The work, dedicated to a Cardinal Chigi, had been published in 1721 in Rome. Following the Latin dedication there was a lengthy introduction written in Italian; the maps, when unfolded, were two or three feet square, while the leather-bound book itself was only eleven by twelve inches in size. A person visiting the catacombs could conveniently carry the book in his coat pocket.
Dr. Gambs made no attempt to study the dedication in Latin, which he had all but forgotten, or the introduction in Italian, of which he knew not a word. He proceeded at once to the maps themselves which showed the most important sections of the catacombs and were ornamented with pictures of the gods of the underworld, of Hades and of Tartarus, and of the moon goddesses, Hecate, Persephone, and Alcestis. The legends were again in Italian, but, after a short time, Dr. Gambs was able to discover that a connection had been indicated between the Praetextatus and the St. Sebastian catacombs. Many of the other catacombs, however, were also linked up, and to what extent these connections were actual and to what extent hypothetical, Gambs could not, of course, determine. For old maps rarely differentiate between the hypothetical and the actual. But, for the moment, at least, these distinctions did not interest him. It was enough for him that Jessiersky, too, might have seen the connection marked down there between the Praetextatus and the St. Sebastian catacombs. If he had, he might either have tried to get out at once through the main entrance to the Praetextatus catacombs, which is situated near Sant’Urbano in a sand pit, or he might have gone first over into the St. Sebastian catacombs and then have attempted to find his way out somewhere near the Via Ardeatina, or even through the catacombs of St. Nereus and Achilles.
It would have been better, of course, if, during his last days in Rome, Jessiersky had tried to hunt up maps more up-to-date than those of Casamonte. But he seemed to have been misled by the clarity of the Casamonte maps, assuming them to be as correct as they were clear, and to have consulted no other books.
Dr. Gambs might well have been satisfied to leave the matter there. But having, for once, bestirred himself, he was not satisfied to drop it at this stage. It occurred to him that Jessiersky, knowing that he was being pursued, could hardly have hoped to escape his pursuers on the Aosta, on which he had booked passage in his own name. A cable to the police of Buenos Aires asking them to arrest a certain Herr Alexander Jessiersky, who had officially died in the catacombs, but who might conceivably have gone ashore in Argentina, would have sufficed to bring all his plans to nothing. It was most likely, then, that his booking passage on the Aosta had only been a maneuver to put off his pursuers, and that Jessiersky had planned to escape to safety by another ship and under another name. If such a plan failed, there should be some record of a berth which, engaged about that time aboard another ship for a passenger of another name, had not been occupied. And Dr. Gambs, in fact, discovered that a ticket had been purchased for the Independence, which had sailed from Genoa for New York on May 12th, for a man with the rather odd name of Friedlichkeit, apparently a German, whose ticket had never been turned in.
Seldom, if ever, does it happen that a paid passage remains unused, that it is not canceled in time. But the place on the Independence had not been occupied and from this it was to be concluded that, while the Aosta ticket was not supposed to have been turned in, it had not been possible to turn in the Independence ticket. What is more, it turned out that no Herr Friedlichkeit existed or had ever existed. Friedlichkeit’s cabin had, in reality, been engaged by Jessiersky for himself under a false name and with a forged passport which probably had been procured in Munich. And if ever Jessiersky had got out of the catacombs, he would have gone not to Naples, but to Genoa, and would have left Europe not on the Aosta, but on the Independence.
But he had been unable to carry out his plan, and instead of sailing the ocean, he had had to wade through the waters of the Lethe. And a happening which he had meant only to simulate had actually taken place. The details of his death, of course, could not be reported. But they were of no great importance to the authorities; for them it was enough to know that Jessiersky had ceased to exist.
Chapter 12
Jessiersky had soon discovered that Casamonte’s maps, while not precisely inaccurate, were incomplete to the point of misguiding him. Where, for example, the maps showed one passage branching off from another, there were often two or even three others, and in places where they indicated only one, or at most two stories, there were frequently many more, one above another. Jessiersky had thought that, in general, he would be able to walk along on one level, but he found before long that he had to deal with three dimensions. One level rose up above another, and the whole interior of the earth seemed riddled with tunnels and cavities, like a honeycomb or sponge, so that it would have required descriptive geometry to give the true picture. The maps were not actual representations; they were merely simplified diagrams. Details were sacrificed for the sake of overall clarity. Moreover, the maps were drawn on a small scale so that large areas could be shown on a single page and give the impression of vastness. The final result was not so much a distortion as a modification of reality.
