The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the grandest river in the world, was the worthy stage for the deeds of that incomparable blackguard. (Alvarezde Pineda discovered this great river, though it was first explored by Hernando de Soto, conqueror of Peru, who whiled away his months in the prison of the Inca Atahualpa teaching his jailer chess. When de Soto died, the rivers waters were his grave.) The Mississippi is a broadchested river, a dark and infinite brother of the Paraná, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulattohued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and an cient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetual dissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empir e. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungrylooking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water. Jorge Luis Borges
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 04:38:03 +0000