CHAPTER 12
In which are described the Kircher Museum & the magnetic oracle
“The unique language,” Kircher said, “the memory of the universal language given by God to Adam, with its magnificent descriptive power & the thousand & one arcana of its numerological structure. See what we can find in the most ordinary pebbles of the road, Caspar. In His divine goodness, the Creator had given us the means of finding Him in objects themselves; for nature has certainly drawn for us this symbolic Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way in the labyrinth of the world.”
Thanks to Kircher I came to see how the cosmos had been made on the analogy & in the image of the supreme archetype. From the summit down to the tiniest being everything was in absolute proportion and reciprocal conformity & yet, as Saint Paul testified, things invisible could be perceived by our intellect through material things …
From that day onward I put my heart even more fully into my work & into our search for the emblematic letters that would help us to go back in time to the origin of things.
“Research,” said Kircher, “is collecting. It is to gather together as many of these undeciphered wonders in order to reconstitute the perfection of the initial encyclopedia; it is to reconstruct the Ark with the same concern for completeness & urgency as Noah showed. And I will accomplish this holy task, Caspar. With your aid & God’s.”
My master confided in me more & more, exhibiting a trust in me of which I ever strove to prove myself worthy. I can testify that at that time, at the age of just thirty-six, he had a view of the world that had reached a state of clarity & complexity that he then simply proceeded to develop. Henceforth omnia in omnibus, “everything is in everything,” was his motto, meaning that there was no thing in the world that did not correspond to all the others according to a certain proportion & analogy.
We returned to Rome at the end of the summer of 1638 with no adventures worth mentioning apart from our discovery, as we left Calabria, of the fatal effects of the venom of the tarantula & the detailed study of its alexipharmakon. During the few months of our peregrinations, Kircher had acquired incomparable experience and knowledge. He brought back a phenomenal quantity of unique materials to the Roman College & his sole desire was to get down to studying them. During our journey back he had talked to me of the two books that were going through his mind & described his plans in great detail: a Mundus subterraneus, dealing with geology and hydrology, & an Ars magna lucis et umbrae, which would eclipse, in the field of optics, Kepler’s Paralipomena & even the Dioptrique of the previous year, in which Monsieur Descartes made bold to assert so many arrogant & foolish ideas.
But Pope Urban VIII insisted he give priority to applying his genius to Egypt and deciphering the hieroglyphs. Thus Athanasius had to wait several years before being able to write the works in which he uses the results of our explorations.
During our stay in the south, the collections of the late Sieur Peiresc had finally reached Rome. We spent several months organizing them & arranging them on the floor of the Roman College the Father General of the College had put at Kircher’s disposal. Together with everything my master had amassed during our recent voyage, it made a considerable accumulation of all kinds of rarities, especially since the Jesuits in the missions regularly sent him some from the East and West Indies.
Kircher wanted his museum to be the finest & most complete in the world. Not just a more extensive collection of curiosities than those of Paracelsus, Agrippa, Peiresc & others, but a veritable concrete encyclopedia, a display that would give each visitor the possibility of surveying the whole of human knowledge since the origins. The gallery where it was housed was resplendent with costly marble; Athanasius added some Greek & Roman columns, transforming the place into a portico where one could philosophize while walking up & down in the manner of the Stoics. Several classrooms opening off the sides were used to teach various arts & sciences.
My master had five oval panels painted in fresco on the vaults of the vestibule. The first, which greeted the visitor when he entered the museum, showed a salamander surrounded by flames.
“The salamander is me,” Kircher told me when I asked him about the meaning of the allegory. “It says that I urge visitors to brave the fire of difficult studies …”
I found that entirely appropriate, especially since I had seen my master so at ease in the blazing infernos of Etna and Vesuvius.
