Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [170]
“Why?” Garamond asked.
“Certain places have more magic than others.”
“But who are they—in real life?”
“People. Secretaries, insurance agents, poets. People you might run into tomorrow and not recognize.”
Now we could see a small group preparing to enter the clearing. The phosphorescent light, I realized, came from little lamps the priestesses held up in their hands. They had seemed, earlier, to be at ground level because the clearing was on the top of a hill; the Druidesses had climbed up from below and were approaching the flat, open hilltop. They were dressed in white tunics, which fluttered in the slight breeze. They formed a circle; in the center, three celebrants stood.
“Those are the three hallouines of Lisieux, Clonmacnoise, and Pino Torinese,” Aglie said. Belbo asked why those three in particular. Aglie shrugged and said: “No more. We must wait now in silence. I can’t summarize for you in a few words the whole ritual and hierarchy of Nordic magic. Be satisfied with what I can tell you. If I do not tell you more, it is because I do not know...or am not allowed to tell. I must respect certain vows of privacy.”
In the center of the clearing I noticed a pile of rocks, which suggested a dolmen. Perhaps the clearing had been chosen because of the presence of those boulders. One of the celebrants climbed up on the dolmen and blew a trumpet. Even more than the trumpet we had seen a few hours earlier, this looked like something out of the triumphal march in At da. But a muffled and nocturnal sound came from it, as if from far away. Belbo touched my arm: “It’s the ramsing, the horn of the Thugs around the sacred banyan...”
My reply was cruel, because I didn’t realize he was joking precisely to repress other associations, and it must have twisted the knife in the wound. “It would no doubt be less magical with the bombardon,” I said.
Belbo nodded. “Yes, they’re here precisely because they don’t want a bombardon,” he said.
Was it on that evening he began to see a connection between his private dreams and what had been happening to him in those months?
Aglifc hadn’t followed our words, but heard us whispering. “It’s not a warning or a summons,” he explained, “but a kind of ultrasound, to establish contact with the subterranean currents. You see, now the Druidesses are all holding hands, in a circle. They are creating a kind of living accumulator, to collect and concentrate the telluric vibrations. Now the cloud should appear...”
“What cloud?” I whispered.
“Tradition calls it the green cloud. Wait...”
I didn’t really expect a green cloud. Almost immediately, however, a soft mist rose from the ground—a fog, I would have said, if it had been thicker, more homogeneous. But it was composed of flakes, denser in some places than in others. The wind stirred it, raised it in puffs, like spun sugar. Then it moved with the air to another part of the clearing, where it gathered. A singular effect. For a moment, you could see the trees in the background, then they would be hidden in a whitish steam, while the turf in the center of the clearing would smoke and further obscure our view of whatever was going on, as the moonlight shone around the concealed area. The flake cloud shifted, suddenly, unexpectedly, as if obeying the whims of a capricious wind.
A chemical trick, I thought, but then I reflected: we were at an altitude of about six hundred meters, and it was possible that this was an actual cloud. Foretold by the rite? Summoned? Or was it just that the celebrants knew that on that hilltop, under favorable conditions, those erratic banks of vapor formed just above the ground?
It was difficult to resist the fascination of the scene. The celebrants’ tunics blended with the white of the cloud, and their forms entered and emerged from that milky obscurity as if it had spawned them.
There was a moment when the cloud filled the entire center of the little meadow. Some wisps, rising, separating, almost hid the moon, but the clearing was still bright at its edges. We saw a Druidess come from the cloud and run toward the wood,