Mario Reading - The Nostradamus prophecies

‘I don’t need to. And I don’t want to.’

Calque stood up. ‘Fine. It was stupid of me to even ask. Why should you tell me? What can I do about anything? I’m an old man. I should retire. But I hang on in the police force because I don’t have anything else to do with my life. That’s about the sum of it. Goodbye, Mister Sabir. I’m glad the bastard didn’t get you.’

Sabir watched Calque shuffle towards the door. There was something about the man – an integrity, perhaps – that raised him above the common run of humanity. Calque had been honest according to his own lights during the investigation. He had cut Sabir far more slack than he had any right to expect. And he hadn’t blamed him for Macron’s death or Sergeant Spola’s wounding. No. He had taken those things on himself. ‘Wait.’

‘For what?’

Sabir held Calque’s eyes with his own. ‘Sit down, Captain. I’m going to tell you part of the story. The part that will not compromise any third parties. Will you be satisfied with that?’

Calque returned Sabir’s glance. Then he settled himself cautiously back in his seat. ‘I shall have to be, won’t I? If that’s all you feel you can give me.’

Sabir shrugged. Then he inclined his head questioningly. ‘Secrets of the confessional?’

Calque sighed. ‘Secrets of the confessional.’

‘There were only fifty-two quatrains on the parchment I retrieved from the bamboo tubing. I had initially assumed there would be fifty-eight, because that is the exact number needed to make up Nostradamus’s original ten centuries. But six are still missing. I now think that they are scattered around, like the ones at Rocamadour and Montserrat and designed to serve as clues to the main caucus.’

‘Go on.’

‘As far as I can work out, each of the fifty-two remaining quatrains describes a particular year. A year in the run-up to the End of Days. The Apocalypse.

Ragnarok. The Mayan Great Change. Whatever you choose to call it.’

‘What do you mean, describes a year?’

‘Each one acts as a pointer. It describes some event that will take place in that year – and each event is significant in some way.’

‘So the end isn’t dated?’

‘It doesn’t need to be – even Nostradamus didn’t know the exact date of Armageddon. He only knew what preceded it. So the date becomes obvious the nearer we get to it. In increments.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

Sabir sat up straighter in his bed. ‘It’s simple. Nostradamus wants mankind to escape the final holocaust. He feels that if the world can change its behaviour by acknowledging the Second Coming – by rejecting the Third Antichrist – then we might stand a faint chance of avoiding annihilation. That’s why he’s given us the clues, year by year and event by event. We’re to correlate the quatrains with the events. When each event occurs just as Nostradamus predicted, the quatrains will increase in importance and we can tick them off. The closer we get to Armageddon, the more obvious the starting date and the end date will be, for the simple reason that the events predicted for the last few years in the run-up to the End of Days haven’t happened yet. Then people will start to believe. And maybe change their behaviour. To all intents and purposes Nostradamus was giving us a fifty-two-year warning.’

Calque made a face.

‘Look, the first clue, in what I now believe to be the first quatrain, runs like this:

The African desert will melt into glass False freedoms will torment the French

The great empire of the islands will shrink Its hands, feet and elbows shun the head.’

‘That means nothing. It gets us nowhere.’

‘On the contrary. Look at it again. “The African desert will melt into glass.” In 1960 the French conducted their first ever nuclear test in south western Algeria. In the Sahara Desert. They called it the Gerboise Bleu – the Blue Jerboa.’

‘You’re stretching, Sabir.’

‘Try the next line, then: ‘False freedoms will torment the French.’ In 1960 France granted – or was forced to grant – independence to French Cameroon, French Togoland, Madagascar, Dahomey, Burkina Faso, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Mauritania. But still they persisted with their war in Algeria. “False freedom” is when you give with one hand and you take back with another. Now lines three and four: ‘The great empire of the islands will shrink. Its hands, feet and elbows shun the head.’ Great Britain was always the ‘great empire of the islands’ to Nostradamus. He uses the image on numerous occasions and it was always specific to Britain. In 1960 the British granted independence to Cyprus. Also to British Somaliland. Ghana. Nigeria. These are the extremities. Queen Elizabeth II was the head. By achieving independence, they shun her.’

‘Not enough.’

‘Try the next one then:

Germany will be strangled and Africa retaken A young leader will emerge: he will retain his youth Men will raise their eyes towards the battlefield A star will shine that is no star.’

‘According to your theory, Sabir, this quatrain should then refer to 1961. Does it? I don’t see that.’

‘Why don’t you? Take the first half of the first line: ‘Germany will be strangled.’ Nostradamus uses the phrase envoyer le cordon, meaning to ‘send the bowstring’. In other words to ‘order to be strangled’. And what happened in 1961? The border was closed between East and West Berlin and the Wall was built – a concrete cordon, effectively separating and strangling Germany. Now the second part of the first line: ‘And Africa retaken.’ On the 21st of April 1961 rebellious members of the OAS took Algiers, in an effort to stop General de Gaulle from granting Algerian independence. You remember that, don’t you, Calque? You were probably still busy cutting your milk teeth on the beat as a pandore.’

‘Pah.’

‘ “Men will raise their eyes towards the battlefield.’ Does that remind you of anything? On the 12 th of April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first ever man to enter space – in the Vostok I – thereby launching the space race and further aggravating the Cold War between the United States, NATO and the Soviet Union. “A star will shine that is no star.” That’s a pretty damned good description of an orbiting spacecraft, isn’t it? Especially when you figure that Nostradamus was writing 450 years before any such thing had even been envisaged.” ’

‘What about “A young leader will emerge: he will retain his youth?” I suppose you’re going to tell me that describes John F. Kennedy.’

‘Of course it does. Kennedy first took over the US Presidential office on the 20th of January 1961. “A young leader will emerge” – Kennedy became the leader of the Western world when he took the Oath of Allegiance. He will “retain his youth” because he will be assassinated, two years later, on the 22nd of November 1963.’ ‘I suppose Nostradamus calls that one, too.’ ‘Yes. I have it as “The pale carriage of the young King turns black.” The second line goes: “The Queen must mourn; the King’s crown will be sundered.” Kennedy was shot in the head, on the 22nd of November 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Robert McClelland, MD, described the wound in his testimony at Parkland before Arlen Specter on the 21st of March 1964. He said that the brain tissue had been blasted out through the top of the President’s skull. Look. I’ve printed his testimony off the internet. Let me read it to you: “I could very closely examine the head wound and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered… so that the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out…” That seems to me to accord pretty clearly with “the King’s crown will be sundered”. Don’t you think?’