Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  Up to this point the clues have seemed to match Venice and St Mark’s. Suddenly however new associations rearrange Langdon’s thoughts; he turns to Sienna, telling her ‘I made a mistake’. Sienna looks at him and turns pale. Are we in the wrong place, she wants to know. ‘“Sienna”, Langdon whispered, feeling ill. “We’re in the wrong country.”’

  And so off they go again, within moments, to Istanbul – albeit now estranged and flying separately. The whole of the action in Inferno takes place over the course of a sleepless day and night, but the visit by Langdon and Sienna to Venice sets a touristic record, quicker even than the tour groups disembarking from the unending queue of cruise liners. It cannot have lasted more than an hour and a half.

  ISTANBUL

  What Langdon has realised is that ‘the gilded mouseion of the holy wisdom’ refers to the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; Hagia Sophia is the Greek for holy wisdom. He also realises that the doge in question, Enrico Dandolo, was buried not in Venice but in Constantinople; in fact when Dandolo died in Constantinople in 1205 he was placed in a sarcophagus in the south gallery of the Hagia Sophia. So this is where the clue tells Langdon to come and kneel and listen for ‘the sounds of trickling water’ and ‘follow deep into the sunken palace’.

  Langdon’s plane arrives at Ataturk airport. From there, he is driven along the highway, named for John F Kennedy, which runs along the Sea of Marmara and through the ancient Land Walls of Constantinople. Constantinople, Istanbul, Byzantium, Stamboul: for 2,500 years this city has stood under different names and different rulers by the narrow waterway of the Bosphorus that separates Europe and Asia. In AD 324, Constantine made it the capital of the Roman Empire. When the Western Empire collapsed in AD 476, the era of the Byzantine Empire began, and Constantinople became the centre of the civilised world. For a thousand years the city held off attacks by Arabs, Barbarians and Seljuk Turks, preserving and developing within her the highest attainments of Greek culture, and surviving just long enough to transmit the Classical and Byzantine achievements to a re-ordered and re-awakening Western Europe.

  The end came on a May night in 1453, when a crescent of fire embraced the walls as the overwhelming Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmet prepared for the morning kill. The last emperor, named Constantine like the first, gathered his followers in Hagia Sophia, the most magnificent church in Christendom, to celebrate a final mass amid sobs, wailings and cries of Kyrie eleison. Calling ‘God forbid that I should live an Emperor without an Empire! As the city falls, I will fall with it!’, Constantine rode out against the Turks, and was immediately cut down.

  The interior of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

  Langdon is driven past the gaping windows of the Byzantine sea palace of Bucoleon, and round the headland of the old city until he and others – now including the icy-eyed man, along with his umlaut – are deposited in the park between the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. By this time everyone is on the same side, trying to save mankind from the great cull.

  ‘Hovering beneath the water, an undulating bubble of transparent plastic containing a gelatinous, yellow-brown liquid’… the Yerebatan Saray cistern in Istanbul.

  ‘Not so much a building as a mountain’, the Hagia Sophia strikes Langdon with ‘the staggering force of its enormity’. In AD 532 the Emperor Justinian gathered thousands of workers and a hundred of the finest masters and architects from all over the ancient world to build a church that would rival in size and beauty any building constructed to that day. Five years later at the inauguration ceremony, Justinian, in reference to the fabled Temple in Jerusalem, cried out, ‘O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!’ He had achieved more than that. The impressive interior of Hagia Sophia has only been equalled in the succeeding 1,500 years by the cathedral of Chartres.

  The beauty of the interior lies in the enormous space it contains, and in the dynamic use of that space. The dome soars weightlessly overhead, seeming to float and billow like a gigantic hot-air balloon. Visitors stand in wonder within its vastness, at first reduced to insignificance and then absorbed into the cosmic illusion. The dome must have been so much more magnificent when girdled with Byzantine mosaics. But the day after the Turks took Constantinople, Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque and in accordance with Islamic dogma all representational images had to be covered. Only in the 1930s, when Ataturk changed the church-cum-mosque into a museum, were the mosaics exposed once more. Those that could be saved were restored.

  This is where Doge Dandolo was put to rest, in the southern gallery upstairs, but his sarcophagus has long been empty; his bones were removed by the Turks and thrown away.

  Why it should be possible to put one’s ear to the floor, listen to Dandolo’s empty tomb and hear the trickle of water is not clear. There is nothing below the gallery floor other than vacant space filled by air. But it is true that below the narthex of his great church, Justinian built a vast cistern, nowadays called in Turkish the Yerebatan Saray, meaning the underground palace. Through much of the twentieth century, the cistern continued to serve its original purpose of storing the water brought to the city by the aqueduct of Valens. Its long avenues of 336 columns in 28 rows all have finely carved capitals; still in the same condition as when it was built, the cistern of today is exactly what our eyes would have seen had we lived in the sixth century.

  This is where Bertrand Zobrist fixed his water-soluble sack of murky yellow-brown liquid, and beneath it, bolted to the floor, you may still see the polished titanium plaque that bears his inscription.

  * * *

  IN THIS PLACE, ON THIS DATE

  THE WORLD WAS CHANGED FOREVER.

  * * *

  PART FOUR

  DAN BROWN AND HIS WORLD

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Langdon & Brown

  Florence has long been familiar ground to Robert Langdon. At the end of The Da Vinci Code (2003), the second Langdon novel, after Sophie Neveu asks him when they can meet again, he tells her that he will be lecturing in Florence next month, where he will be given a room at the Hotel Brunelleschi. ‘We’d be living in luxury’, he suggests to her. ‘You presume a lot, Mr Langdon’, she replies, though she quickly accepts. On one condition: no museums, no churches, no art, no relics, no tombs, she insists. ‘In Florence? For a week?’ Langdon protests. ‘There is nothing else to do!’

  A LIFETIME KNOWLEDGE OF FLORENCE

  In fact Langdon’s familiarity with Florence goes back to his schooldays. In The Lost Symbol (2009), the third Langdon novel, he mentions Dante’s Inferno, saying that nobody escaped Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private school he attended in New Hampshire, without knowing the great Italian poet and the canticles of his Divine Comedy.

  So at the beginning of the fourth Langdon novel, Inferno, when he regains consciousness at the hospital and sees the Palazzo Vecchio illuminated against the night sky, his surprise that he is somehow in Florence is nevertheless accompanied by phantasms and visions rooted in his long personal and cultural familiarity with the city, and especially with Dante’s Inferno.

  SYMBOLS AND QUESTS

  But why does an otherwise laid-back Harvard University professor find himself in this succession of hair-raising adventures: in Rome; in Paris, London and Rosslyn; in Washington DC; and now in Florence, Venice and Istanbul? In each case he is summoned. He is wanted precisely because he is a world-renowned professor of religious symbology, whose specialities include classical iconology, symbols of pre-Christian culture, goddess art and the decryption of ancient ciphers. Also he is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Symbology of Secret Sects, The Art of the Illuminati, The Lost Language of Ideograms, Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine and the essential university textbook Religious Iconology.

  If you are looking for answers in any of these areas – be it missing masonic treasures, the grotesque killings of a pope and cardinals, or the murder of a curator among the Leonardos at the Louvre – Robert Langdon is your man. And thus Robert Langdon finds himself in Florenc
e once again, where there are riddles to be unravelled if the world is to be saved from the Shade and the vast but uncertain threat known only as Inferno.

  To be summoned is one thing; to accept is another. And Langdon does have a remarkable history of getting himself involved in outrageous, dangerous and seemingly impossible challenges that would have defeated more ordinary men. The questions they raise, and the demands they make on Langdon’s physical and mental powers, amount less to a typical detective thriller case, and much more to something like a quest – in the mould of Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Chrétien de Troyes’ Story of the Grail, or for that matter Dante’s Inferno.

