On first reading, this felt a bit like it came out of nowhere. Thinking about the piece a little more, though, the character of this man who lived in the labyrinth might be the most interesting part of this story, in terms of entertainment and thematically. Renegotiating ideas at the end of a story this way screams, "This is important!"

A change of heart would explain why Said didn't just kill Ibn-Hakam in his sleep. This stunt makes some sense as the actions of an obsessive coward with a bunch of money and a desire to kill someone in the least risky way possible.

Hypo.thesis apparently can't handle page 96, so here are my notes on it. New note: "'Or complex,' volleyed Dunraven. 'Remember the universe.' Funny banter isn't something I've seen in many other Borges stories, but he's good at it. New note: "volleyed Dunraven." Borges breaks the rules a bit by using a descriptive dialogue tag. I think he does it really well, though. "Volleyed" communicates more than, say, "retorted." It tells us a bit about Dunraven's tone and what kind of comment he's making, which is already clear because Borges' dialogue is sharp and clear, but it also tells us that Dunraven might think of conversation as a game or a competition. Originality helps here, too. I don't think I've seen "volleyed" used as a dialogue tag anywhere else. New note: "Climbing up steep sandy hills...." Their walk needs a little more specificity, in my opinion. Maybe it would be more clear with a description of these characters coming over a hill past Dunraven's family shack and seeing the labyrinth in the distance, or something like that. The beginning of this paragraph was pretty disorienting at first. The disorientation definitely could be intentional, though. Borges could be setting something up with that vagueness.

This explains the physical description of Said, which combined the swagger of a brave man with other features that... didn't quite fit. It also explains Allaby's realization that this is not, in fact, a brave man.

The idea of Said using a gun seemed strange to me until I thought about what Unwin is doing: he's bringing these characters from the myth Said created (probably with some help from the townspeople's imaginations) into reality. I wonder how much of the cultural and religious stuff Said said about himself was true and how much of that was part of the persona.

They're still speculating. I love that Borges doesn't offer a definitive answer to this mystery.

I love that Borges' characters talk like literary critics or very invested readers. It's not exactly metatextual, but it feels meta.

I assume this refers to the fake Al-Bokhari, but I don't understand how. I don't think any of the previous descriptions of him have anything to do with scarlet.

This is where Rose of Sharon went after stopping near the labyrinth.

This sounds a lot like Dunraven and Unwin sleeping in the labyrinth, doesn't it? There, we learn who is brave and who is a coward. That mirroring might have further significance, though; we'll see. I'm starting to suspect that this story might be headed somewhere crazy.

This phrase keeps appearing.

I agree with Dunraven on this one.

Another echo from the beginning of the story. On page 96, Dunraven calls the universe a mystery.

This is very similar to a phrase Dunraven used in reference to Ibn-Hakam's tale in the last paragraph of page 97.

I'm not exactly sure how to read this. Maybe Dunraven is partially convinced, even a bit afraid; maybe he thinks Dunraven is lying more, and he's outraged. He sleeps well further down the page, which makes me doubt that this story scares him much.

I would expect Unwin, who has been consistently skeptical of this story, to be unsettled by the news that even part of it is true. Apparently not--at least not so much that he can't sleep. He's already shown that he's self-assured and confident and what he believes; apparently, that trait is more extreme in him than I thought. Either that or he's just a really sound sleeper.

Here's an example of Borges displaying Dunraven's ignorance. There's no way Borges didn't know that there are actually a bunch of African languages, and if Borges was telling this story in his own voice, I suspect we'd see some specifics about what languages the African man speaks. (Borges was pretty interested in language.) Often, it's difficult to tell whether Borges is being ignorant/racist or his narrator is; in this case, I'm pretty certain it's the narrator.

"in retrospect he would surely see that long discomfort as adventure"--This shows us that Unwin is a glass-half-full sort, or at least that he uses positivity as a coping tool. When faced with difficulty, he immediately thinks about the potential good in it.

