AFTER COMPLINE
The visit to the library cost us long hours of work. Described in words, the verification we aimed to carry out was simple, but our progress by lamplight as we read the legends, marked the passages and the blank walls on the map, recorded the initials, followed the various routes that the play of openings and obstacles allowed us, was very long. And tedious.
It was bitter cold. The night was not windy and we did not hear those faint whistlings that had upset us the first evening, but a damp, icy air entered from the arrow slits. We had put on woolen gloves so as to be able to touch the volumes without having our hands become numb. But they were the kind used for writing in winter, the fingertips left bare, and sometimes we had to hold our hands to the flame or put them against our chests or clap them as we hopped about, half frozen.
For this reason we didn’t perform the whole task consecutively. We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William — with his new glasses on his nose — could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land. And as he leafed through one manuscript, he ordered me to look for others.
“See what’s in that case!”
And I, deciphering and shifting volumes, said, “Histories anglorum of Bede … And also by Bede, De aedificatione templi, De tabernaculo, De temparibus et computo et chronica et circuli Dionysi, Ortographia, De ratione metrorum, Vita Sancti Cuthberti, Ars metrica …”
“Naturally, the complete works of the Venerable … And look at these! De rhetorica cognatione, Locorum rhetoricorum distinctio, and here many grammarians, Priscian, Honoratus, Donatus, Maximus, Victorinus, Eutiches, Phocas, Asper … Odd, I thought at first that here there were authors from Anglia… Let us look below…”
“Hisperica… famines. What is that?”
“A Hibernian poem. Listen:
I didn’t understand the meaning, but as William read he rolled the words in his mouth so that you seemed to hear the sound of the waves and the sea foam.
“And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: ‘Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgates.’ … The words all begin with the same letter!”
“The men of my islands are all a bit mad,” William said proudly. “Let us look in the other case.”
“Virgil.”
“What is he doing here? What Virgil? The Georgics?”
“No. Epitomae. I’ve never heard of it.”
“But it’s Virgil of Toulouse, the rhetorician, six centuries after the birth of our Lord. He was considered great sage…”
“Here it says that the arts are poema, rethoria, grama, leporia, dialecta, geometria… But what language was he writing?”
“Latin. A Latin of his own invention, however, which he considered far more beautiful. Read this; he says that astronomy studies the signs of the zodiac, which are mon, man, tonte, piron, dameth, perfellea, belgalic, margaleth, lutamiron, taminon, and raphalut.”
“Was he crazy?”
“I don’t know: he didn’t come from my islands. And listen to this; he says there are twelve ways of designating fire: ignis, coquihabin (quia incocta coquendi habet dictionem), ardo, calax ex calore, fragon ex fragore flammae, rusin de rubore, fumaton, ustrax de urendo, vitius quia pene mortua membra suo vivificat, siluleus, quod de silice siliat, unde et silex non recte dicitur, nisi ex qua scintilla silit. And aeneon, de Aenea deo, qua in eo habitat, sive a quo elementis flatus fertur.”
“But there’s no one who speaks like that!”
“Happily. But those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.”
“But this, too. Listen…” I had grasped a book marvelously illuminated with vegetable labyrinths from which monkeys and serpents peered out. “Listen to these words: cantamen, collamen, gongelamen, stemiamen, plasmamem, sonerus, alboreus, gaudifluus, glaucicomus…”
“My islands,” William said again, with tenderness. “Don’t be too harsh with those monks of far-off Hibernia. Perhaps, if this abbey exists and if we still speak of the Holy Roman Empire, we owe it to them. At that time, the rest of Europe was reduced to a heap of ruins; one day they declared invalid all baptisms imparted by certain priests in Gaul because they baptized “in nomine patris et filiae’ — and not because they practiced a new heresy and considered Jesus a woman, but because they no longer knew any Latin.”
“Like Salvatore?”
“More or less. Vikings from the Far North came down along the rivers to sack Rome. The pagan temples were falling in ruins, and the Christian ones did not yet exist. It was only the monks of Hibernia in their monasteries who wrote and read, read and wrote, and illuminated, and then jumped into little boats made of animal hide and navigated toward these lands and evangelized them as if you people were infidels, you understand? You have been to Bobbio, which was founded by Saint Columba, one of them. And so never mind if they invented a new Latin, seeing that in Europe no one knew the old Latin any more. They were great men. Saint Brendan reached the Isles of the Blest and sailed along the coasts of hell, where he saw Judas chained to a rock, and one day he landed on an island and went ashore there and found a sea monster. Naturally they were all mad,” he repeated contentedly.
“These images are … I can hardly believe my eyes! So many colors!” I said, drinking it all in.
“From a land that doesn’t have many colors, a bit of blue and much green. But we mustn’t stand here discussing Hibernian monks. What I want to know is why they are here with the Anglians and with grammarians of other countries. Look at your chart; where should we be?”
“In the rooms of the west tower. I’ve copied down the scrolls, too. So, then, leaving the blind room, we enter the heptagonal room, and there is only one passage to a single room of the tower; the letter in red is H. Then we go from room to room, moving around the tower, and we return to the blind room. The sequence of the letters spells … you are right! HIBERNI!”
“HIBERNIA, if we come from the blind room back into the heptagonal, which, like all the others, has the letter A for Apocalypsis. So there are the works of the authors of Ultima Thule, and also the grammarians and rhetoricians, because the men who arranged the library thought that a grammarian should remain with the Hibernian grammarians, even if he came from Toulouse. It is a criterion. You see? We are beginning to understand something.”