Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

the shadowless hour [midday], a trap in the high ceiling opens and a
jailer whom the years have gradually been effacing maneuvers an iron
sheave and lowers for us, at the end of a rope, jugs of water and
chunks of flesh. The light breaks into the vault; at that instant I can see
the jaguar.
I have lost count of the years I have lain in the darkness; I, who
was young once and could move about this prison, am incapable of
more than awaiting, in the posture of my death, the end destined to me
by the gods. With the deep obsidian knife I have cut open the breasts
of victims and now I could not, without magic, lift myself from the
dust.
On the eve of the burning of the pyramid, the men who got
down from the towering horses tortured me with fiery metals to force
me to reveal the location of a hidden treasure. They struck down the
idol of the god before my very eyes, but he did not abandon me and I
endured the torments in silence. They scourged me, they broke and
deformed me, and then I awoke in this prison from which I shall not
emerge in mortal life.
Impelled by the fatality of having something to do, of
populating time in some way, I tried, in my darkness, to recall all I
knew. Endless nights I devoted to recalling the order and the number
of stone-carved serpents or the precise form of a medicinal tree.
Gradually, in this way, I subdued the passing years; gradually, in this
way, I came into possession of that which was already mine. One night
I felt I was approaching the threshold of an intimate recollection;
before he sights the sea, the traveller feels a quickening in the blood.
Hours later I began to perceive the outline of the recollection. It was a
tradition of the god. The god, foreseeing that at the end of time there
would be devastation and ruin, wrote on the first day of Creation a
magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils. He wrote it in
such a way that it would reach the most distant generations and not be
subject to chance. No one knows where it was written nor with what
characters, but it is certain that it exists, secretly, and that a chosen one
shall read it. I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of
time and that my destiny as the last priest of the god would give me
access to the privilege of intuiting the script. The fact that a prison
confined me did not forbid my hope; perhaps I had seen the script of
Qaholom a thousand times and needed only to fathom it.
This reflection encouraged me, and then instilled in me a kind
of vertigo. Throughout the earth there are ancient forms, forms
155