Langdon quickly explained Dante’s vision of Mount Purgatory, the Ps representing the Seven Deadly Sins, and the process of cleansing them from the forehead.
“Obviously,” Langdon concluded, “Bertrand Zobrist, as the Dante fanatic that he was, would be familiar with the seven Ps and the process of cleansing them from the forehead as a means of moving forward toward paradise.”
Sienna looked doubtful. “You think Bertrand Zobrist put those Ps on the mask because he wants us to … literally wipe them off the death mask? That’s what you think we’re supposed to do?”
“I realize it’s—”
“Robert, even if we wipe off the letters, how does that help us?! We’ll just end up with a totally blank mask.”
“Maybe.” Langdon offered a hopeful grin. “Maybe not. I think there’s more there than meets the eye.” He motioned down to the mask. “Remember how I told you that the back of the mask was lighter in color because of uneven aging?”
“Yes.”
“I may have been wrong,” he said. “The color difference seems too stark to be aging, and the texture of the back has teeth.”
“Teeth?”
Langdon showed her that the texture on the back was far rougher than that of the front … and also far grittier, like sandpaper. “In the art world, this rough texture is called teeth, and painters prefer to paint on a surface that has teeth because the paint sticks to it better.”
“I’m not following.”
Langdon smiled. “Do you know what gesso is?”
“Sure, painters use it to prime canvases and—” She stopped short, his meaning apparently registering.
“Exactly,” Langdon said. “They use gesso to create a clean white toothy surface, and sometimes to cover up unwanted paintings if they want to reuse a canvas.”
Now Sienna looked excited. “And you think maybe Zobrist covered the back of the death mask with gesso?”
“It would explain the teeth and the lighter color. It also might explain why he would want us to wipe off the seven Ps.”
Sienna looked puzzled by this last point.
“Smell this,” Langdon said, raising the mask to her face like a priest offering Communion.
Sienna cringed. “Gesso smells like a wet dog?”
“Not all gesso. Regular gesso smells like chalk. Wet dog is acrylic gesso.”
“Meaning …?”
“Meaning it’s water soluble.”
Sienna cocked her head, and Langdon could sense the wheels turning. She shifted her gaze slowly to the mask and then suddenly back to Langdon, her eyes wide. “You think there’s something under the gesso?”
“It would explain a lot.”
Sienna immediately gripped the hexagonal wooden font covering and rotated it partway off, exposing the water below. She grabbed a fresh linen towel and plunged it into the baptismal water. Then she held out the dripping cloth for Langdon. “You should do it.”
Langdon placed the mask facedown in his left palm and took the wet linen. Shaking out the excess water, he began dabbing the damp cloth on the inside of Dante’s forehead, moistening the area with the seven calligraphic Ps. After several dabs with his index finger, he redipped the cloth in the font and continued. The ink began smearing.
“The gesso is dissolving,” he said excitedly. “The ink is coming off with it.”
As he performed the process a third time, Langdon began speaking in a pious and somber monotone, which resonated in the baptistry. “Through baptism, the Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin and brought you to new life through water and the Holy Spirit.”
Sienna stared at Langdon like he’d lost his mind.
He shrugged. “It seemed appropriate.”
She rolled her eyes and turned back to the mask. As Langdon continued applying water, the original plaster beneath the gesso became visible, its yellowish hue more in keeping with what Langdon would have expected from an artifact this old. When the last of the Ps had disappeared, he dried the area with a clean linen and held the mask up for Sienna to observe.
She gasped out loud.
Precisely as Langdon had anticipated, there was indeed something hidden beneath the gesso — a second layer of calligraphy — nine letters written directly onto the pale yellow surface of the original plaster.
This time, however, the letters formed a word.
CHAPTER 58
“‘Possessed’?” Sienna demanded. “I don’t understand.”
I’m not sure I do either.Langdon studied the text that had materialized beneath the seven Ps — a single word emblazoned across the inside of Dante’s forehead.
possessed
“As in … possessed by the devil?” Sienna asked.
Possibly.Langdon turned his gaze overhead to the mosaic of Satan consuming the wretched souls who had never been able to purge themselves of sin. Dante … possessed?It didn’t seem to make much sense.
“There’s got to be more,” Sienna contended, taking the mask from Langdon’s hands and studying it more closely. After a moment she began nodding. “Yes, look at the ends of the word … there’s more text on either side.”
Langdon looked again, now seeing the faint shadow of additional text showing through the moist gesso at either end of the word possessed.
Eagerly, Sienna grabbed the cloth and continued dabbing around the word until more text materialized, written on a gentle curve.
O you possessed of sturdy intellect
Langdon let out a low whistle. “ ‘O, you possessed of sturdy intellect … observe the teachings hidden here … beneath the veil of verses so obscure.’ ”
Sienna stared at him. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s taken from one of the most famous stanzas of Dante’s Inferno,” Langdon said excitedly. “It’s Dante urging his smartest readers to seek the wisdom hidden within his cryptic verse.”
Langdon often cited this exact line when teaching literary symbolism; the line was as close an example as existed to an author waving his arms wildly and shouting: “Hey, readers! There is a symbolic double meaning here!”
Sienna began rubbing the back of the mask, more vigorously now.
“Careful with that!” Langdon urged.
“You’re right,” Sienna announced, zealously wiping away gesso. “The rest of Dante’s quote is here — just as you recalled it.” She paused to dip the cloth back in the font and rinse it out.
Langdon looked on in dismay as the water in the baptismal font turned cloudy with dissolved gesso. Our apologies to San Giovanni, he thought, uneasy that this sacred font was being used as a sink.
When Sienna raised the cloth from the water, it was dripping. She barely wrung it out before placing the soggy cloth in the center of the mask and swishing it around as if she were cleaning a soup bowl.
“Sienna!” Langdon admonished. “That’s an ancient—”
“The wholeback side has text!” she announced as she scoured the inside of the mask. “And it’s written in …” She paused, cocking her head to the left and rotating the mask to the right, as if trying to read sideways.
“Written in what?” Langdon demanded, unable to see.
Sienna finished cleaning the mask and dried it off with a fresh cloth. Then she set it down in front of him so they could both study the result.
When Langdon saw the inside of the mask, he did a double take. The entire concave surface was covered in text, what had to be nearly a hundred words. Beginning at the top with the line O you possessed of sturdy intellect, the text continued in a single, unbroken line … curling down the right side of the mask to the bottom, where it turned upside down and continued back across the bottom, returning up the left side of the mask to the beginning, where it repeated a similar path in a slightly smaller loop.
The path of the text was eerily reminiscent of Mount Purgatory’s spiraling pathway to paradise. The symbologist in Langdon instantly identified the precise spiral. Symmetrical clockwise Archimedean.He had also noted that the number of revolutions from the first word, O, to the final period in the center was a familiar number.