The whole of 1639 was spent opening crates & setting the contents out in the embellished gallery. A ship had arrived from China, its hold packed with treasures sent to Kircher by Father Giovanni Filippo de Mariani, a missionary to Japan & China. Rhinoceros horns, ceremonial regalia embroidered in gold, belts adorned with rubies, samples of paper, statues of idols, saints, mandarins, inhabitants of those countries; flowers, birds and trees painted on silk, various drugs unknown to our doctors, especially the one called “Lac Tigridis,” various books, manuscripts, grammars, etc.; all these riches poured into the Roman College, increasing the wealth of the museum. As well as that, there were numerous letters sent to Athanasius by his distant & faithful correspondents.
In particular Manuel Diaz, Deputy Provincial of the Order in China, mentioned the recent discovery of a stele, which was going to prove of major importance. On this stone, dug up by chance in 1623 in the course of excavations outside the city of Sian Fu, there was a text written in two languages, Syrian and Chinese. According to Diaz, it was an inscription carved in the year 781 after the death of Our Lord that proved that Nestorians had established themselves in China by that date. Kircher was extremely excited by the discovery that Christians, if only Syrians, had been present at such an early date at the heart of the Chinese Empire. He did not think it necessary to explain why this fact seemed so crucial to him but I did not for one second doubt that this simple letter had helped him take another step in the establishment of a doctrine that he was elaborating day by day.
Beside this letter from Manuel Diaz, our correspondence also included missives from Johann Adam Schall von Bell, the official in charge of introducing a calendar at the court of Emperor Ch’ung-chen, from the painter Johann Grueber, from Michal Piotr Boym & other equally famous missionaries, all of which were packed with marvelous information about that country. They were full of things such as magic or metamorphic mountains that could change or even move to another place, of sea dragons & extremely rare animals, of idols possessed by an evil spirit, of monuments & impassable walls. The missionaries also emphasized the power & antiquity of the Chinese Empire. They seemed fascinated by a people so different from ours & yet so advanced in numerous fields while still immersed in the most odious idolatry. The Jesuit who had accompanied the cargo on the boat had managed to keep an ‘ananas’ plant alive by giving it his own ration of water; Kircher pronounced the fruit absolutely delicious. The flesh beneath the skin is a little fibrous, but it dissolves entirely into juice in the mouth. Also its taste is so pronounced & so distinctive that those who tried to describe it precisely, finding it impossible to do so without having recourse to comparison, cited everything that was most exquisite about the aubergine, the apricot, the strawberry, the raspberry, the muscat grape & the orange pippin, & having said that, they were forced to admit that in addition it has a certain taste that could not be expressed & that is restricted to it alone.
All that, combined with the perpetual persecution to which the Jesuit missionaries were subjected in their work of propagating the faith, convinced my master that he should go & join them. At the beginning of 1640 he asked the Father General to authorize him to leave for the East to devote himself to the conversion of the Chinese. I was as excited as Athanasius at the idea of devoting my life to God & to the Church, but Providence decided otherwise: Kircher’s request was refused on the express order of the Pope, who did not want to lose such an estimable man at any price. Despite what he admitted to me was a great disappointment, Athanasius submitted to the orders of his superiors with good grace while showing even greater interest than ever in everything he could learn about these distant countries.
At the age of thirty-eight my master seemed at the pinnacle of his powers. He was working on several books at once, mixing all subjects, throwing light on all the disciplines of human knowledge without, for all that, giving up his teaching of mathematics & oriental languages, or forgetting the practical application of his discoveries. Professor, astronomer, physician, geologist & geographer, specialist in languages, archaeologist, Egyptologist, theologian, etc., he was the man all the great minds of his age wanted to talk to & none came to Rome without asking for an audience with him.
The porter was therefore constantly climbing the College stairs to his study to inform him of the presence of this or that visitor. Since this brother was old & decrepit, Kircher thought up a device to spare him such exertions, which were incompatible with his age. He installed a copper pipe going from the porter’s lodge to his desk six floors up; fixed to each end was a metal funnel to amplify their voices. Running down inside the pipe was a wire, which the porter could pull to sound a Javanese gong close to the place where my master was, informing him that the porter wished to speak to him. This invention worked perfectly & the porter thanked Athanasius a thousand times for his generosity. But my master had to remonstrate with him several times: he took such delight in using the machine for trivial reasons that he was disturbing Kircher in his studies.
