by Umberto Eco
However, he promptly pricked up his ears when he heard that his friends were still talking about Prester John. When he had left them in Paris that story still seemed a fantasy of bookworms, but in Milan he had heard Baudolino speak of it to Rainald as of something that could become a visible sign of the imperial power, at least as much as the rediscovery of the Magi. The enterprise, in that case, would interest him, and he began taking part in it as if he were constructing a war machine. The more they talked about it, the more it seemed to him that the land of Prester John, like an earthly Jerusalem, was being transformed from a place of mystical pilgrimage to a land of conquest.
So he reminded his comrades that, after the Magi business, the Priest had become far more important than before: he had to be presented truly as rex et sacerdos. As king of kings he had to have a palace compared to which those of the Christian sovereigns, including the basileus of the Constantinople schismatics, would seem hovels, and as priest he had to have a temple compared to which the churches of the pope were shacks. He had to be given a worthy palace.
"There is a model," Boron said, "and it is the Heavenly Jerusalem as the apostle John saw it in the Apocalypse. It must be girded by high walls, with twelve gates, like the twelve tribes of Israel, to the south three gates, to the west three gates, to the east three gates, and to the north three gates...."
"Yes," the Poet jested, "and the Priest enters one and goes out the other, and when there is a storm they all slam at once; I can imagine the drafts. In a palace like that you would never find me, not even dead...."
"Let me continue. The foundations of the walls are of jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonix, sard, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, hyacinth, and amethyst; and the twelve gates are twelve pearls, and the forecourt is pure gold, transparent as glass."
"Not bad," Abdul said, "but I think the model must be the Temple of Jerusalem, as the prophet Ezekiel describes it. Come with me tomorrow morning to the abbey. One of the canons, the learned Richard of Saint Victoire, is trying to reconstruct the design of the Temple, since the text of the prophet is at times obscure."
"Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "I don't know if you've ever studied the measurements of the Temple."
"Not yet."
"Well, don't, because it's enough to drive you crazy. In the Book of Kings it says that the Temple is sixty cubits wide, thirty high, and twenty deep, and that the porch is twenty wide and ten cubits deep. In Chronicles, however, it is said that the porch is one hundred twenty cubits high. Now, if it were twenty wide, one hundred twenty high, and ten deep, not only would the porch be four times higher than all the Temple, but it would also be so flimsy that it would fall down at a mere breath. The problem, however, arises when you read the vision of Ezekiel. Not one measurement holds up, and so a number of pious men have admitted that Ezekiel had indeed had a vision, which is a bit like saying he had drunk too much and was seeing double. Nothing wrong with that, poor Ezekiel (he also had a right to his fun), but then that Richard of Saint Victoire reasoned as follows: if everything, every number, every straw in the Bible has a spiritual meaning, we must clearly understand what it says literally, because it's one thing to say, for the spiritual meaning, that something is three long and another's length is nine, since these two numbers have different mystical meanings. I can't describe to you the scene when we went to hear Richard's lecture on the Temple. He had the Book of Ezekiel before his eyes, and he was working with a tape to demonstrate all the measurements. He drew the outline of what Ezekiel had described, then he took some sticks and little slabs of soft wood, and, with the help of his acolytes, he cut them and tried to put them together with nails and glue.... He tried to reconstruct the Temple, and he reduced the measurements proportionally. What I mean is that where Ezekiel said one cubit, he had a finger's width cut.... Every two minutes the whole thing collapsed. Richard became angry with his helpers, saying they had let go of the stick, or hadn't put on enough glue; they defended themselves, saying that he was the one who had given them the wrong measurements. Then the master corrected himself, saying that perhaps the text said porta, but in this case the word meant porch, otherwise there would be a door almost as big as the whole Temple; at other moments he reversed himself, and said that when two measurements didn't agree it was because the first time Ezekiel was referring to the dimension of the whole building and the second to the measurement of one part. Or else sometimes it said cubit but it meant geometric cubit, which is equal to six ordinary cubits. In other words, it was amusing for a few mornings to follow that sainted man as he racked his brains, and we burst out laughing every time the Temple came apart. To keep him from noticing, we pretended to pick up some fallen object, but then a canon realized we were always dropping things, and he sent us away."
In the days that followed, Abdul suggested that, as Ezekiel after all belonged to the people of Israel, perhaps others of his faith could shed some light. When his companions, shocked, said that it was not right to read the Scriptures while asking advice of a Jew, since notoriously that treacherous race altered the text of the sacred books to remove every reference to the coming of Christ, Abdul revealed that some of the greatest masters in Paris took advantage at times, though in secret, of the learning of the rabbis, at least for those passages where the coming of the Messiah was not involved. As luck would have it, in those very days, the Saint Victoire canons had invited to their abbey one such man, still young but of great reputation: Solomon of Gerona.
