In the meantime, the stubbornness of the heretics locked up and tortured in the dungeon began to soften. But they remained faithful to their belief, claiming that they had a Covenant with God and that they did not dare back down because they had sworn to undergo whatever suffering necessary. The Inquisitor told them that they had been blinded and that their covenant was with the Devil, but Callistus and Enguerrand did not want to give in. They had, they said, signed a covenant with God and that there was no doubt about it; the Devil does not personally bring a contract in which he is a party, but rather appears as a merchant, banker or mediator. The stipulations of the contract were ostensibly related to business, but that was trap, because the Devil later fits such a contract into the complex book of bills and debts that he uses to rule this world. The next day the Marquis fell unconscious because, according to his calculations, he was supposed to die the day after, which he actually did. But all Satan’s hopes were in vain; the experienced Father Robert did not allow himself to be deceived; he knew that the Devil attempts to confuse people by foreseeing events from the future.
Dagobert again had to take up his sword. The unruliness of the crowd demanding freedom for the heretics went beyond all measure of good taste, and the King ordered that an end be put to it. For three whole days the rebels put up a strong resistance, but they began to fail from exhaustion and it was not difficult for Dagobert to send them scurrying. The Satanic two-wheelers were gathered into a pile and burned, and their production and use was forbidden under the threat of the death penalty.
Since the anger of the crowd was silenced, and since the heretics refused to recant, they were sent before the court of the Holy Inquisition and sentenced to death by burning, with the hope that the flames would achieve that which neither mercy nor torture had. Listening to the reading of the sentence, Enguerrand de Auxbris-Malvoisin spoke for the first time since his arrest. He recited some kind of incantation:
And then you must pass
Through flames, painful and hard
But bringing salvation. Here, everything rotten will burn and
All that will be left is just that which
Fire is, but does not burn
and is not hot.
On January 28, Anno Domini 1348, the confessor visited the heretics in the dungeon and they miraculously agreed to give their confession. The cart carrying Enguerrand and Callistus was driven all the way across Paris as a warning and example of the fate of those who rebel against the Divine Order. The commoners, frightened, downtrodden because of the recent uprising and bloodshed, followed the heretics in silence on their long last journey. Before the sentence was publicly read, the Inquisitor asked the heretics if they wanted to repent, to which they answered that they had repented even before they had been caught. Then, Brother Guillaume read the sentence and Robert de Prevois gave the signal for the fire to be set to the stake. The heretics quickly vanished in the smoke and flames.
May it stand recorded for all generations that Enguerrand, before losing consciousness, shouted an incomprehensible word, certainly some kind of hellish incantation: Dharamsala, Dharamsala, Dharamsala…**
~ ~ ~
On the Threshold of the New Era
THE MANUSCRIPT OF CAPTAIN QUEENSDALE. PUBLISHER’S PREFACE
In a copy of The Encyclopedia of Wind Roses printed in 1872, bought quite accidentally in a secondhand bookstore in Zürich, instead of the final signature which was missing, I found a manuscript dated 1892, written in calligraphy. The contents of the manuscript (which was, in fact, a copy of another) changed the direction of my life to a great extent, as you will see, just as it changed the life of the copyist. I do not possess a single proof that would support the validity of the lines which follow. It is possible that the whole thing is a joke. Someone with an English sense of humor (the copyist is English) is doubtlessly willing to undertake extensive and expensive preparations in order to, after his own death, make fools of a small group of unknown people. My intuition convinces me otherwise. In any case, whether the facts correspond to reality or whether they are the fruit of someone’s imagination, I believe it is worthwhile to publish this carefully selected text, printed in six copies, and I now send it into the world to find its six readers.
Rheiner Meier
Zürich, 1903
PREFACE BY THE UNKNOWN COPYIST
At the end of 1898, crushed by inexplicable depression and fatigue, I left London, a lovely social position, a reputable name (that I will not mention here) and withdrew to the land of my ancestors in Western England, hoping that, far from the hustle and bustle of the city, I would find peace and dignity, and prepare for death. At the beginning, it seemed that nothing would come of my plan because, not far from my home, one of the nouveau riche had moved in, some sort of London private-eye, a detective who had been on the front pages of the scandalous chronicles for years; a chronic user of morphine and amateur violinist, who broke down at the very appearance of a velocipede because he had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. I do not know what related the velocipedes to his illness but, since that vehicle had attained a certain popularity amongst the young, his attacks occurred almost daily. I doubt that, in my life, I have met a man, and I have met plenty, who was more completely in love with himself. In truth, to be in love with anyone is a matter of the naïveté common to early youth, but to be in love with oneself, and therefore with the person we know best, means either to be an idiot or an evil man, and my neighbor was, I am convinced, both.
To make matters worse, this good-for-nothing, about whom people of dubious reputation had even written several trivial books for entertaining the masses, was constantly attempting to visit me, to give me gifts, to invite me to games of bridge and, worst of all, I tolerated these intrusions with a hypocrisy and patience that was amazing, if one considers my pitiful spiritual state. And yet, I am most thankful to him, that genius of shabby logic. And this is why: in order to defend myself from his onslaughts I began, using the excuse of my doctor’s advice, to take long walks to the shore of the ocean where I found a certain measure of peace in the silence, barely disturbed by the murmuring of waves and the whistle of the wind; by the way, I also learned, during a storm accompanied by roaring thunder, that the worst sort of noise is… the prattle of human voices in a closed room. If these words make me out to be a misanthropist to future readers, I will be satisfied. Was I not (like everyone else) a misanthropist who pretended to be a philanthropist in the tortuous farce of social life? Those walks helped me become aware that I had wasted my life in the constant presentation of myself as someone else, someone different than who I really am; that I put on the mask of a specter my whole life until finally, just as it says in the Caballah, I actually became a specter. I gave thanks to the Lord for mercifully doling out to me, near the end of my life, the flames of the worst suffering of the soul, for wracking my body with pain and insomnia; I was thankful for every suffering that opened my eyes, blinded before that by the trivial sparkle of worldly things.
During one such excursion, while the coachman waited for me in a nearby tavern, as I walked along the seastrand, I saw a shining object cast upon the beach by the high tide. I can be grateful to Providence and someone else that I descended the steep cliff, for I might well have broken my back or a leg. Far from it, that I feared for my life or my health; I was lethargic and fainthearted, and I would undertake such an effort for nothing — by earthly criteria — valuable. But the object sparkled mysteriously; that which greed could not do was done by curiosity, and I descended, wading knee-deep into the water, and I snatched it up. At first glance, it was just a common bottle of fine glass, carefully sealed with pitch. Immediately I called my driver and rode home. That evening, in the privacy of my study, I broke the bottle. Inside was a scroll of paper, the manuscript of Captain Adam Queensdale, dated 23 October 1761.