In 1641 Magnes, sive de Arte Magnetica appeared, a book of nine hundred and sixteen pages in which Kircher returned to the questions he dealt with in his Ars Magnesi, published in Würzburg in 1631, augmenting it with numerous other examples, making it a definitive treatment of the subject. This attraction, which is so clear to see between beings & things, & so similar to the mysterious force present in the lodestone, Kircher attributed to universal magnetism. Once more analogy turned out to be invaluable, the sympathetic power drawing a magnetized needle to the north being merely an illustration of the far greater power uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm, as Hermes the Egyptian had established in far-off times. The irresistible attraction or repulsion that sometimes appears between a man & a woman, the force that guides the bee to the flower or makes the sunflower turn toward the Sun showed the same phenomenon at work on earth & in the skies: the power of God, the absolute magnet of the universe.
“The world,” my master said, “is protected by secret ties & one of them is universal magnetism, which governs both the relationships between men & those that exist between animals, vegetables, the Sun & the Moon. Even minerals are subject to this occult force.”
In this book Kircher also describes the “magnetic oracle,” which he had designed for the Supreme Pontiff & had constructed in advance so as to be able to give it to him at the same time as the description. I was there the first time this curious machine was put into operation, in the presence of Cardinal Barberini, whom my master had asked to come and judge whether such a gift was appropriate.
You must imagine a hexagonal table with, towering up in the center, the reproduction of an Egyptian obelisk containing inside it a very big lodestone. Arranged around the table, one at each side, were six large crystal spheres, each harboring a cherub made of wax & hanging free on a thread. Between these spheres were a dozen smaller ones, constructed on the same model but with figurines representing mythological animals. These twelve figures also had a magnet inside them & each was in balance with the others in relation to the central stone. Finally, different systems such as the Latin alphabet, the zodiac, the elements, the winds & their directions were painted around each of the large spheres. A cursor on the edge of the table made it possible to turn the lodestone in the obelisk to a greater or lesser extent, which disrupted the balance between the figures & made them move until the balance of their magnetism was restored in a different position. The outstretched arms of the “putti,” or cherubs, would then point to a particular constellation or letter of the alphabet, thus answering the questions the operator had asked.
“It’s just a toy,” Kircher told the Cardinal, “but I maintain that a man who is truly in harmony with nature, that is to say at one with the magnetic forces controlling it, could make excellent use of this machine & produce oracles worthy of belief.”
“I can readily believe that,” said Cardinal Barberini, his sparkling eyes showing his interest in my master’s machine, “but it is a dangerous gamble for anyone who tries it; the machine only has to give a nonsensical reply to some question & the one who asked it would be consigned to the herd of the uninitiated, not to say ignoramuses.”
“True,” Kircher said with a smile, “but such an unfortunate person would always be free to blame the machine itself, in which case its inventor would defend it by arguing that it was only designed for amusement & that God alone knows the purposes of Providence.”
“Indeed, my friend,” the Cardinal said, also smiling. “Still, out of pure curiosity I would very much like to see you try it out.”
“Your wish is my command, Monsignore. Now let us see, what question shall I ask this glass pythoness?” Kircher concentrated for a while, then his face lit up. “Does this toy, produced by my imagination to illustrate the secret powers of nature, have access to the truth? That is my question. I will therefore put it to the alphabetical sphere in order to get a written response. Caspar, a blindfold, a pen & some paper.”
I hurried to fetch the objects my master had asked for from a servant. Then I had to blindfold him &, after the Cardinal had checked that he could not see, sit him down facing the cursor. Athanasius moved it. All the little figures started to revolve jerkily. When, after a few seconds, they were back in balance, the Cardinal announced the letter “N.” I immediately noted it down, while my master operated the cursor a second time.
