body of a tiger or a bull in which teeth, organs and heads monstrously pullulate in mutual conjunction and hatred". He eventually escapes the city and finds the Troglodyte who followed him there waiting outside; he names him Argos (after the dog of Odysseus), and decides to teach him language. Soon after, though, Argos reveals that he is Homer, and that the Troglodytes are the Immortals, having destroyed the original City of the Immortals and (on the advice of Homer) replaced it with the labyrinth Rufus encountered. Rufus spends centuries living with the Immortals, mostly immersed in thought, until the notion of the existence of a river with the powers to "take away" immortality causes the group to scatter in search of it in the tenth century. Rufus wanders the world, fighting at Stamford Bridge, transcribing the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, and buying the aforementioned edition of Pope's Iliad in 1714. In 1921, Rufus' ship runs aground in Eritrea while en route to Bombay, and he drinks from a spring, losing his immortality. In the end, Rufus realizes that he has incorporated the experiences and words of Homer into his tale, but concludes that "I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men—I shall be dead." Rufus is, in fact, the bookseller Cartaphilus, who, we learn at the beginning of the story, dies in October 1929 while returning to Smyrna. The story ends with a brief postscript which discusses the fictional book A Coat of Many Colours by Dr. Nahum Cordovero, which argues that the tale of Rufus/Cartaphilus is apocryphal, on the basis of its interpolations of texts by Pliny, Thomas De Quincey, René Descartes and George Bernard Shaw. The postscript ends with the unknown author of the postscript rejecting Cordovero's claim. Analysis "The Immortal" deals with several themes which are present throughout much of Borges' writing; one such theme is immortality. Borges' conception of immortality assumes various manifestations throughout his writing and even in this clearly titled piece of work, it is not clear exactly who is meant to be the immortal. On one hand, it is clearly pointed to that Rufus is searching for the city of the immortals and therefore the being that he finds there must in fact be the immortal. However, it can also be said, without too subtle of an insight, that Rufus becomes the