Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  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 m
ore 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.

  WHEN PETERSEN CALLED for help, Elaine was still in a state of shock; huddled up in Mauro’s arms, she was drifting, immersed in a flood of disjointed images, her sole sensation that of her skirt wet at the crotch. Dietlev’s name in combination with a tourniquet had the effect of a slap on the face; on her feet at once, she rushed over to the gangway ladder, acting instinctively but determined to face up to the challenge.

  “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.