After a half hour of this, Kircher, exhausted by the effort of concentration it demanded, declared that he would stop there & removed his blindfold. Cardinal Barberini took the sheet of paper from me &, in a half-amused, half-sardonic voice, read out the following as if he were reading a verse from the Gospel: “natu ranatu ragau deth …”
“There, Reverend Father,” he said, handing the paper to my master, “is a perfect illustration of what I was saying just now. I’m afraid you are not quite in tune with the Universal Lodestone.”
Kircher frowned & I blushed for him, less at his failure—which was, after all, foreseeable—than at the prelate’s acid remark.
In silence, my master read again the sibylline text the machine had produced &, still without saying a word, calmly took up the pen, drew four lines on the sheet & handed it back to the Cardinal.
However, dear reader, if you want to learn the surprising consequences of this action, you will have to wait until the next chapter …
ON THE RIVER PARAGUAY: For a moment it seemed as if the forest were crying for her
Once the gunboat had passed the nest of machine guns, the burst of fire became less accurate, then stopped: overconfident, the hunters only controlled the river downstream; the straight arm of the river, which widened out up to their camp, curved upstream of it, reducing the firing angle. It took a few seconds before Petersen realized he was confusing the hammering of the motor with the sound of automatic rifles. Recovering from the shock of the attack, he cautiously stood up. The boat was now out of range, but a plume of thick smoke was rising from the rear deck … the fire extinguisher! He dashed off toward the bridge, stumbling over Dietlev, who was lying on the floor, grimacing and groaning, clutching in both hands a bloody mass of pulp which he seemed to be trying to compress with all his strength … Herman swore silently, then leaned over the guardrail: “Up here, you two,” he shouted to Mauro and Elaine. “Dietlev’s been wounded, he needs a tourniquet. Get your asses up here, for God’s sake.”
Petersen continued on his way. The sheets of steel all around him were vibrating as if the whole structure were about to fall apart at any moment. “Slow down, you stupid bastard!” he yelled as he came to the wheelhouse. “Shut off the engine!”
Since Yurupig, paralyzed at the helm, didn’t move, he reduced the throttle himself.
The gunboat continued to make headway, wallowing in the water.
“Where’s Hernando?” Petersen asked, taking down the fire extinguisher. Almost simultaneously he saw the body of the Paraguayan: in the shadow on the other side of the wheelhouse, his eyes apparently staring in wonder into space, the man was lying on his back, his throat cut.
“I don’t believe it,” Herman stammered, feeling sick. “Fucking hell, what on earth got into you?”
Yurupig turned his head toward him, but just stared at him for a few seconds like a delirious priest, a madman on the edge of catalepsy.
“We’ll sort that out later,” Petersen said, all the more viciously, as he felt intimidated. “For now you leave it in gear and continue to go upriver slowly. Understood?”
Back on the rear deck, he wrapped an old cloth around his hand before opening the hatch to the hold. At the indraft the fire, which was smoldering under the deck, flared up, but Petersen sprayed the contents of the extinguisher on it until the blaze was put out. A piece of luck this old thing worked …
“Right, that’s that,” he muttered. Inspect the tanks once the smoke’s dispersed … For the moment he had to see to Dietlev. In a bad way, if you wanted his opinion.
Milton’s body, all twisted from the bullets, came to mind. He’d seen enough corpses in his life to recognize the improbable angle of death. He’d had it, he could wait …
“Herman!” Mauro shouted, running to meet him. There was urgency in his voice.
“What is it now?”
“A leak! Follow me, quick!”
Petersen followed him as he hurried to the top. One glance told him the extent of the damage: the water had reached the table in the cabin.
“The bastards, the fucking bastards! That was all we needed!”
“Get a move on,” Mauro urged. “Where are the pumps?”
“Too late. We’ll never manage to stem the inflow … We’ll have to run aground, and quick.”