Naturally Solomon was not staying at Saint Victoire: the canons had found him a room, dark and fetid, in one of the shabbiest streets of Paris. He was, indeed, a young man, even though his face seemed haggard from meditation and study. He expressed himself in good Latin, but in an almost incomprehensible fashion, because he had a peculiar mouth: in the whole left side he had all his teeth, upper and lower, from the central incisor, but no teeth on the right side. Though it was morning, the darkness of the room obliged him to read with a burning lamp, and on the arrival of his visitors, he put his hands on a scroll he had before him as if to prevent others from peering at it—a futile precaution, because the scroll was written in Hebrew characters. The rabbi tried to apologize because, he said, that was a book that Christians rightly execrated, the ill-famed Toledot Jeschu, in which it was said that Jesus was the son of a courtesan and a mercenary, a certain Pantera. But the Saint Victoire canons themselves had asked him to translate a few pages, because they wanted to understand the extent of the Jews' perfidy. He said that he would undertake the task willingly because he also considered the book too severe, inasmuch as Jesus was surely a virtuous man, even if he had had the weakness to consider himself, wrongly, the Messiah, but perhaps he had been deceived by the Prince of Darkness, and even the Gospels admitted that the Prince had come to tempt him.
He was questioned about the form of the Temple according to Ezekiel, and he smiled: "The most alert commentators on the sacred text have not succeeded in establishing the exact structure of the Temple. Even the great rabbi Solomon ben Isaac admitted that, if you follow the letter of the text, there is no understanding where the northern external chambers are, where they begin to the west, and how far they stretch to the east, and so on. You Christians do not understand that the sacred text is born from a Voice. The Lord, hakadosh baruch hu, that the Holy One, may his name always be blessed, when he speaks to his prophets, allows them to hear sounds, but does not show figures, as you people do, with your illuminated pages. The voice surely provokes images in the heart of the prophet, but these images are not immobile; they liquefy, change shape according to the melody of that voice, and if you want to reduce to images the voice of the Lord, blessed always be his name, you freeze that voice, as if it were fresh water turning to ice that no longer quenches thirst, but numbs the limbs in the chill of death.
"Canon Richard, to understand the spiritual meaning of each part of the Temple, would like to reconstruct it, as a master mason would do, and he will never succeed. Visions ar
e like dreams, where things are transformed one into another, not like the images of your church, where things remain always the same."
Then Rabbi Solomon asked why his visitors wanted to know what the Temple was like, and they told him of their search for the kingdom of Prester John. The rabbi showed great interest. "Perhaps you do not know," he said, "that our texts also tell us of a mysterious kingdom in the Far East, where the scattered ten tribes of Israel still live."
"I have heard these tribes spoken of," Baudolino said, "but I know very little of them."
"It is all written. After the death of King Solomon, the twelve tribes into which Israel was then divided fell to fighting. Only two, that of Judah and that of Benjamin, remained loyal to the house of David, and ten whole tribes went north, where they were defeated and enslaved by the Assyrians. Of them nothing more was heard. Esdras says that they went towards a land never inhabited by man, in a region called Arsareth, and other prophets have announced that one day they would be found and would make a triumphal return to Jerusalem. Now, one of our brothers, Eldad of the tribe of Dan, more than a hundred years ago, arrived at Qayrawan, in Africa, where a community of the Chosen People exists, saying that he came from the kingdom of the ten lost tribes, a land blessed by heaven, where life is peaceful, never troubled by any crime, where truly the streams flow with milk and honey. This land has remained separated from every other country because it is defended by the river Sambatyon, which is as wide as the shot of the mightiest bow, but it is without water, and only sand and stones flow there furiously, making a noise so horrible that it can be heard even at the distance of a day's march, and that inanimate matter flows there so rapidly that anyone wishing to cross the river would be swept away by it. That stony course stops only at the beginning of the Sabbath, and only on the Sabbath can it be crossed, but no son of Israel could violate the Sabbath day of rest."
"But Christians could?" asked Abdul.
"No, because on the Sabbath a hedge of flames makes the banks of the river inaccessible."
"Then how did that Eldad reach Africa?" the Poet asked.
"This I do not know, but who am I to dispute the decrees of the Lord, the Holy One be he ever blessed? Men of little faith, Eldad may have been borne by an angel. The problem for our rabbis, who immediately began arguing about that account, from Babylon to Spain, was rather something else: if the ten lost tribes had lived by the divine law, their laws should have been the same as Israel's, whereas according to Eldad's story they were different."
"But if the kingdom Eldad tells of was the realm of Prester John," Baudolino said, "then its laws would truly be different from yours, but similar to ours, even better!"
"This is what divides us from you gentiles," Rabbi Solomon said. "You have the freedom to practice your law, and you have corrupted it, so you seek a place where it is still observed. We have kept our law intact, but we haven't the freedom to follow it. In any case, you should know that it would also be my desire to find that kingdom, because it could be that our ten lost tribes and the gentiles live there in peace and harmony, each free to follow his own law, and the very existence of that prodigious kingdom would be an example to all the children of the Almighty, may his Holy Name be always blessed. And further, I must tell you I would like to find that kingdom for another reason. According to what Eldad said, the Holy Language is still spoken there, the original language that the Almighty, blessed always be his name, had given to Adam, and which was lost with the construction of the tower of Babel."
"What folly," Abdul said. "My mother always told me that the language of Adam was reconstructed on her island, and it is the Gaelic language, composed of nine parts of speech, the same number as the nine materials from which the tower of Babel was built: clay and water, wool and blood, wood and mortar, pitch, linen, and bitumen. It was the seventy-two sages of the school of Phenius, who constructed the Gaelic language, using fragments of all the seventy-two tongues born after the confusion of tongues, and for this reason Gaelic contains what is best in every language, and since the Adamitic language has the same form as the created world, so each noun in it expresses the essence of the very thing it denotes."
Rabbi Solomon smiled indulgently. "Many nations believe that theirs is the language of Adam, forgetting that Adam could speak only the language of the Torah, not of those books that tell of false and lying gods. The seventy-two languages born after the great confusion are ignorant of fundamental letters: for example, the gentiles do not know the letter Het and the Arabs are unaware of Peh, and hence such languages resemble the grunting of swine, the croaking of frogs, or the cry of the crane, because they belong to peoples who have abandoned the true way of life. The original Torah, at the moment of the creation, was before the Almighty, always may his name be blessed, written like black fire upon white fire, not in order of the written Torah as we read it today, and which was manifested only after Adam's sin. For this reason every night I spend hours and hours spelling out, with great concentration, the letters of the written Torah, to confuse them, to make them spin like the wheel of a mill, and thus cause to reappear the original order of the eternal Torah, which preexisted creation and had been given to the angels by the Almighty, blessed be his name always. If I knew that a distant kingdom exists where the original order is preserved, as well as the language that Adam spoke with his creator before committing his sin, I would gladly devote my life to seeking it."
As Solomon said these words, his countenance was illuminated by such a light that our friends asked themselves if it were not worth having him share in their future discussions. It was the Poet who found the decisive argument: the fact that this Jew wanted to find in the kingdom of Prester John his language and his ten tribes should not disturb them. Prester John had to be so powerful that he could govern even the lost tribes of the Jews, and there seemed to be no reason why he should not also speak the language of Adam. The chief question was, first of all, how to construct that kingdom, and to that end a Jew could be as useful as a Christian.
Nevertheless, they still had not decided what John's palace should be like. They resolved the question some nights later, the five of them in Baudolino's room. Inspired by the genius of the place, Abdul made up his mind to reveal to his new friends the secret of the green honey, saying that it could help them not to imagine but, rather, to see Prester John's palace directly.
Rabbi Solomon said at once that he knew far more mystical methods to provoke visions, and that at night he had only to murmur the multiple combinations of the letters of the secret name of the Lord, spinning them on his tongue, until a whirl of thoughts and of images was born, whereupon he plunged into a blissful exhaustion.
The Poet at first seemed suspicious, then he determined to try, but, wishing to temper the property of the honey with that of wine, in the end he lost all restraint and raved better than the others.
Having reached the proper state of intoxication, and helping himself with a few unsteady lines that he drew on the table, dipping his finger into the jar, he suggested that the palace had to be like the one the apostle Thomas had had built for Gondophorus, king of the Indians: ceilings and beams of Cyprus wood, roof of ebony, and a dome surmounted by two golden apples, on each of which gleamed two carbuncles, so that the gold shone during the day by the light of the sun and the gems at night in the glow of the moon. Then he stopped relying on his memory and on the authority of Thomas, and began seeing doors of sardonyx mixed with horns of the cerastes, which prevent passersby from introducing poison into the building, and windows of crystal, tables of gold on columns of ivory, lights nourished with balsam, and the king's bed of sapphire, to preserve chastity, because—the Poet concluded—this John may be a king all right, but he is also a priest and so, as for women, nothing doing.
"It seems beautiful to me," Baudolino said, "but for a king who rules over such a vast land, I would also put, in some hall, those automata that I've heard existed in Rome, that gave warning when one of the provinces was in revolt."
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"In the Priest's kingdom, I don't believe," Abdul remarked, "that there can be revolts, because peace and harmony reign there." However, the idea of the automata appealed to him, because everyone knows that a great emperor, whether Moor or Christian, had to have automata at court. So he saw them, and with wonderful hypotyposis he made them visible also to his friends: "The palace stands on a mountain, and it's the mountain that is made of onyx, with a peak so smooth that it shines like the moon. The temple is round, its dome is of gold, and the walls, too, are of gold, encrusted with gems so rutilant that they produce warmth in winter and coolness in summer. The ceiling is encrusted with sapphires that represent the sky and carbuncles that represent the stars. A gilded sun and a silvered moon—these are the automata—travel through the heavenly vault, and mechanical birds sing every day, while at the corners four bronze angels accompany them with their trumpets. The palace rises over a hidden well, in which teams of horses move a grindstone, making it turn according to the changes of the seasons, so that it becomes the image of the cosmos. Beneath the crystal floor fish swim, and fabulous marine creatures. However, I have heard talk of mirrors from which you can see all the things that happen. One would be most useful, for John, to survey the extreme confines of his realm...."
The Poet, by now thinking in terms of architecture, began drawing the mirror, explaining: "It will be set very high, and can be reached by ascending a flight of one hundred twenty-five steps of porphyry...."