Cardinal Chigi, however, may very well have been pleased with them. Seated at the desk in his palace, leafing through the expensively bound copy which had just been handed to him, he undoubtedly noted with satisfaction that the dedication composed in Latin distichs contained a reference to the supposed descent of Chigi from a patrician gens. To Casamonte, who stood most respectfully behind his chair, anxiously observing the effect of his poetical points upon this prince of the church, the cardinal may well have made the comment, which was as indulgent as it was ambiguous, that the cartographer’s venture into the domain of poetry had been decidedly successful. Unfortunately, however, Casamonte’s poetry had carried over into the maps. For to leave out the unessential is of the essence of poetry. And in the dedication, Casamonte had not only failed to mention that the patrician Chigis, who claimed to be relatives of the Juliuses and Flaviuses, were really descended from an obscure and quite ordinary banker; but also suppressed everything on the maps that might have marred the general effect of the beautifully ornamented pages. To the cardinal, in his castle with its broad vista, this was not in the least disturbing. He had never set foot into the underworld of Rome, except once, or perhaps twice, when a service had been held in the tomb chapel of St. Cecilia. But to a man who was about to lose his way in the catacombs, those beautiful pages were profoundly disturbing, and Alexander Jessiersky cursed the tendency of the world to color everything to suit its taste and needs. He himself, of course, had once been in favor of this kind of coloring. But now he was in favor of it no longer.
He was now willing to admit, however, that his attempt to flee from the moon through the catacombs, without any previous reconnoitering, had been rank foolishness. For he realized that he had greatly underestimated the difficulty and the danger of the undertaking. He had supposed that in picking his way through passages that had been laid out not by nature but by man, he would encounter no insurmountable obstacles. But he had forgotten that the catacombs, unlike a house that is built by a few men, had been the work of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.
When Jessiersky saw that he had little chance of reaching the main entrance to the Praetextatus Catacombs in the sand pit and none at all of finding the spot on the other side of the Via Ardeatina where he had hoped to get back above ground, he decided to return to Sant’Urbano and give up his attempt to put the moon off the track, at least for the time being. He came to this decision fairly soon, for his transatlantic voyage was very much on his mind. By now Achtner would surely have been found, and the investigation of his death would soon be completed. And when, as would undoubtedly be the case, it was proved that he, Jessiersky, had been the murderer, and when later on he was also charged with the shooting of Eisl and the murder of Spinette, the Austrian police would not be long in requesting the Italian authorities to hunt down the fugitive and arrest him. Under no c
ircumstances, therefore, must he miss the Independence; and he now felt no further desire to go in for extensive explorations under the earth, even if he had to put up with the moon for a while longer. The opportunity to get rid of it would present itself later on.
But this attempt to beat the moon with its own weapons was to result only in the moon’s beating Jessiersky with his. For when he tried to return to Sant’Urbano, he could no longer find his way back from the shadowed side of the earth, out of the underworld of the moon, to the light world of the sun.
After the first two days, although he had eaten very sparingly of his small supply of food, he had nothing left to eat, and he began to be tormented by a frightful thirst. On the third day — he still kept track of the time by his watch — he realized that he could no longer get to the Independence. But was it not possible, he wondered, if he were able to stay down here forever, that he might yet be able to put the moon off the scent? For down here the moon could no longer do him any harm.
He would sink down exhausted and lean back against a wall, or he would lie down in the dust and sleep. In between times, he went on groping his way along in the darkness because he wanted to save his candles. Then too, he thought, without them he could more easily discover the light shafts which were supposed to have been cut through in various places, the so-called luminaria. He had heard that most of these openings had become blocked up and that some of them had been reduced to the merest crack. But so far he had not come upon any. Perhaps also it had been moonless night up there when he groped past the shafts, and this was a new prank of the moon to prevent him from finding them.
Then he began to be afraid that he might bump into the dead bodies of the two priests in the darkness, and he felt his way more slowly, walking on the tips of his toes like a moonstruck dog. But then it occurred to him that he would be warned of their presence well in advance by the odor of decay. Or had they become mummies now, indistinguishable from the others which, here and there, had fallen out of the tombs or had been dragged out, far back in the past, by plundering barbarians? He frequently had the feeling that he was brushing against mummies, and once something stuck to the sole of his shoe like a spur. When he lit a candle, he saw that he had stepped squarely into the middle of a lower jawbone which had been lying in the passage and which now spanned the heel of his shoe as neatly as the clasp of a spur.
The suitcase and the coat, even the hat, he had lost long before. From time to time bats would sweep past him, grazing him with their wings. But by the time he had struck a light in order to try to follow them to their exit, they would already have disappeared. He pictured to himself the openings through which they flew out into the open air. Up on the plain, when they fluttered out blindly in swarms, it must look as though an oil volcano were shooting up, in a black spray, a mass of rippling black clouds. Real volcanoes, thought Jessiersky, now becoming delirious, shot up jets of fire from an underworld river called Pyriphlegethon. But probably it had a tributary composed of bats, and the bats were being shot up into the air by the oil volcanoes.
It was about the eighth or ninth day that he suddenly saw light. At first he thought that he had at last come upon a shaft. Then he thought someone had come to look for him. But when he saw two priests coming toward him, who stopped and spoke to him in French, he knew that they must be the two French priests who had died in the catacombs.
One of them was slender, well-proportioned, aristocratic in his bearing and also somewhat younger than his companion who was short and stocky and had a rather crafty expression on his face. With a sanctimonious air, he kept averting his eyes from Jessiersky, who stood rooted to the spot.