Mauro grabbed Petersen by the arm. “The life jackets?”
“There aren’t any. Warn the others and let me get on with it, OK?”
Once back in the wheelhouse, Petersen took the helm from Yurupig and examined the river in front: on that section of the Rio Paraguay the right bank’s nothing but a marsh, a vast expanse of gorse and aquatic plants, impossible to land there; on the other bank, however—for a hundred yards at most—the whitish color of the water indicated shallows, alongside the forest. Wondering what was the best way of landing, Herman turned the wheel and accelerated to force the boat, already too heavy to be maneuverable, to point its prow in that direction. The gunboat was so slow to respond, he opened the throttle fully and headed straight for the sandbank.
“Go and find the first-aid kit,” she said to Mauro as soon as she’d examined Dietlev’s leg. “In trunk 6, with the maps … But do hurry, please!”
Without paying him any further attention, she undid her blouse and, with a trick only women can manage, pulled out her brassiere. She then proceeded to tie this improvised tourniquet around Dietlev’s thigh, fairly high up underneath his shorts, and pulled it tight until it stopped the spasmodic flow adding to the pool of blood around him.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, taking Dietlev’s hand.
Clenching his jaws, his face flushed with pain, he managed to sketch a smile. “It’s bad?”
“Impressive, that’s all. No need to panic.”
She kept her eye open for Mauro; finally she saw him coming back with the first-aid kit.
“It’s a real mess down there,” he said, showing her his soaking trousers. There’s water up to the berths, I’ll have to go and tell Petersen …”
“OK,” she said, opening the bag Dietlev had prepared in Brazilia.
To think she’d made fun of the obsessive care with which he’d gone about choosing and organizing the contents … That thing’s a real Pandora’s box! We’ll be in a pretty bad way when we get back even if only a hundredth of the mishaps you’re preparing for happen … Now then, don’t be negative, he’d replied with a laugh. God is great, as they say in Brazil, but the forest’s even greater. I’ll remind you of that, when the time comes. You’ll be glad you can find what you’re looking for, even if it’s only for a scratch …
She knew the procedure more or less; all those pages on first aid were perhaps going to be some use after all. Nervously tearing open several envelopes with sterile compresses, she moistened them with antiseptic and bent over the wound. Clean it, find the artery, bind with a ligature, don’t touch the nerves … At the first contact Dietlev could not repress a cry. She pulled her hand away and looked at him with concern.
“Go on,” he managed to say. “Ignore me.”
She continued cleaning, concentrating on the bloodiest part of the knee. The joint was crushed, transformed into bloody pulp. Meu Deus! They’ll never be able to stick that back together again … She was getting annoyed, swearing in a low voice.
“Get the clamp,” Dietlev said with a grimace. “The pliers that look like a pair of scissors … That’s it. Now loosen the tourniquet, you’ll see it better …
The wound started to bubble in brief spurts.
“It looks as if it’s coming from behind,” she said, sponging up the blood as it came, “No … Ah, there it is!”
She’d just noticed the section of pink tube, fluted like a chicken’s esophagus, out of which the blood was pumping. Concentrating on what she was doing, she slipped one of the jaws under the artery, checked she wasn’t taking anything that looked like a nerve, and closed the clamp until the catch engaged. The hemorrhaging stopped.
Mauro returned just at the moment when the boat started to go at full speed again. “We’re going to run aground,” he warned.
“Help me hold his leg,” she said immediately, not without noticing his somewhat stunned look.
“Elaine …” Dietlev said in a faint voice.
She leaned close to him so she could hear better.
“Have I told you before you’ve got beautiful breasts?”
Blushing to her ears, she clumsily tried to close her blouse. His eyes fixed on her chest, Mauro was smiling, a stupid look on his face, like a child who’s just seen Father Christmas.
“A neat piece of work,” the old German said, proud of his maneuver. Then he cut out the engine and switched on the electric pumps. “Go forward,” he said to Yurupig, “and try to find these blasted leaks.”
