villa I continue to hone my tentative translation, schooled on Quevedo, of Thomas Browne's Urn Burial (which I do not mean to publish).