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

“According to my calculations, Atlantis was somewhere between the New World & North Africa. When its highest peaks started spewing out fire, when the ground started trembling & caving in, spreading terror & death, the Atlantic submerged the whole land. But when it reached the volcanoes it succeeded in cooling their heat & consequently in arresting the progressive collapse of the land. The few peaks that were thus spared are the islands that today we call the Canaries & the Azores. And such was the power of these volcanoes, which must assuredly have been some of the major chimneys of the central fire, that even today they still display a certain amount of activity: all those islands smell of sulphur, & from what I have been told one can see numerous little craters & geysers where the water that escapes is boiling. It is therefore not impossible that one day the same phenomenon that made a whole world disappear could suddenly make it reappear, with all its ruined cities & and its millions of skeletons …”

Even though imaginary, this vision made my blood freeze. Kircher fell silent, the fire was dying out in the hearth & I shut my eyes in order to see with my mind’s eye the emergence of the terrible graveyard from those far-off times. I saw the alabaster palaces slowly rise from the depths, the towers truncated, the huge statues broken, lying on their sides, decapitated, & I seemed to hear the sinister creaking noises accompanying this nightmare apparition. But suddenly the sound took on a quite different quality, it became so real that I made an effort to throw off my drowsy imaginings; I woke at the very moment when a terrible explosion made the walls of our lodging tremble & cast a red light over the room where we were.

“Up you get, Caspar, up you get! Quick!” Kircher yelled, a transformed man. “The volcano has woken! The central fire! Quick!”

As I stood up, terrified, I saw Athanasius rushing toward our luggage as one explosion followed the other. “The instruments! The instruments!” he shouted to me.

Taking that to mean he was urging me to help him save our precious equipment before fleeing, I did my best, despite my shaking legs, to help him gather up our things. The innkeeper, who was to be our guide, & his wife did not take such precautions; they cleared off, not without having advised us to join them at the foot of the mountain as quickly as possible.

We soon came out; even though it was night, the sky was ablaze & we could see as if it were daylight. My spirits revived somewhat when I saw that the track by which we had arrived had not been affected by the eruption. But my terror returned when I saw my master setting off in the opposite direction, the one that led toward the crater the color of incandescent embers.

“This way! This way!” I screamed to Kircher, thinking his agitation had made him go the wrong way.

“Stupid ass!” was his reply. “It’s an unexpected chance, a present from heaven. Come on, hurry up! We’re going to learn a lot more today than we could by reading all the books ever written on the question.”

“But our guide!” I exclaimed, “we haven’t got a guide! We’re going to certain death!”

“We’ve got the best guide possible,” said Kircher, pointing to the skies, “we’re in His hands. If you’re too frightened, go down & get yourself another master. Or follow me & if we must die that’s just too bad, but at least we’ll have seen.”

“By the grace of God,” I said, crossing myself, & ran to catch up to Kircher, who had already turned away & set off for the summit.

“What do you think of Kircher from the point of view of Sinology?” Eléazard asked. “Do you think he can be considered a precursor, in one way or another?”

“I don’t know,” Loredana replied, “it’s odd. And then it all depends on what you mean by a ‘precursor.’ If you mean someone who put forward, before anyone else, some basic principles for understanding Chinese culture that were sufficiently penetrating to open the way to the understanding we have today, then the answer is definitely no. On that level his book is nothing more than an intelligent — and often dishonest — compilation of the work of Ricci and other missionaries. And every time he takes it upon himself to interpret these facts, he gets it badly wrong, just as with the Egyptian hieroglyphs. His theories on the way Asia was peopled or on the influence of Egypt on the development of Chinese religions are completely crack-brained. And it’s the same with his approach to the formation of ideograms … On the other hand, his book has been a fantastic tool, the first of its kind, for the understanding of the Chinese world in the West: he’s never prejudiced, except in religion of course, and all things considered presents a pretty objective vision of a world that until then simply didn’t exist for Europeans. And that, despite everything, is not bad at all.”

“That is what I think too,” said Eléazard, “but in my opinion it goes even farther. In his way he does more or less the same as Antoine Galland did for Arab culture when he produced the first translation of A Thousand and One Nights : he creates a myth, a mysterious China, supernatural, inhabited by wealthy aesthetes and scholars, a baroque exoticism that Baudelaire, or even Segalen, will recall in their fantasies of the Orient.

“It’s difficult to prove,” Loredana said reflectively, “but it’s an interesting idea. Kircher as the unwitting initiator of Romanticism. It’s close to heresy, isn’t it?”

“To bring in Romanticism is going a bit too far, but I really think that by providing, for the first time, an overall image of China and not a simple traveler’s tale, he determined the string of prejudices and errors under which that country continues to suffer.”

“Poor Kircher, it sounds as if you really do have it in for him,” Loredana said with a smile.

Eléazard was surprised by this remark. He had never seen his relationship with Kircher from that angle and even as he was collecting his thoughts to deny it, he realized that this way of formulating the problem opened up disturbing prospects. Looking at it more closely, there was certainly a touch of resentment in his constant denigration of the Jesuit. Something like the hatred with which a discarded lover reacts or a disciple unable to fill his master’s shoes.

“I don’t know,” he said earnestly, “I find your question disturbing … I’ll have to think about it.”

The rain was still pouring down on the patio. Lost in thought, Eléazard peered at the candle flame as if the light would provide him with an answer to his questions. Amused by his attitude, the unusual importance he seemed to accord the meanings of words, Loredana felt her prejudice against him crumble away a little more. It was perhaps because of the wine, but she found her defensive reaction just now — when she had reprimanded herself for lowering her guard, even just a little — exaggerated. One ought to be able to confide in him without being afraid of his pity or a lesson in morality. It was good to know that.

“I think I have it in for him for having been a Christian,” Eléazard suddenly said, without noticing how the few minutes of silence made his statement sound absurd. “For having betrayed … I can’t say what exactly at the moment, it’s the dominant impression despite my sympathy for him. His whole life’s work’s such a mess!”

“But who would have dared to be an atheist at the time he lived? Do you really think that was possible, or merely thinkable, even for a layman? Not out of fear of the Inquisition but because of the lack of the appropriate mind-set, because of an intellectual inability to imagine a world without God. Don’t forget it was three more centuries before Nietzsche managed to express that denial.”