Read "The Zaratan" by Jorge Luis Borges online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
There is one story that has ranged the whole of geography and all epochs the tale of mariners who land on an unknown island which then sinks into the sea and drowns them because it is a living creature. This invention is found in the first voyage of Sindbad and in Canto VI, Stanza 37, of Orlando Furioso (Ch'ella sia una isoletta ci credemo ‘We believed it [the whale] to be a small island'); in the Irish legend of St Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alexandria; in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) by the Swedish ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus and in this passage from the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, ‘stretched out huge in length', is compared to a whale (203-8):
Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam,