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

“As you see, Caspar,” he said when he had finished, “we have not wasted our time coming here. Now we know from the evidence of our own eyes that certain creatures are born of the fire itself, just as flies are engendered by manure & worms by putrefaction. Those there had been created practically before our very eyes & we can, or at least you can bear witness to it to the world at large, since, for my own part, I have decided to take a closer view of this original matter. Make sure you note down everything you hear & if anything should happen to me you must go back down to deliver to the world the posthumous fruits of my sacrifice.”

I begged Kircher not to do anything so foolish, but he half covered himself up with his cape, poured our supply of water over himself &, carrying his bag & his instruments, set off at the same moment as a further explosion shook Etna.

“Be with me, Empedocles! And do thou hear me, Caspar, son of wise Anchites,” he cried, rushing toward the stream of lava. I watched him, under a blazing deluge, approach the fiery matter, gesticulating & skipping about like a whole litter of mice; he looked like a man possessed suffering the torments of hell & I crossed myself several times to ward off this evil omen. From where I was standing, my master appeared to be enveloped in embers & his clothes were giving off white steam & I yelled at him to make him come back …

God finally answered my prayers: Kircher was coming back. However, his feet seemed to be so itching to get back that his biretta fell off as he ran & it was bare-headed that my master rejoined me, safe & sound, in the shelter of the rock. His cassock was in tatters & scorched by the fire, his boots were sizzling, which partly explained the capers I had seen him perform & I had to put out his hair, patches of which were burning, with the skirt of my cassock.

After having thanked me with a fraternal pat on the shoulder, Athanasius borrowed my chronometer to continue his observations. When he established that the interval between each eruption was increasing regularly, he finally decided to quit the pandemonium.

We returned without any major difficulties to the town where we had left most of our luggage. Kircher, whose feet, hands & face had some nasty burns, was in a pitiful state, so we granted ourselves several days’ rest, which my master used to copy out his notes.

As soon as Athanasius’s injuries had healed, we set off for Syracuse. Our program included a study of the ancient monuments of the city as well as visits to the Dominican libraries in Noto & Ragusa, but, without informing me, Kircher had concocted other plans: Syracuse being the town where Archimedes was born, I should have realized my master would not waste the opportunity of measuring his genius against that of the famous mathematician.

We walked on the ramparts of Ortygia, above the sea, for several hours without my being able to understand the point of the measurements Athanasius was constantly making with the astrolabe, or of the sketches that were filling his notebook. Then he locked himself in his room for two days & one night, forbidding anyone to disturb him. When he came out, radiant with joy, he immediately went to see various craftsmen, who were given very precise tasks to carry out without delay. During the next two weeks we did our planned tour of the libraries of the area.

In Ragusa my master bought various books in Hebrew on the Cabbala from the Jew, Samuel Cohen, & from the musician, Masudi Yusuf, a manuscript containing the first Pythian Ode by Pindar, accompanied by a system of transcription that made it possible to reproduce the original melody! After having studied it, he made a present of this inestimable work to the Monastery of San Salvatore in Messina.

But the day came when, all the pieces ordered by him having been delivered, Athanasius condescended to explain the purpose of these mysterious preparations. When Syracuse was besieged by the Consul Marcellus, in 214 before the birth of Our Lord, Archimedes’s inventions delayed the Roman victory for a long time. According to Antioch of Ascalon & Diodorus of Sicily this admirable scholar even managed to set enemy vessels on fire by shooting the rays of the sun at them from a burning mirror. Declaring it physically impossible to construct such a powerful mirror, most of the commentators & scholars of the present age had declared the story a legend; contrary to this general opinion, Kircher intended to rehabilitate Archimedes in the very place where, almost two thousand years ago, he had proved the incomparable power of his genius.

“You see, Caspar, all these ignoramuses, for example Monsieur Descartes, to quote but one, all these asses are quite right when they claim it would be impossible to light a fire from so far away with mirrors: a flat mirror would not concentrate enough of the sun’s light since it sends the rays back perpendicularly to its surface. Circular or parabolic mirrors are certainly capable of setting combustible material on fire, but only from very short distances, that is, at the point of convergence of the rays. Given this problem, the first task was to work out precisely where Marcellus’s ships were. Given the configuration of the town ramparts, the depth of water at their perimeter and the closeness necessary to besiege the town effectively, factors that I calculated with you recently, the Roman galleys must have been operating at thirty or forty paces from the walls. Now to satisfy these conditions, a parabolic mirror would have to be a league in diameter, which is indeed scarcely conceivable, even today. But the resources of the human mind are are boundless &, thanks be to Heaven, I conceived the idea of an elliptical mirror which, I am sure, will succeed where the others have always failed! The Duke of Hesse will be here in three days’ time. I have informed him of my project & he has invited the most notable personages of Sicily to witness the occasion. They will, therefore, have first sight of this new speculum ustor , which we are going to construct together, my dear Caspar, if you will agree to assist me …”

We set to work without delay & after two days of uninterrupted labor, during which we glued, nailed & pinned numerous pieces of wood, a cart came to transport our machine to the place on the harbor where the demonstration was to take place. Once there, we installed it & covered it with a cloth in the colors of the Grand Duke & His Majesty the Viceroy of Sicily. Then we waited.

Once all the guests were assembled, Athanasius Kircher — who was pacing up and down the rampart in a fever of anxiety about a result that would make or break his reputation — gave a review of the historical facts, explained his theory at length & elaborated a little on possible uses of his machine, if it should work; he pretended to have his doubts about that, given the limited means at his disposal & the aging of the sun, which must necessarily have lost some of its power in the 1848 years since Archimedes’s feat. At the agreed time, eleven o’clock in the morning, a large fishing boat, purchased with the help of Frederick of Hesse, anchored at forty paces from the place where we were. A Roman she-wolf had been painted on the stern to serve as a target. After having placed some model — but perfectly copied — legionnaires here & there on the deck, the sailors left the ship. Kircher raised the cloth & uncovered his machine to a general murmur of astonishment.

It consisted of a wide truncated cone, open at either end, the interior of which had been made into a mirror; a fairly simple system of wheels & gears allowed it to be deployed precisely in all directions. Turning several handles one after the other, Athanasius focused the mirror so that the patch of light it produced struck the center of the target. Then came the wait. There was absolute silence and one could hear the lapping of the waves below. A quarter of an hour and still nothing had happened. The guests started to whisper among themselves. Kircher was sweating profusely, constantly adjusting his ray, his eye fixed on the roman she-wolf. Attracted by the unusual spectacle, the common people had gathered behind the cordon of guards & were commenting out loud on what they could see, laughing & joking as is the custom among these people of the south when faced with something that is beyond their understanding. A half hour had already passed with no result & even the guests were beginning to grow impatient at the time it was taking when a seagull, doubtless attracted by the brightness of the mirror, let go a dropping which splattered on the machine, only just missing my master. It was all that was needed to set off general hilarity. Lazzi directed at Athanasius came from all sides & I heard a Sicilian noble comment in a tone of profound contempt: