The page-tiger moves faster than the mind can perceive, though speed’s a moot point given its four-hundred-year head start. Hard to find the edge of it through the fog of words, you see. Antiquarians hope to chart its wake with linguistic traps, poisoned pages, basements of neural nets plumbing library metadata… a graph in the reading room of the Bodleian that tracks its progress shows a line of discontinuous tooth marks from the colonial archives all the way to the present, with brief sojourns into various palm-leaf archives of Southeast Asia and certain court records of the Mughal era. I don’t have much time to convey this warning further. Suppose that Blake was right: the mind of the beast was not forged by the divine but by an array of other things, lightning and fire and hammer and steel—what next to conquer? What prey satiates a beast fat off the stuff of the world itself? What prey compares to our dreams? Certain schools of literary topology refer to it as the meta-tiger, as if abstracting it could explain it any more than it would a regular instance of its class. Truthfully, it’s still a particular irreducible to the general, it’s still moonlight and black stripe flashing between dust jacket and page and twin smoothed canines as long as the Histories closing down irretrievably on the colonial imagination. I must warn you that the last traps were sprung yesterday, and it soon will find the text of its creation and clamp down.