Unwin's increasing annoyance and then anger toward Dunraven is expressed in the increasingly brutal descriptions of Dunraven on this page. They start out mild, with Unwin thinking that Dunraven's story "strain(s) for eloquence" and suffers from "paucity of effect"; soon after that, Dunraven's voice, disembodied from him, is "incorrigible"; and then, there's this highlighted passage; and shortly after that, Unwin loses it a little and says something mean out loud.

It sure sounds like this description came from Dunraven's imagination. He's more-or-less honest about it, but still, this makes me question his reliability as a narrator.

Borges uses literal description and then figurative language and then some more literal description, all to describe the same object. In different hands, this might get repetitive, but the different elements of Borges' description compliment each other and say different things. In the highlighted portion before the first period, the figurative language and literal description more or less describe the same thing, but both are necessary because they're interdepent. The words "elaborately carved" contextualize the idea that this ship looks like it was build by carpenters or cabinetmakers, which could mean a couple different things on its own, and the comparison adds flavor and specificity to "elaborately carved," which would be vague and somewhat bland on its own. Meanwhile, the next line adds further specificity without retreading the previous pieces of description at all.

This word is used to refer to spirits and ghosts in Hebrew and ancient Greek writings.

This has the geographic vagueness of a myth. It's also mythic in its tropes, themes, and brevity: here, we have despotism, divine intervention, treasure, family betrayal, murder, meaningful dreams, and a period of wandering in the desert, all in less than a page. This also answers my question about Ibn-Hakam's religion. He's not a north-African Muslim; he's a mythic king from a mythical, possibly Thousand and One Nights-inspired land. His religion isn't specific.

This line has me a bit puzzled. Based on my limited knowledge and research, I don't think this is a mainstream Muslim practice. That could mean all kinds of things, of course, and I could also be wrong. I don't think it's an error on Borges' part. Considering how well-read he was and how often he quotes the Qu'ran in his stories, I think he probably knows? knew? more about Islam than I do. (I got a little gramatically lost bouncing back and forth between Borges the writer and Borges the man.) Anyway, I'll be paying attention to anything else Ibn-Hakam says about religion.

These characteristics are all over the map. Some of them might be race-related; Borges' sometimes wrote problematic descriptions, although he also created rich, complex characters with all sorts of nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. This could also be Dunraven othering Ibn-Hakam; it's already clear enough that his young self was fascinated and puzzled by the man at best. No matter what part race plays in this description, Ibn-Hakam's different aspects raise all sorts of clashing implications and connotations, suggesting that he'll be a complex, nebulous character.

We're beginning a story (the one Ibn-Hakam's telling) within a story (Allaby's account to the authorities) within a story (Dunraven's tale) within a story (the outermost one, with the third-person narrator). Borges loved The Thousand and One Nights, which plunges even deeper into the layers than this.

Borges makes fun of his own direct characterization here, and I don't completely understand why. I'm not exactly sure what to do with that as a writer.

This reminds me of the beginning of "In the Cart." There, Chekhov introduces us to Marya through the contradictions between her attitude and the attitude our narrator deems appropriate for the weather conditions. Here, the disagreement characterizing Dunraven is a little more extreme. Dunraven introduces his "ancestral land" as if he's inherited the stars, but it's an undeniable reality that it's actually a sparse patch of land and a collapsing building. Borges emphasizes this effect when writing about the building by placing Dunraven's perceptions and reality side by side. The phrase "majestic, tumbledown edifice" flip-flops like crazy. "Majestic" and "edifice" (which is usually used for large buildings) clearly fit Dunraven's vision, but "tumbledown" splits them up with its completely contradictory meaning. In the end, reality wins out, and we learn that this structure actually looks "like a stable fallen upon hard times."

Aren't we all?

This is pretty typical of Borges. His stories are often preceded quotes, and they only provide tantalizing hints of what the story might be. They often start in the middle of sentences, and I'm not really sure why. In this case, it looks like he might be saying that Ibn-Hakam al-Bokari "is the likeness of the spider who buildeth her a house." I haven't read this before, so we'll see.