Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [146]
“I must confess I haven’t.”
“It’s a bit out of the way, between Gare de 1’Est and Gare du Nord. An unremarkable building at first sight. But if you look at it more closely, you realize that though the door looks wooden, it is actually painted iron, and the windows appear to belong to rooms unoccupied for centuries. People walk past and don’t know the truth.”
“What is the truth?”
“That the house is fake. It’s a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Metro. And once you know this, you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld: if you could penetrate those walls, you would have access to subterranean Paris. I have had occasion to spend hours and hours in front of that door that conceals the door of doors, the point of departure for the journey to the center of the earth. Why do you think they made it?”
“To ventilate the Metro, as you said.”
“A few ducts would have been enough for that. No, when I see those subterranean passages, my suspicions are aroused. Do you know why?”
As he spoke of darkness, he seemed to give off light. I asked him why his suspicions were aroused.
“Because if the Masters of the World exist, they can only be underground: this is a truth that all sense but few dare utter. Perhaps the only man bold enough to say it in print was Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. You know him?”
I may have heard the name mentioned by one of our Diabolicals, but I wasn’t sure.
“He is the one who told us about Agarttha, the underground headquarters of the King of the World, the occult center of the Synarchy,” the taxidermist said. “He had no fear; he felt sure of himself. But all those who spoke out after him were eliminated, because they knew too much.”
As we walked along the tunnel, Signer Salon cast nervous glances at the mouths of new passageways, as if in those shadows he was seeking confirmation of his suspicions.
“Have you ever wondered why in the last century all the great metropolises hastened to build subways?’’
“To solve traffic problems?”
“Before there were automobiles, when there were only horse-drawn carriages? From a man of your intelligence I would have expected a more perceptive explanation.”
“You have one?”
“Perhaps,” Signor Salon said, and he looked pensive, absent. The conversation died. Then he said that he had to be running along. But, after shaking my hand, he lingered another few seconds, as if struck by a thought. “Apropos, that colonel—what was his name?—the one who came to Garamond some time ago to talk to you about a Templar treasure...have you had any news of him?’’
It was like a slap in the face, this brutal and indiscreet display of knowledge about something I considered private and buried.
I wanted to ask him how he knew, but I was afraid. I confined myself to saying, in an indifferent tone, “Oh, that old story. I’d forgotten all about it. But apropos: why did you say apropos?”
“Did I say that? Ah, yes, well, it seemed to me he had discovered something, underground...”
“How do you know?”
“I really can’t say. I can’t remember who spoke to me about it. A customer, perhaps. But my curiosity is always aroused when the underground world is involved. The little manias of old age. Good evening.”
He went off, and I stood there, to ponder the meaning of this encounter.
52
In certain regions of the Himalayas, among the twenty-two temples that represent the twenty-two Arcana of Hermes and the twenty-two letters of some sacred alphabets, Agarttha forms the mystic Zero, which cannot be found...A colossal chessboard that extends beneath the earth, through almost all the regions of the Globe.
—Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de I’lnde en Europe, Paris, Calmann Levy, 1886, pp. 54 and 65
When I got back, I told the story to Belbo and Diotallevi, and we ventured various hypotheses. Perhaps Salon, a gossiping eccentric who dabbled in mysteries, had happened to meet Ar-denti, and