Explore "The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To Angélica Ocampo
If I am not mistaken, the chief sources of information concerning Mokanna, the Veiled (or, literally, Masked) Prophet of Khurasan, are only four in number: a) those passages from the History of the Caliphs culled by Baladhuri; b) the Giant's Handbook, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn abi Tahir Taifur; c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, wherein we find a refutation of the abominable heresies of the Dark Rose, or Hidden Rose, which was the Prophet's holy book; and d) some barely legible coins unearthed by the engineer Andrusov during excavations for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins, now on deposit in the Numismatic Collection at Tehran, preserve certain Persian distichs which abridge or emend key passages of the Annihilation. The original Rose is lost, for the manuscript found in 1899 and published all too hastily by the Morgenlandisches Archiv has been pronounced a forgery first by Horn, and afterwards by Sir Percy Sykes.