Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

This tirade drew laughter and chuckles from all sides & even Kircher congratulated him on the richness of his vocabulary.

“A tragedy, then,” the laughing sculptor went on, “for the widow Isis, but that would be to ignore her — very understandable — persistence, for the queen, aided by her sister & by Anubis, reconstructed her husband’s member with river silt and spittle, stuck it on him in the right place &, thanks to heaven & various practices, brought it back to life. And since, as it seems to me, this new instrument worked better than his previous one, Isis soon found she was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy, who was called Harpocrates and became king in his turn, while Osiris, the first mortal ever to be recovered from a definitive death, was enjoying a happy eternity in the Fields of Iaru, the Egyptian paradise …”

The company was fascinated by Bernini’s story & asked many questions, principally regarding its truth.

“The Egyptian priests,” my master said, “following the doctrine passed on by the patriarchs of antiquity, were convinced that God was to be found everywhere & they aimed at finding His manifestations hidden in natural entities &, once they had been discovered, showing them in symbols derived from nature. The story of Osiris is a fable, of course, a discreet veil beneath which the sages were, according to the testimony of Iamblichus, endeavoring to express the most profound mysteries of the deity, the world, angels & demons.”

“Oh, come on, Reverend Father,” Bernini mocked. “Who do you take us for? Next you’ll be asking us to accept that your pharaohs believed in the one God & the Holy Trinity!”

“You don’t know how right you are …”

“How is it then that the entire world isn’t Christian?” Bernini asked in more serious tones than before.

“The malice of the Devil is infinite &, moreover, it was greatly aided by the confusion of languages following the fall of the Tower of Babel, by the nations moving farther & farther away & the perversion of rites to which that led. All idolatrous religions are nothing but more or less recognizable anamorphoses of Christianity. The Egyptians, who, thanks to Hermes, still retained the greatest secrets of universal knowledge, passed them on throughout the world as far as China & the Americas, where they were gradually transformed, growing paler like those foxes that lose their natural color & take on that of the ice or the desert where they live. But the Egyptians knew that truth as well, for what is the dismemberment of Osiris by Typhon & Isis’s patient search other than an image of idolatry itself, a misfortune that divine wisdom remedied by reuniting the scattered parts of the archetype in a single mystical body? Look around you: nothing stays the same, nothing lasts, no peace can be guaranteed by laws that are so strong they will not collapse. War is everywhere! And it is up to us, the priests & missionaries, to seek, through suffering & martyrdom, that lost stability …”

On the third day of their journey on foot through the jungle it became clear to all that their progress would be much slower than expected. Yurupig, Mauro & Petersen took it in turns to carry Dietlev’s stretcher, but the most they could do in a straight line in the forest was about ten yards, so frequent were the tangles of branches and succulents, dark undergrowth and luxuriant, impenetrable foliage. Occasionally the person opening up a path managed to make a passage with the machete, but almost always they had to go round the obstacle, clamber over a fallen tree trunk, which would disintegrate into sawdust under their weight, thread their way as best they could through the rigging of the intertwined lianas or even crawl, when a way forward could be vaguely discerned behind an arching root. Constantly diverted from their ideal line, they concentrated on following natural gaps oriented toward the northeast quarter of the compass. This course, however, remained largely theoretical inasmuch as they were sometimes forced to turn back and try another route that was less obvious but better suited to their goal. They had the impression they were treading on an immense mass of decaying material that collapsed, liquefied under their feet, an elastic, aromatic humus from which the trampled vegetation immediately sprang up again, made stronger, denser by its own decomposition. Bromeliads and rubber plants suffering from gigantism with nothing in common with the plants Elaine knew by those names from the florist’s, vegetable columns, smooth or ringed, recalling the impossible combinations of computer-generated images: root-stilts, strangler fig trees, all kinds of parasites, a Chinese box of jungles, one inside the other at the very heart of the jungle. An indefinable cacophony came down from above, filling the space all round them, a shrill, discordant hubbub in which Yurupig and Petersen alone were able to pick out the howl of a capuchin monkey, the castanets of a toucan’s beak, the sudden hysterical shriek of a great macaw … The mystery of life seemed to have concentrated in this primordial crucible teeming with mosquitos and insects.

By five in the afternoon the green shade had become too dense to continue so that they had to set about looking for a place to camp fairly early to give them time to clear their chosen spot, hang their hammocks off the ground and collect some dead wood. Elaine would never have thought it could be so difficult to find something that would burn in the middle of the forest: the wood was spongy. Full of mosses, of fermented sap, ant and termite nests, lived in, alive, as combustible as a sponge full of water. The hissing fire they gathered round when night had fallen was thanks to Yurupig alone.

They had agreed that Elaine would bring up the rear, in order to save her as far as possible from the ambushes of the forest; their progress disturbed a large number of animals, which they only saw as they took flight, but having seen a little coral snake disappear more or less from under her feet, she knew she was as exposed to danger as the others. However much she kept her eyes fixed on the ground, every tree trunk, every crevice remained a deadly trap she had to beware of. Just as in a ghost train at the fair, the immense webs of the bird-eating spiders would suddenly stick to her face like candy floss, an an aggressive rustling close by would send her heart racing, everything seemed to be conspiring against the intruders, to be uniting to swallow them up.

Yurupig and Petersen were more at ease in this ordeal. They both knew a thousand and one tricks to find drinking water or to make the trees ‘sing’ before attaching their hammocks. Petersen was grumbling all the time, reviling the world and its creatures, while the Indian moved silently, all senses on the alert, a hunter through and through. For the first two days the German had sullenly refused to speak to them but then, without anyone really understanding the reason for this sudden change, recovered his spirits and a certain comradeship with the group.

When they gathered around the fire on the evening of the third day, all hope of reaching the junction of the river soon had vanished. “We’re going to have to ration the food a bit more,” Mauro said. “At this rate it won’t last much longer.”

“How far would you say we’ve been today?” Elaine asked.

“No idea … A mile at most. But I’m as exhausted as if we’d done seventy.” His hand inside the collar of his T-shirt, Mauro was scratching his chest frenziedly, then examined the little scab he’d managed to bring out: a kind of tiny spider, swollen with blood, seemed to be enclosed in the dead skin.

“Oh no, I don’t believe it!” he said with revulsion. “What the hell’s this bug?”