Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [135]
“Well,” Belbo said, “perhaps I am using the wrong word, but surely you know the genre.”
Aglie smiled again. “It is not a genre. It is knowledge. What you wish to do is publish a survey of knowledge that has not been debased. For you it may be simply an editorial choice, but for me, if I am to concern myself with it, it will be a search for truth, a queste du Graal.”
Belbo warned that just as the fisherman who casts his net could pull in empty shells and plastic bags, so Garamond Press might receive many manuscripts of dubious value, and that we were looking for a stern reader who would separate the wheat from the chaff, while also taking note of any curious by-products, because there was a friendly publishing firm that would be happy if we redirected less worthy authors to it...Naturally, a suitable form of compensation would be worked out.
“Thank heavens I am what is called a man of means. Even a shrewd man of means. If, in the course of my explorations, I come upon another copy of Khunrath, or another handsome stuffed salamander, or a narwhal’s horn (which I would be ashamed to display in my collection, though the Treasure of Vienna exhibits one as a unicorn’s horn), with a brief and agreeable transaction I can earn more than you would pay me in ten years of consultancy. I will look at your manuscripts in the spirit of humility. I am convinced that even in the most commonplace text I will find a spark, if not of truth, at least of bizarre falsehood, and often the extremes meet. I will be bored only by the ordinary, and for that boredom you will compensate me. Depending on the boredom I have undergone, I will confine myself to sending you, at the end of the year, a little note, and I will keep my request within the confines of the symbolical. If you consider it excessive, you will just send me a case of fine wine.”
Belbo was nonplussed. He was accustomed to dealing with consultants who were querulous and starving. He opened the briefcase he had brought with him and drew out a thick manuscript.
“I wouldn’t want you to be overoptimistic. Look at this, for example. It seems to me typical.”
Aglie took the manuscript: “The Secret Language of the Pyramids...Let’s see the index...Pyramidion...Death of Lord Carnarvon...Testimony of Herodotus...”He looked up. “You gentlemen have read it?”
“I skimmed through it,” Belbo said.
Aglie returned the manuscript to him. “Now tell me if my summary is correct.” He sat down behind the desk, reached into the pocket of his vest, drew out the pillbox I had seen in Brazil, and turned it in his thin, tapering fingers, which earlier had caressed his favorite books. He raised his eyes toward the figures on the ceiling and recited, as if from a text he had long known by heart:
“The author of this book no doubt reminds us that Piazzi Smyth discovered the sacred and esoteric measurements of the pyramids in 1864. Allow me to round off to whole numbers; at my age the memory begins to fail a bit...Their base is a square; each side measures two hundred and thirty-two meters. Originally the height was one hundred and forty-eight meters. If we convert into sacred Egyptian cubits, we obtain a base of three hundred and sixty-six; in other words, the number of days in a leap year. For Piazzi Smyth, the height multiplied by ten to the ninth gives the distance between the earth and the sun: one hundred and forty-eight million kilometers. A good estimate at the time, since today the calculated distance is one hundred and forty-nine and a half million kilometers, and the moderns are not necessarily right. The base divided by the width of one of the stones is three hundred and sixty-five. The perimeter of the base is nine hundred and thirty-one meters. Divide by twice the height, and you get 3.14, the number ir. Splendid, no?”
Belbo smiled and looked embarrassed. “Incredible! Tell me how you—”
“Let Dr. Aglie go on, Jacopo,” Diotallevi said.
Agile thanked him with a nod. His gaze wandered the ceiling as he spoke, but it seemed to me that the path his eyes followed was neither idle nor random, that they