At last he found his voice. “So you are alive?” he cried out. “I don’t know what to think! I told the man up there that I was coming down here to look for you, but that was only a pretext! In reality — please forgive me — I never doubted for a moment that you were dead.”
The priests looked at him for a while in silence, then the slender one said: “Monsieur de Jessiersky, you have spoken only a few words to us. Nevertheless, we notice with regret that your French is not of the best. You should have availed yourself of the opportunity to learn it better from your late father.”
“Do you think so?” asked Jessiersky, who was much too confused to be surprised that they should know not only about him but also about his father. “Yes, yes, that’s quite possible. But tell me, are you dead, or aren’t you?”
“If we were,” said the short one after a long silence, “you would at least have to believe in immortality. Isn’t that true?”
“Do you think so?”
“Certainly.”
“But why? Or if you are still alive, explain to me at least what you’ve been living on all this time. I, too, brought along a small supply, but I finished it up long ago, and I am starving. You must have dragged in whole mountains of provisions to be standing there alive before me now. And why did you come down here in the first place? Were you really interested in the catacombs, or were you simply trying — tell me honestly — to get away from the moon?”
“The moon,” said the slender one, poking with the tip of his toe the remains of a mummy which was lying in the dust. “You can neither escape from the moon nor not escape from it. The moon is the symbol of illusion, the sign of the uncertainty under which we exist.”
“Why can’t you escape from the moon?” cried Jessiersky. “I myself almost escaped from it!”
“But only almost!”
“Ah, now I see that you are dead,” said Jessiersky. “But you are ashamed of having died. For why else would you answer me so evasively? That also explains why you apparently don’t want to tell me that I, too, am already dead.”
“So you think,” inquired the short priest, “that you yourself are no longer among the living?”
“Certainly.”
“Then you do believe in immortality after all?”
“No,” said Jessiersky, “obviously I do not believe in it. For how could we be talking about our death — although, come to think of it, we would have to be immortal to talk about it after it had taken place. But perhaps you can at least explain death to me. As you can see, I hadn’t even noticed that I was dead. Is it possible that you, too, haven’t noticed yet that you are dead?”
“I really don’t know why you want to know that,” said the slender priest. “For, after all, everything is just what we think it is, what we take it to be. And the same applies to man and his situation. Considered from the standpoint of the body, he is, of course, mortal. But when you consider him from the point of view of his soul, he can only be immortal. For the soul is the nonmortal aspect of man, and what is not physical does not die. Therefore one and the same being, man, is both mortal and immortal.”
Jessiersky made a wry face. “That sort of immortality,” he said, “would give me little pleasure.”
“But there is no other.”
“Quite frankly, it’s too abstract for me.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t oblige you with a more concrete variety. For our only organ for existence, our only connection with the world is our body. It sinks into the tangible, as the so-called ‘foot’ of a shell sinks into the mud, and if we lose it, we are confined to the abstract. To make it more palatable to you, I would have to express myself more poetically.”
“How, may I ask?”
“By trying to use allegories. I might, for example, do something with the idea that one returns in death to the place of one’s birth. In that event, we, my companion and I, would return to France, because all of our forebears lived there, and you, Monsieur de Jessiersky, would return to Galicia, to Poland. . . .”
“To Poland?” exclaimed Jessiersky, surprised that even the most private thoughts of his youth seemed to be known to this priest. “To Poland, you say? But what would I do in Poland, now that everything has been confiscated there! Even in Bohemia my late wif
e’s two . . .”
“Oh, among the dead nothing is confiscated,” said the slender priest, “and particularly not among dead Poles. It is conceivable that Germans and Czechs might still take things away from one another in death, but under no circumstances would anything like that happen in Poland. The nobility there are still happily ensconced on their estates, even though they might have squandered them away long ago, and they are being waited on by all the people who are not nobles. Among the dead any attempt to introduce social reforms would be quite hopeless. Even those who would benefit, reject them here, as of course, do those who wouldn’t. . . .”
“I, too,” said Jessiersky, “have always imagined it to be like that, or very much like that. Isn’t that strange?”
“No, not at all,” returned the slender priest. “For, although it is reactionary, or perhaps just because it is reactionary, it fits very well into the picture we have of death. You have no idea how extremely reactionary our pictures of death are! But however that may be, I can very well imagine that you too, when you die, instead of being taken to the cemetery in a hearse, will be carried in a sleigh to Poland. . . .”
“But that’s extraordinary,” cried Jessiersky, “really too extraordinary that you should happen to mention the sleigh! Although, unfortunately, I am convinced that no sleigh will ever carry me to Poland. There was one for my poor father, but there will be no sleigh for me.”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” said the priest reassuringly. “For you, too. To Poland. A sleigh, drawn by two tall half-breeds with ornamented harnesses and bells on the headstalls. To Wiazownika or Marianowka, whichever you please. Into a kind of Jessiersky heaven. You have earned it at long last by your little episodes with Spinette and Eisl and Achtner, though originally you would never have thought of . . .”
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