  A TOUCH OF CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  While Langdon seemingly accepts his challenges with a ready ease, something as simple as being strapped into an aircraft seat fills him with dread. That happens at the start of Angels and Demons (2000), the very first of the Langdon books, when a hypersonic jet conveys him to Geneva. The cabin hasall the appearance of a wide-bodied commercial airliner but it has no windows, ‘which made Langdon uneasy’.

  He has the same problem in Sienna Brooks’ apartment in Florence early in Inferno. As he washes his wound and splashes water on his face, ‘the windowless bathroom was suddenly feeling claustrophobic’, and instinctively he steps into the hall towards a shaft of natural light. And later, while eluding his pursuers through the streets of Florence, the sight of the great red-tiled dome of the cathedral, the Duomo, reminds Langdon of an earlier visit to the city when ‘he had foolishly decided to ascend the dome only to discover that its narrow, tourist crammed staircases were as distressing as any of the claustrophobic spaces he’d ever encountered’. That at least is understandable; there is even a sign at the entrance warning off visitors who feel uncomfortable in confined spaces. For Langdon, however, the feeling is extreme; it even follows him to London in The Da Vinci Code, where, entering the narrow low-ceilinged walkways in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, he feels a touch of panic and considers how the word cloister is linked to the word claustrophobic.

  Dan Brown with a man dressed as a Vatican Swiss Guard at the Rome premiere of the Angels and Demons movie.

  Throughout his life Langdon has been haunted by ‘a mild case of claustrophobia – the vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome’. The condition has affected his life in many subtle ways: his aversion to indoor sports like squash, for example; foregoing inexpensive faculty housing and paying a small fortune to live in an airy, high-ceilinged Victorian home being another. Langdon even suspects that his attraction to the world of art as a young boy had much to do with his love of the vast spaces within museums.

  THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

  Langdon’s fear of closed spaces becomes part of his ordeal, almost a necessary aspect of his quest. There is the terrifying scene in The Lost Symbol when the evil Mal’akh seals Langdon in a box and pumps it full of liquid. ‘All he could do now was stare up through the blur of water above him and hope.’ Unable to hold his breath any longer, ‘His lips parted. His lungs expanded. And the liquid came pouring in. … And then blackness. Robert Langdon was gone’. But not quite, it turns out, for this scene corresponds to the tenth hour of the Amduat, that part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead which deals with the soul’s passage through the twelve hours of the night, when bodies of the deceased are suspended in the primeval waters of Nun. They appear to be drowning, but in fact they are being refreshed by the waters, and the promise is that they will be resurrected. ‘O ye who whose cheeks are filled with water, whose souls have been deprived of their heavenly air, and who beat the air with your hands in order to obtain it, Come ye forth in this stream, for your members shall not perish, and your flesh shall not decay, and ye shall have dominion over the water, and your souls will have life.’ It’s not a spell that saves Langdon from drowning, however, but science. He has in fact been submerged in an oxygen-rich perfluorocarbon liquid – not something invented by Dan Brown, but a substance that is already finding medical uses. Whatever the means, Langdon has survived the ordeal and re-emerges, transformed and reborn as in the ancient myths, in much the same way that after the twelve hours of the night the soul is reborn again with the rising sun.

  In Inferno, all Florence seems to be a trap. Langdon is chased through the streets and buildings and secret passages while struggling to recover from amnesia, and struggling even to understand why he is being hunted. All the while, he’s desperately trying to solve clues that will lead him from the darkness to the light, to the solution that he seeks. Seek and you will find.

  FALLING DOWN A WELL

  Perhaps an explanation for what motivates Robert Langdon can be found in the recurring story, an obsessive memory, which he repeats to himself about playing as a child in an open field. It is a late spring or summer’s day, as Langdon recalls the incident in Angels and Demons. The flowers here are like paintings, he is thinking to himself, as he runs laughing across the meadow. His eye catches a brilliant lady’s slipper – the most beautiful flower in New Hampshire, and so rare that he has seen it only in books.

