From: Almereyda@aol.com
You're probably well
aware of this bit of Borges, from "A Universal History of Iniquity".
In any case, it will be a pleasure to tap it into the computer.
The Father of Waters,
the Mississippi, the grandest river in the world, was the worthy stage
for the deeds of that incomparable blackguard. (Alvearez de Pineda discovered
this great river, though it was first explored by Hernando d 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 river's waters were
his grave.)
Ths Mississipi is
a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of the Parani, the
Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulatto-hued
water; more than four hundred milion tons of mud, carried by that water,
insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and ancient
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 empire. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their
bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race,
prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for
they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.