Á Bao A Qu

The stair inside the Tower of Victory at Chittor turns tight and dark, a hundred and fifty-seven steps of sandstone worn shallow down the middle, and on the lowest of them something is lying that has no shape at all. It is not quite invisible. In the right slant of light it reads as a smear of clearer air, the way heat reads over stone in the afternoon. It has been on that step, so the story runs, for as long as the tower has stood, and the tower has stood since the fifteenth century, when Rana Kumbha raised nine storeys of red sandstone and white marble over the Rajasthan plain to advertise what he had done to the Sultan of Malwa.

Then a foot comes down on the first step and the thing wakes.

What wakes is a light before it is a body. Somewhere inside the formless mass a blue begins, faint as skimmed milk held up to a window, and it strengthens with every step the climber takes. The creature follows close, keeping to the heel of whoever is ahead. Around the middle of the stair it acquires tentacles, or something the tellings are willing to call tentacles, and by then it is solid enough to touch. Anyone who reaches back finds the fuzz on the skin of a peach. It has no eyes anywhere on it. It sees with the whole of itself, in every direction at once, which sounds like an advantage until you think about what it spends its life looking at.

The climb is its entire existence and the climb is a test it cannot pass by itself. The Á Bao A Qu only comes to completion if the person in front of it reaches the terrace at the top, and only if that person arrives there perfect, having attained Nirvana, casting acts that throw no shadow. That is a high bar for a tourist. Almost every climber gets partway and the creature knows it before the climber does. Its blue thins toward grey, the half-formed limbs go slack, and it stops on a step it has climbed a thousand times before, refusing to go higher because there is no point. Then it comes back down, tumbling and folding over itself, and as it falls it makes a sound. The sound is very small. It is the noise silk makes when silk is drawn across silk, and it is the only complaint the creature ever registers.

Once, in the whole run of centuries, it got there. The tellings do not say when, and they do not say who was walking in front, only that the climber went up the last of the spiral and did not falter, and the thing behind him arrived on the terrace entire, coloured all the way through, in the open air above the plain for the first and last time. Nothing describes what it did next. It went back to the bottom step, because that is where it lives.

Now the part that matters more than any of it. There is no Malay legend of the Á Bao A Qu. The creature is the invention of Jorge Luis Borges, written with Margarita Guerrero for the Manual de zoología fantástica in 1957 and carried into the expanded El libro de los seres imaginarios ten years later, and it has no life at all before that page. In the 1957 text Borges credited the story to an introduction to the Arabian Nights by Richard Francis Burton. By 1967 the credit had quietly changed to On Malay Witchcraft, published in 1937 by one C. C. Iturvuru. No such book has ever been found. What has been found is Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, a real Argentine poet, journalist and art critic who moved in Borges’s circle and turns up in the Borges corpus indexes, and who wrote about painting rather than about Malaya. A bibliography of exactly one item, and that item a friend.

Borges had form for this. His translator Andrew Hurley, working on the 2005 Penguin edition, gave up on tracing the book’s citations and said so plainly, noting that some of the quotations in it are almost certainly put-ons, and that in at least one case, the peryton, Borges had invented the animal outright. Scholarship on the Manual has since made the technique its subject: the parade of historical, sacred and philosophical authorities in that book is real enough to be checked, and it is also the cover under which the fabrications walk in. The Á Bao A Qu is the method working perfectly. It is furnished with a real tower, a real dynasty, a real Buddhist end-state and a citation, and every one of those is load-bearing except the citation.

Even the name resists placement. It looks Malay and behaves like nothing in the Malay record, and the one attempt at an origin comes from the Malaysian writer Antares, who suggested it might be a slurring of abang aku, my elder brother, possibly out of Orang Asli tradition. That is a modern guess offered as a guess, not an attestation, and it stands alone.

Strip away the false pedigree and the creature is still worth having, because its powers are exactly the powers a Borges creature should have. It can perceive without organs. It can take on form, colour and light, and it can lose them again, and the whole of that range is decided by somebody else’s inner state, read off a stranger with an accuracy nothing in the tower can fake. It is a barometer with feelings.

Its limits are the same fact seen from the other side. It cannot climb unaccompanied. It cannot hurry a climber, warn one, or choose a promising one, and it cannot stay awake once the stair is empty. It has no way to improve its odds and no way to stop trying. The one time the ascent worked it did not change anything, and the creature went back down to the first step to wait for the next person who almost certainly will not be good enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Á Bao A Qu?

The Á Bao A Qu is a translucent, luminous being that lives on the bottom step of the stairway inside the Tower of Victory at Chittor in Rajasthan. It sleeps until someone begins to climb, then follows close behind, gaining colour, form and blue light as the ascent continues. It reaches its complete shape only if the climber attains perfection at the top.

Is the Á Bao A Qu a real Malay myth?

No. The Á Bao A Qu was invented by Jorge Luis Borges, with Margarita Guerrero, for Manual de zoología fantástica in 1957, and no record of the creature exists before that book. Borges first credited it to an introduction to the Arabian Nights by Richard Francis Burton, then in 1967 to On Malay Witchcraft (1937) by C. C. Iturvuru, a book nobody has ever located. The name closest to that citation belongs to Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, an Argentine art critic in Borges’s circle who wrote nothing about Malaya.

What does the Á Bao A Qu look like?

When dormant it is a shapeless, almost transparent mass, visible mainly as a distortion in the air. As it climbs it fills with a blue light that deepens step by step, and about halfway up the stair it develops tentacle-like limbs. Its surface feels like the fuzz on the skin of a peach, and it has no eyes, seeing instead with its entire body.

Where does the Á Bao A Qu live?

It lives on the staircase of the Vijaya Stambha, the Tower of Victory, inside Chittor Fort in Rajasthan, India. The tower was built by Rana Kumbha in the fifteenth century to mark his victory over Mahmud Khalji of Malwa, and rises about thirty-seven metres in nine storeys, with a narrow spiral stair of roughly 157 steps.

Has the Á Bao A Qu ever reached the top of the tower?

Once. In the whole span of its existence a single climber went all the way to the terrace without faltering, and the Á Bao A Qu arrived there complete and fully coloured. Every other attempt ends with the creature stalling short, fading back toward transparency and tumbling down the steps with a sound like silk drawn across silk.

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