S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
This is the oldest of all, the most secret, which holds the most power. You must see it before you, close your eyes, see it clearly and speak it with your lips closed, without your voice, letter by letter, and then say aloud, clearly enough for the dragon to hear you, a truth that you have never before disclosed, not to your closest friend, not even in confession. This is the most important thing: it must never have been uttered before. Then a mist will arise, and you can flee. Weakness afflicts the monster’s limbs, leaden oblivion fills its mind, and you run away before it can seize you. When it awakes, it won’t remember you. But don’t forget: you can do it only once!
Kircher contemplated his fingertips. Should the music fail to soothe the dragon, he was resolved to turn to this last resort and flee on one of the coach horses. The dragon would then presumably devour the secretaries—it would be a shame about them, especially Guglielmo, who was very quick and eager to learn—and probably the two Germans too. But he himself would escape, thanks to science; he had nothing to fear.
This journey would be his last. He would not subject himself to travel again. He was simply not suited for such exertions. While traveling he was always queasy, the food was always dreadful, it was always cold, and the dangers were also not to be underestimated: The war may have moved south, but that didn’t mean things up here were pleasant. How ravaged everything was, how wretched the people! He had, it was true, found several books in Hamburg for which he had long been searching—Hartmut Elias Warnick’s Organicon, an edition of Melusina mineralia by Gottfried von Rosenstein, and a few handwritten pages that might have been penned by Simon von Turin—but even this was no consolation for the weeks without his laboratory, where everything was manageable, while everywhere else chaos reigned.
Why did God’s Creation prove to be so recalcitrant, whence came its stubborn tendency to confusion and jaggedness? What was clear within the mind revealed itself outside to be a tangle. Kircher had grasped early on that one had to follow reason without being flustered by the quirks of reality. When one knew how an experiment had to turn out, then the experiment had to turn out like that, and when one possessed a distinct conception of things, then, when one described them, one had to satisfy this conception and not mere observation.
Only because he had learned to trust entirely the Holy Spirit had he been able to accomplish his greatest work, the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. With the old tablet of signs that Cardinal Bembo had once bought he had gotten to the bottom of the mystery: He had plunged deep into the little pictures until he understood. If one combined a wolf and a snake, it had to mean danger, but if there was a dotted wave under it, then God intervened and protected those who deserved his protection, and these three signs side by side meant mercy, and Kircher had fallen to his knees and had thanked heaven for such inspiration. The half-oval open to the left stood for judgment, and if there was a sun too, then it was the Day of Judgment, but if there was a moon, then this meant the torment of the man praying at night and hence the soul of the sinner and sometimes even hell. The little man must have meant person, but if this person had a staff, then it was the working person or work, and the signs behind it indicated what sort of work he did: if there were dots, then he was a sower; if there were dashes, he was a boatman; and if there were circles, he was a priest, and because priests wrote too, he could just as well be a scribe—it depended on whether he was situated at the beginning or at the end of the line, for the priest was always at the beginning, whereas the scribe came after the events that he recorded. Those had been ecstatic weeks. Soon he no longer needed the tablet; he had written in hieroglyphs as if he had never done otherwise. He had no longer been able to sleep at night, because he dreamed in signs. His thoughts consisted of dashes and dots and wedges and waves. So it was when one felt grace. His book, which he would soon have printed under the title Oedipus Aegyptiacus, was the greatest of his achievements: for thousands of years humanity had stood baffled before the mystery, no one had been able to solve it. Now it was solved.
The only irksome thing was that people were so dull-witted. He received letters from brothers in the Orient who informed him of sequences of signs that did not conform to the system described by him, and he had to write back to them that it didn’t make a difference what some oaf had carved into a stone ten thousand years ago, some little scribe who, after all, knew less about this script than an authority like him—what, then, was the point of concerning oneself with his errors? Had that little scribe received a letter of thanks from Caesar? But Kircher boasted one. He had sent the Kaiser a hymn of praise in hieroglyphs; he always carried with him the grateful reply from Vienna, folded and sewn into a silk pouch. Involuntarily he placed his hand on his chest, could feel the parchment through his jerkin, and immediately felt somewhat better.
The coaches had stopped.
“Are you unwell?” asked Olearius. “You’re pale.”
“I’m doing splendidly,” Kircher said in annoyance.
He flung open the door and climbed out. The sweat of the horses was steaming. The meadow too was damp. He squinted and propped himself up against the coach. He was dizzy.
“Eminent men,” said a voice. “Visiting us!”
Over by the tents there were people, and somewhat closer the old woman sat in front of the washtub, but right next to them there was only a donkey. The animal looked up, lowered its head again, and plucked blades of grass.
“Did you hear that too?” asked Fleming.
Olearius, who had climbed out behind him, nodded.
“It’s me,” said the donkey.
“There’s an explanation for this,” said Kircher.
“And what is it?” asked the donkey.
“Ventriloquism,” said Kircher.
“Right,” said the donkey. “I am Origenes.”
“Where is the ventriloquist hiding?” asked Olearius.
“He’s asleep,” said the donkey.
Behind them Fleming and the secretary had climbed out. The other secretaries followed.
“That’s really not bad,” said Fleming.
“He rarely sleeps,” said the donkey. “But now he is dreaming of you.” Its voice sounded deep and strange, as if it were not issuing from a human throat. “Do you want to see the show? The next one is the day after tomorrow. We have a fire eater and a hand walker and a coin swallower, that’s me. Give me coins, I’ll swallow them. Do you want to see? I’ll swallow them all. We have a dancer and a woman to play the female roles and we have a maiden who is buried and remains underground for an hour, and when she is dug up, she is fresh and not suffocated. And we have a dancer, did I say that already? The player and the dancer and the maiden are the same person. And we have a peerless tightrope walker, he is our director. But he is asleep at the moment. We also have a freak—when you look at him, your mind will reel. You can hardly tell where his head is, and not even he himself can find his arms.”
“And you have a ventriloquist,” said Olearius.