When he came back down to the gangway, Elaine was just finishing binding Dietlev’s artery with the ligature. “How is he?” he asked.
“He’ll pull through,” she said coldly, “but it was less a …”
She took a syringe out of its case, pierced the rubber stopper of a little vial with the needle and started to draw up the contents. Dietlev had noted the nature and method of administering the medicines on all the labels so that she’d had no difficulty finding what she needed.
“What about Milton?” Dietlev asked as Elaine injected the morphine in his arm.
“Dead,” Petersen replied curtly. “I’ve just been to have a look.”
Elaine paused for the fraction of a second. A painful silence took hold of the little group in which the feeling of guilt at having forgotten Milton mingled with the sudden awareness of his tragic death.
“Mauro, could you boil some water for me please? I’ve got to finish cleaning this. Then we’ll have to take him down and make him more comfortable.”
“Right,” said Herman, “I’ll go and have a look around to check the damage before night falls.”
“One moment!” said Elaine. “That guy … I mean the Paraguayan?”
Petersen indicated his fate with an extremely expressive gesture. “Yurupig … He didn’t have a chance.”
It was like a sieve, beyond repair as well. As for the outboard motor, it had not only been stuck under water, a direct hit had torn it apart. Yurupig shook his head. “Nothing we can do. The cylinder head’s split.”
“A fine mess you’ve got us into!” Petersen exclaimed. “Stupid fucking indio! What are we going to do now, eh? You tell me that.”
Mauro’s calm voice was heard behind them: “Stop your bickering and come and help us. We need a piece of wood or something rigid to immobilize his leg.”
“I’ll see to it,” said Yurupig. “Start bringing the mattresses up to dry them out. The hammocks too …”
“And what else?” Herman said, beside himself. “I’m the one who gives the orders on this boat.”
“Stop shouting, for God’s sake,” said Mauro, taking him by the arm. “He’s right. As for giving orders, that’s all over. I’d say you’ve shown us what you can do …”
Taken aback by his firmness, Petersen followed him down into the interior. There was no water left in the saloon, but everything was higgledy-piggledy: books and papers transformed into revolting sponges, splinters of glass, soaking cushions … countless objects swept away by the flooding were scattered around in the most unlikely places. The cabins hadn’t been spared either, but on the top bunks they found three foam-rubber mattresses and a few blankets that were almost dry. The rest they spread out on the rail.
Meanwhile Yurupig had brought two small planks cut out of a crate lid and one of the webbing straps used to keep the tin trunks tightly closed. Once she had the splints, Elaine set about seeing to Dietlev’s leg. As a result of the morphine he was so fast asleep that she had no difficulty immobilizing it satisfactorily. Then Yurupig made arrangements to move him: after having tied both ends of the strap together, he pushed it under Dietlev’s buttocks, leaving a broad loop on either side; then he lay on his back between Dietlev’s legs, slipped his arms through the loops, as if he were putting on a rucksack, and turned over onto his front. Once in that position, with all the weight of Dietlev’s body on his shoulders, he used one knee to lever himself up and got slowly to his feet. Not long after, he performed the same maneuver in reverse to put Dietlev down on a makeshift bed at the rear of the boat.
Elaine flopped down beside Dietlev. She had started to tremble and felt she was going to be sick. For a moment it seemed as if the forest were crying for her.
Under a blazing sky, the evening breeze began to raise little waves on the river.
“Why not continue upstream on a raft?” Mauro asked.
Petersen gave a contemptuous shrug. “The current’s too strong. Even if we did manage to build a raft that would more or less float, we’d never be able to go upstream on it.”
“But they will eventually get worried,” Mauro went on. “They can always send someone in from the north, from Cáceres, for example, or even from Cuiabá, can’t they?”
“Who are ‘they’? Here it’s every man for himself. And my wife won’t get worried, sometimes I’m away for several weeks on business. By the time she does, we’ll all be long since dead.”
