Not all the shelves were taken up with Newton's books. Some housed piles of papers, his notes and accounts of experiments; they spilled over onto a table placed to one side of the room. Taking up about a third of the shelf space were bottles and glass vessels. Some of the bottles contained coloured liquids and each container was corked and labelled. In one corner of the room stood an elaborate glass construction, a distillation apparatus, and in another was a telescope on a stand. Inside the large stone fireplace a metal cauldron was suspended on brackets driven into the sides.
To a stranger entering this room, the circus of smells would have been quite overpowering (even for those with the olfactory sensibilities of the seventeenth century). But to Newton the odours had become almost subliminal, and if a particular conglomeration of effluvia broke through the barrier of familiarity, he simply viewed them as somehow homely.
It was freezing cold, but the fire would soon turn the room into a veritable sauna. Years earlier, Newton had paid a pair of workmen to knock special ventilation holes in the outer wall of the laboratory, and this simple adaptation had probably saved him from asphyxiation on more than one occasion. Striding to the table, he cleared a space and deposited the plate and cup there before turning and crouching down beside the trunk that he had placed in the middle of the laboratory floor the previous night.
As he fumbled with the lock he began to think about his latest trip to London in pursuit of the missing clue that he was sure was there. For almost a quarter of a century now he had been searching, searching for the core secret of all existence, the prisca sapentia . Science had been his first mistress and he had bled her dry. His Principia Mathematica had been published two years earlier, making him a star in the academic world; but he had known all along that there was more to the universe than the nuts and bolts, the mechanical edifice he had observed and described in his acclaimed work.
Almost from the moment he had arrived here at Cambridge University in 1661, he had been drawn into the world of alchemy and the occult. His old mentor and predecessor in the Lucasian Chair, Isaac Barrow, had struck the first spark, and it had been kindled into a raging fire by the writings of the great adepts of the past, men like Cornelius Agrippa and Elias Ashmole, John Dee and Giordano Bruno. Their search had been called the Great Work or Magnum Opus , and for long years these geniuses of occultism had conducted elaborate alchemical experiments in smoky laboratories. They had given their lives to the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, the legendary substance that would allow the alchemist to transmute any base metal into gold, the magical interface between the physical and the metaphysical that could also allow the adept to produce the elixir vitae and to find eternal youth.
Like every alchemist before him, Newton had based his ideas on that bible of the Hermetic experimenter, the doctrine of The Emerald Tablet . In his youth, Barrow had enlightened him about the existence of this wondrous text and had explained how it was the guide for all alchemists. It had been created in the time of the Ancients, Barrow had explained, a time when men knew far more about the workings of the universe than did all the intellectuals and philosophers of his own day. These Ancients had distilled their knowledge into the inscriptions to be found in The Emerald Tablet . No one knew where the original tablet now lay. It had vanished from the eyes of mortal men, but translations of the inscriptions had been handed down through the generations of alchemists, and each had followed what they believed to be the absolute truth as described by the Ancients. The tablet described for them the route to the Philosopher's Stone, how they must prepare both their own souls and the lumpen physical matter with which they worked. Newton believed that the reason why no alchemist had so far succeeded in producing the object of their dreams was no fault of the Ancients. Nor, of course, was it a failing of Nature; it was simply that no philosopher or alchemist had purified his soul sufficiently well, and no seeker of the Truth had committed himself to the task with sufficient vigour and single-mindedness.
Unlike almost every other alchemist from Hermes Trismegistus himself to his own inner circle, Newton had no desire to make gold simply for its own sake. He saw little value in unimaginable wealth. For him, the gold at the end of the rainbow was pure knowledge, the knowledge possessed by the gods, and he knew that he would do anything to find it. It was his reason for being. Over the many years he had stood at the furnace studying the microcosm, and relating it to the macrocosm seen through the lenses of his telescope, he had teased out connections and taken the notion of holism to new heights of reasoning. In that time he had grown to believe that he was himself semi-divine, that he had been placed here on Earth for one purpose — to find the Philosopher's Stone and to elucidate the Truth. God, he believed, had chosen him, marked him out as unique and empowered him with the greatest intellect of his generation, so that he, Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University, could do his Father's bidding and unravel for the rest of humankind the true meaning of existence, the innermost workings of Nature, the mechanism of the universe.
The hinges of the trunk creaked as Newton lifted the lid. Inside were carefully packed glass vessels swathed in wool to protect them on the potholed road from London. There were jars of chemicals. One contained sticks of grey-coated metal cylinders immersed in a yellowish oil. Beside this was a tube of powder, black as soot, and next to that another filled with a crimson talc. Placed on its side and nestled in a thick woollen wrap lay a large hourglass.
One third of the trunk was packed with neatly stacked leather-bound books. Newton lifted the top one and surveyed the spine. 'The Fame and Confessions of the Fraternity of the Rosicrucians by Thomas Vaughan,' he read aloud before placing it carefully on the floor beside the trunk. The book beneath it had its title embossed in gold on the cover: The Sceptical Chemyst . The name of the author, Robert Boyle, was written in large letters under the title. Newton leafed through the pages for a few moments and then placed it on top of the Vaughan.
He then lifted the remaining volumes from tjie trunk and took them to a table backed against the wall to the right of the fireplace, where he began to arrange them in piles before transferring them to the shelves above. As he lifted a particularly handsome tome, bound in green hide and carrying the title The Compound of Alchymy: The Twelve Gates Leading to the Discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and its author's name, George Ripley, a small piece of parchment slipped out from under the back cover.- It dropped to the floor at Newton's feet.
He picked it up and unfolded it carefully. The parchment was dry and yellowed, but he could see writing in faded brown ink covering the surface. Pacing over to the fireplace, Newton held the parchment close to his face so that he could make out the tiny handwriting. It was written in Aramaic, an ancient Semitic language with which he was familiar. Translating it in his head, Newton whispered the words to himself:
Oh ye seeker, ye truth seeker, lose not heart. For, whilst falling to our knees before the tablet of green, there lies another and even deeper Truth. My friends, I have seen it only as if in a dream, but the gods proclaim it real. As the fields are green, the blood of the Lord is red, red as the ruby. And, as the tablet is of its given shape, so the ruby is a sphere; for indeed, I have seen it as if in a dream. And if the power of the tablet is one, that of the ruby sphere is a million-fold more. The glorious tablet leads the way, the sphere opens the doors to the world. If your soul be pure, seek the sphere and with it ye shall possess the glory of the Ancients. Seek the sphere under the earth, 'tis cocooned in stone, great learning above and earth below.