  The boy kneels down. Excitedly he reaches towards the flower – and suddenly the ground gives way and he falls into a deep forgotten well. He grasps at the sides, but its stone walls are slick and smooth; he has to kick his legs to stay afloat. He screams for help but his cries are lost far beneath the ground, and with the setting of the sun, and as the well-shaft passes completely into darkness, the boy is tormented by visions of the walls collapsing and burying him alive.

  Langdon was barely conscious by the time the rescue team arrived. He had been treading water for five hours. Two days later, as Langdon recalls drily, the Boston Globe ran a story about his accident, beneath the headline ‘The Little Swimmer that Could’.

  That headline in the Globe was an allusion to the 1930 American childrens’ story called The Little Engine That Could, widely used to teach children the value of optimism and hard work. It is about a stranded train that is unable to find an engine willing to haul it over a mountain to its destination. Only the little blue engine is willing to try, and while chuffing ‘I think I can, I think I can, I think I can’, it overcomes a seemingly impossible task.

  UNEXPECTED REALITIES

  It is as though Langdon owes his achievement, his academic success, to that terrifying childhood event, to the fear that steals upon him still when he finds himself in a confined space, and to his courage and endurance and his unbroken optimism. But the crisis was not just physical, it was mental too, and the confined space was not just a well but a confined way of looking at the world. Langdon never saw the world in the same way again. Beneath the flower was the abyss; beneath the apparent certainties lie unexpected realities. In Robert Langdon’s world everything is open to new interpretations.

  Not that Langdon is in any way existentially burdened by it all. In a nicely ironic passage in The Da Vinci Code, he confesses that ‘a career tendency of symbologists was to extract meaning from situations that had none’.

  DAN BROWN

  Like Robert Langdon, Dan Brown also suffers from claustrophobia. ‘I almost fell down a well; it’s something that almost happened to me as a child’ He did not actually fall into the well, but he was on the ledge, unable to move, frozen with fear. ‘I don’t know if I would have been all right. The thought of it, even now, gives me a chill.’ The young Dan remained on the ledge for some time, paralysed until help came. ‘And then I got wrapped in a carpet.’ As an adult, he does not like to talk about the incident, or even think about it. He lets Robert Langdon relive the fear for him. But like Langdon, ever since that terrible moment of what might have been, Dan Brown has seen the world in a different way, not quite so solid or reassuring as he had seen it before.

  THE END DEPENDS UPON THE BEGINNING

  Dan Brown admits that he created Robert Langdon as a fictional alter ego. ‘Langdon’s the guy I wish I could be.’ Both Brown and Langdon were born on the same day in June; in the same town, Exeter, New Hampshire; an
d went to the same school, Phillips Exeter Academy, whose motto is ‘The end depends upon the beginning’.

  For all the similarities in their beginnings, their fears, and the success they have enjoyed in their respective careers, Dan Brown’s attempts at writing got off to an unpromising start. His first books were all flops; Digital Fortress (1998), Angels and Demons (2000) and Deception Point (2001) sold fewer than twenty thousand copies between them. One more book was due under Dan Brown’s publishing contract; if that had failed too, he would have gone back to his quiet routine of teaching at his alma mater in Exeter. That things turned out differently was in large measure thanks to his wife Blythe, who guided him and was a driving force behind his success. Dan Brown’s earliest inspiration, however, came from his hometown itself, from his schooling there and from his early family life.

  PUZZLES AND GAMES

  Dan Brown was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, on 22 June 1964, the son of a mathematics teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy and a mother he has described as ‘a professional sacred musician’. He was raised as an Episcopalian. Both his parents sang in the church choir; his mother has a master’s degree in sacred music and is a professional church organist.

  Secrets and puzzles played a prominent role in Brown’s childhood. His family had no television at home, and his parents’ lives were saturated with mathematics and music. Those interests fused well, Brown says, with the family passion for anagrams, crossword puzzles and ciphers. On birthdays and at Christmas his father would create elaborate treasure hunts. Instead of finding their presents under the tree, Brown and his brother and sister would find treasure maps filled with codes and clues that would lead them from room to room throughout the house – or sometimes even around the town on their bicycles – sending them from one clue to the next until they finally discovered where their presents were hidden.