“But we’ve enough provisions for quite a length of time,” Elaine broke in, “and afterward we can always get by with fishing, or even hunting …”
“Oh, that’s no problem, missie. It’s not the grub I’m worried about, it’s the water. When the jerricans are empty—and quite a few have bullet holes—all that’ll be left will be river water, which leaves us the choice: die of thirst or of dysentery. That’s for certain.”
Elaine had read enough about tropical diseases to see that he was right. “And what are our chances of getting through the forest?”
“For you, none at all. It would be too hard, you’re not used to it; him either,” he said with a glance at Mauro. “Not to mention our friend; disabled as he is, it’s unthinkable. No, what I suggest is that I go with Yurupig to find help. The fork in the river isn’t that far, three or four days on foot, perhaps less, and once we’re there I’m sure there’ll be no problem finding someone to come and fetch you. At the very worst we’ll have to go up as far as Pôrto Aterradinho.”
Elaine hadn’t even started to consider the disaster from this angle, but the arguments Petersen put forward seemed irrefutable. Relieved at not having to face the jungle, she was about to accept this solution, when her eye met Yurupig’s. Slightly behind Petersen and without moving a muscle of his face, he was shaking his head rapidly to tell her to refuse.
“You keep out of this, I warn you,” Herman immediately said, turning to the Indian. “Well,” he said to Elaine, “what do you think?”
“It’s not a decision I can make alone. I’ll have to discuss it with Dietlev first, once he’s woken up. And Mauro will have his say too, of course.”
“As you wish,” Petersen said with a suspicious look. “But there’s nothing to discuss, believe me. I’m off tomorrow morning, anyway.”
“You’ll do what you’re told to do and that’s that,” Elaine said in a steady voice. “That’s what you’ve been paid for, and pretty generously paid too, from what I understand.”
A flash of anger appeared in Petersen’s eyes, but he merely gave a silent laugh, as if he’d glimpsed a comic sequel to the discussion. “I’m going to have a bite to eat and then get some sleep,” he said, controlling his temper. “And you’d be well advised to do the same, senhora … Oh, by the way, I’ve put Milton’s things in your trunk.”
“What things?”
“What he had on him. I chucked them both in the water, him and the other bastard. A matter of hygiene, you understand.”
Necrosis, the stench of corpses, caymans and piranhas falling on a naked body … She felt a quiver of disgust run across the back of her neck. “How could you!” she burst out indignantly. “Who authorized you to do a thing like that?”
“No one, senhora,” Petersen said in honeyed tones and as if he were talking to a madwoman, “no one at all, I assure you …”
Eléazard’s notebooks
KIRCHER’s a common manipulator. He tampers with facts until they make sense. His clear conscience is no excuse. The propagation of the faith, propaganda, distortion of history, etc.—the sequence is only too well known. The certainty of being in the right is always a sign of a secret vocation for fascism.
If the animal is punished it is because it shares responsibility for the act with the man: the man guilty of sodomy has stooped to the level of brute beasts, but the donkey committed the unpardonable crime of raising itself to the level of thinking beings. They are both “against nature.” By betraying the laws of their species, they equally endanger the order of the world.
KIRCHER RESUMED HIS studies, only breaking off from them to receive people who brought him curious animal, vegetable or mineral objects, knowing he was making a collection of them. It was thus that he extended his harvest of anamorphic rocks considerably; he was given stones or sections of minerals in which nature herself had depicted many easily recognizable shapes: dogs, cats, horses, rams, owls, storks & snakes; men & women could also be clearly seen in them, sometimes whole towns with all their parts, their particular domes & belfries. Similarly there were certain sections of branches or tree trunks that had emblems, portraits, even scenes illustrating precisely all the fables of Aesop beautifully engraved on them without recourse to art. The most precious find in Kircher’s eyes was without doubt that series of twenty-one flints where one could very distinctly see each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet formed by the internal structure of the stone!