THE A BAO A QU

"In order to contemplate the most beautiful landscape in the world, it is necessary to get to the last floor of Victoria Tower, in Chitor. There exists a round terrace from which one can dominate the whole horizon. Snail-shell shaped stairs take us to the terrace, but only the ones who don't believe in the fable dare to climb them. The fable is like this: Since the beggining of times the A Bao A Qu lives on the stairs of Victoria Tower, sensible to the values of human souls. It lives in a lethargic state, on the first step, and it only enjoys conscient life when someone climbs the stairs. The vibration of the person who approaches infuses it with life and an interior light insinuates inside it. At the same time, its body and its almost translucent skin beggin to move. When someone climbs the stairs, the A Bao A Qu places itself almost on the visitor's heels and it climbs stuck to the edge of the round steps, worn out by the feet of generations of pilgrims. On each step its colour becomes more intense, its shape gets more perfect and the light which it irradiates becomes more and more bright.

A testimony of its sensibility is the fact that it only achieves its perfect shape on the last step, when the one climbing is a spiritually evolved being. If not, the A Bao A Qu gets paralised before arriving there, its body incomplete, its colour undefined, its light vacillating. The A Bao A Qu suffers when it cannot form itself completely and its complaint is just a perceptible rumor, similar to the silk scuff. But when the man or the woman who revive it are full of purity, the A Bao A Qu can reach the last step already completely formed, irradiating a blue lively color. 

Its comeback to life is very brief, because when the pilgrim steps down the A Bao A Qu spins and it falls to the first step where, already off and similar to a lamp with vague contours, it awaits for the next visitor. It is only possible to see it well when it gets to the middle of the stairs where the prolongation of its body, helped by some sort of little arms when climbing, defines itself clearly. Some say it sees with its whole body and it resembles peach skin when touched. Along the centuries, the A Bao A Qu reached perfection just once. Captain Burton registers the A Bao A Qu legend in a note of his One Thousand and One Nights version."

Jorge Luis Borges & Margarita Guerrero in

The Book of the Imaginary Beings (1967), referring themselves to

the malayan legend of the A Bao A Qu