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

Intrigued by my master’s sudden perplexity, I ventured to ask for an explanation.

“I was thinking of the Art itself, Caspar, & of the marvelous intuition of its inventor: the Ars Magna , that ‘Great Art’ that allows us to combine both things & their ideas thanks to three divine instruments: synthesis, analysis & analogy. By synthesis I can reduce multiplicity to unity; by analysis I can go from unity toward multiplicity; & by analogy I can see not only the original, divine & metaphysical Unity of the world, but also that of knowledge, for I discover the miraculous harmony of the forces and properties that constitute it! The Art of Ramon Lull is not perfect, which is why his discovery proved unusable. But I maintain that this art is possible! It was long ago that I first glimpsed its principles & I use them in practice every day; it is, however, a matter of urgency — I suddenly realized this while rereading the letter from the late Ferdinand III — finally to satisfy the appetite of those less favored among us & to give the more knowledgeable this infallible means of reaching the truth. I insist that any man endowed with reason is capable of acquiring, in a short time, a true if summary vision of the totality of the sciences! I am an old man, Caspar, but I will devote such further days as God will grant me to constructing something no one has ever dared dream of: a machine for thinking! The equivalent, for concepts, of this museum that bears my name & that is nothing other than a visible &, as one might say, palpable encyclopedia & grammar of universal reality!

I was stunned by my master’s contagious enthusiasm & by the success that promised. In a hurry to start work on revising Ramon Lull’s Ars Magna , Kircher entrusted the final putting together of his Arca Noe and Archetypon Politicum to me in order to concentrate entirely on writing this new book. He had to organize the whole range of human knowledge according to a certain system, derived from the divine order, before setting up the analogical rules & the system of combination that would allow anyone to avail themselves of it for their own use. As arduous an undertaking as one could imagine, but one that my master accomplished with disconcerting ease, without his resolution weakening for one single moment.

At the very beginning of 1669, while Athanasius was having the pages of his Ars Magna Sciendi taken to the printer’s as he completed them, a controversy arose that was as nasty as it was brazen. Two works were sent to Kircher by Father Francisco Travigno, a colleague and friend from Padua: one was a book by Valeriano Bonvicino, Professor of Physics at the same university as Father Travigno, & the other a copy of a pamphlet, published with the support of several members of the Royal Society of London & written by — Salomon Blauenstein!

In his Lanx Peripatetica 1Bonvicino strongly criticized Chapter XI of Mundus Subterraneus —in which, as you will recall, Kircher publicly denounced transmutational alchemy — claiming he had been making gold for decades in his house in Padua. As for Blauenstein, that arrant knave who had almost ruined the too-naive Sinibaldus years ago, he repeated the same criticism of my master, but with a biting irony & spite unworthy of any man of science.

However unfair they were, Kircher was deeply wounded in his pride by these these attacks. His anger did not subside for several days, until one of his detractors was struck down by divine justice & many letters of support from the most eminent scholars started to arrive. Kircher did not let up in his work, however, so that his Ars Magna Sciendi & his Archetypon Politicum appeared simultaneously in the autumn of that year, setting off a wave of admiration among the decent gentlemen of Europe.

However, the incomparable success of his books was spoiled by a double misfortune that resounded throughout Christendom, like a divine warning not to underestimate for one moment the devilish machinations of the idolators …

Having lost all sense of the passing of the days, the nights, of everything apart from the mechanical resumption of their movements, they penetrated farther and farther into the green depths of the forest. Dietlev’s death was largely responsible for their resignation; it had deprived them of a leader, of a friend for some of them, but equally of the sole grounds for continuing to resist despair. Elaine in particular could not get over it. For some reason none of them could understand, the shaman had refused to bury the body and persisted in addressing long, passionate speeches to it. Adding horror to mental aberration, he continued to have it carried on the stretcher, despite the stench it quickly started to give off. Elaine felt haunted by this ever-present reminder of his death, definitive yet denied. Pursued by the dead man who was no longer the man she loved, but not yet the one whose memory she would one day cherish, she came to understand the haste we have to get the corpses out of our sight; the purpose of the funeral is to get rid of the decay, to prevent this tangible, inhuman anguish from coming to pollute the world of the living. Without a tomb to place these unattached beings firmly in a state of absence, the dead would return.

At dawn on that morning, when they’d all been walking for an hour, wrapped in freezing mist and in sleep, a murmuring ran through the column, swelling as it progressed. They stopped. Puzzled, Mauro went to the head of the line and saw the wall of black stone blocking the track hacked through the forest. Facing it, the shaman uttered loud invocations then set off again. He followed the cliff until he came to the gap he knew; although vegetation had taken over again, a steep way up could be made out; it had even been improved in places to make it easier to climb. The column entered it, following the shaman who was hurrying, showing clear signs of impatience.

After a wearying initial climb, they were above the tops of the taller trees and were rewarded with a sight that took their breath away. The mountain rose like a sugarloaf into the clear sky like the background to a Flemish painting: a bare, blackish mass with streaks of white but surmounted by a crown of greenery that seeped down into the smallest rifts in the rock. Below them the jungle they had been making their way through for days stretched out as far as the eye could see, a dark swell flecked with white horses, infinite, as impenetrable as the surface of the oceans.

“An inselberg,” Elaine murmured, amazed at the contrast between the barren sides and the luxuriance of the summit.

“That’s right, it is like an island,” Petersen said, a bit surprised to have understood what she had said. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

She sighed, her eyes screwed up, her mind elsewhere. “You can’t even see the river.”

“But at least we can get our bearings at last,” Herman said, his eyes fixed on his watch. Turning his wrist so that the 12 was pointing toward the sun, he drew an imaginary line between that and the hour hand: “North’s over there, which means the River Paraguay must be more or less in that direction.”

He pointed to a line of foliage that was just a little darker, very far away to the southeast. “At a rough guess, I’d say we’re to the east of Cáceres. I’m not even sure we’re still in Brazil …”

“You’re right,” said Mauro after having scrutinized the landscape all around. “If there was a mission in the area we’d at least see smoke or something … God knows where they’re taking us.”

It was a statement, not a question, and there was no answer, but he could read the unavoidable conclusion in Petersen’s blue eyes: God Himself had no idea.