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

Kircher was shaken by long shudders, which even made his beard stand on end, but he did not appear to feel any fear. To be honest, the longer he continued in the company of the angel, the more his face was radiant with intense happiness.

“Look, Athanasius, look carefully. It is at the very heart of this unfathomable abyss that the mystery of the deity is hidden. The soul alone can understand this mystery; for the moment be content with the immense privilege that has been granted you. Praise & worship God in all his blazing glory. Day is breaking, it is time for me to return to the first Choir of the celestial hierarchy. So until we meet again. You will not fail in your mission, for I will be with you.”

Then it was as if Kircher had been struck by lightning. He fainted and slumped down onto the tiles. I hurriedly shut the window before laying him on his bed & making him inhale some spirits of wine.

When he recovered consciousness, my master was in a high fever. Streaming with sweat, he was delirious for several hours without my being able to catch a word he was saying. I did not dare seek assistance for fear he might start upholding some heresy more dangerous for his health than this strange ailment to which he had fallen prey.

But, thanks be to heaven, after a fit of acute euphoria, Athanasius suddenly calmed down. His breathing became normal again, his eyes closed &, clasping his hands on his chest, he muttered a fable, which he assured me was translated from Coptic, stopping after each sentence, as if he were saying a prayer:

Father Gustave listened to his worthy abbot, John Colobos, dictating the new arrangements he had made: “It is with justification & a very great comfort that, as I set out, you will assume my office while I feed on herbage, following with the utmost rigor the example of my venerable forerunners. Soon I will be alone out in the hindmost parts of the desert.”

The heat was enough to cremate him, but Abbot John went on his way out onto the sand, a saintly hermit, a psalm on his lips, chanted in a minor key, while chewing on a kebab, which was nourishing and tasty .

He knelt by the edge of the wadi, and it echoed & echoed to his cry of deepest despair: “Peccavi!” But all at once, e’er the penitent Abbot John had finished his heartfelt confession, a most ghastly, hideous two-horned demon appeared in a blinding light &, with loud, obscene fulminations, proceeded to whip & flay John’s back like a voracious vulture. Thus made aware of his sinful state, his feeble prayers, Abbot John was seized with remorse, knelt down & right urgently began to commend his soul to God, binding himself with vows to extol the Most High by celebrating His great goodness, thus entering that most blessed legion of all the faithful with the noble aim of seeing the conversion of all men .

“Peccavi?” Kircher repeated, just before falling asleep, & that in a tone of quiet astonishment.

The reader will understand my anxiety as I waited for him to wake up. I feared my master would not come out of such a crucial experience unscathed. Even though this vision granted him by God was a great honor, making him even more precious in my eyes than previously, I was still afraid that he might continue talking to the angels for ever.

Fortunately, when he woke, six hours later, his rapture had left no aftereffects. His eyes were slightly more sunken, proof of the physical fatigue caused by his excursion, but he recognized me immediately & spoke to me in a wholly rational manner. He remembered his night with the angel perfectly, at least in its broad lines; as for the detail, he admitted he was unable to remember a single word of what he had said or heard. This made me more than ever glad I had a good memory & he was delighted to hear these revelations again.

Kircher confirmed in every respect the impression I had formed during the night. From the very beginning of Christina’s concert in the Farnese Palace, he had felt overwhelmed by the music, as if he could not only perceive the most subtle harmonies but also discover the profound meaning of the universal rhythm. The music produced by the instruments quickly disappeared, to be replaced by innumerable polyphonies instantly created by his imagination. He counted the buttons on his cassock in his head & that produced a chord; he followed the lines of a piece of furniture or a statue in his mind & he heard a melody, as if all the beings and objects in this world were capable of generating their own music, pleasing or dissonant, depending on the extent to which their structure obeyed the golden rule of proportion.

In the same way, my master had heard the harmony of the celestial spheres as we returned to the College & it was not long before the angel Cosmiel had appeared. Kircher gave me a detailed description of his youthful and surprising beauty; that of the most perfect of da Vinci’s angels would have paled beside him.

As for his voyage to the stars, Athanasius confessed that he had never experienced anything as marvelous. He took it for granted that it had been just as real as our walk in Sicily, although the knowledge he had harvested from it was much more valuable. Immediately he thought of writing an account of it for the edification of mankind, a project I approved of with all my heart & that I urged him to carry out.

After another night of rest, Kircher put aside all the studies on which he was engaged in order to start composing the Iter Extaticum Cœleste in which, he told me, new truths about the structure of the universe would be explained in the form of a dialogue between Cosmiel & Theodidact. And in that pseudonym, behind which my master hid, I once more saw all his natural modesty.

Sixteen fifty-six, alas, was a year that started under very unfavorable auspices: the news came that Naples had been devastated by the plague, which had come from the south. Although it had happened a long time ago, everyone still remembered the epidemic that had carried off three-quarters of the inhabitants of Rome, but such is the frailty of human nature that no one thought the scourge would reach this far again. People were very sorry for the inhabitants of Naples who were dying, but they must have sinned horribly for God to visit such a punishment on them. Protected, they thought, by the presence of the Pope in their city & their presumed virtuousness, the Romans continued to live a life of carefree enjoyment.

The first cases appeared in January, in the poor districts, without really causing alarm among a population used to all sorts of illnesses & whose shameless debauchery made them likely victims of divine anger. In March three hundred deaths were reported … Alone among the nobility Queen Christina took measures to avoid the threat: alerted by the figures & in less time that it takes my pen to write it down, she left a city that had given her such a magnificent welcome, thus removing to Paris, where Cardinal Mazarin had invited her, the appalling conduct which, even today, I cannot help thinking was the sole cause of the misfortunes that struck our beautiful metropolis.

In July we finally had to face up to the fact that the Black Death was in Rome, killing and laying waste worse than the most horrible of wars. People were dropping dead like flies, with the result that they had to be buried at night & by the cartload in the common pits hastily dug out by the surrounding lower-class districts. Profiting from a situation that was so favorable for his natural evil, the devil seized the weakest souls & the most execrable heresies reappeared. The healthy, knowing their death probable, if not close at hand, indulged in orgies to the very gates of the graveyard, blaspheming God & defying death to do its worst. Never were so many crimes committed in so few days. Between July & November the epidemic carried off fifteen thousand inhabitants & people thought the end of the world had come.