Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [195]
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rabbi Allevi,” said Dee. “We’re here to make a few ounces of gold for the emperor. We’re not a couple of cheap necromancers.”
“Give me back the scroll, at least,” Rabbi Allevi begged.
“What scroll?” Dee asked, with diabolical ingenuousness.
“Curse you, Dr. Dee,” said the rabbi. “And verily I say unto thee, thou shall not see the dawn of the new century.” And he went off into the night, murmuring strange words without consonants. Oh, Language Diabolical and Holy.
Dee was huddled against the damp wall of the alley, his face ashen, his hair bristling on his head. “I know Rabbi Allevi,” he said. “I will die on August 5, 1608, of the Gregorian calendar. So now, Kelley, you must help me to carry out my plan. You are the one who will have to bring it to fulfillment. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy. Remember,” he said. But I would remember in any case, and William with me. And against me.
* * *
He said no more. The pale fog that rubs its back against the panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its back against the panes, licked with its tongue the street corners. We were now in another alley; whitish vapors came from the grilles at ground level, and through them you could glimpse squalid dens with tilting walls, defined by gradations of misty gray. I saw, as he came groping down a stairway (the steps oddly orthogonal), the figure of an old man in a worn frock coat and a top hat. And Dee saw him. “Caligari!” he exclaimed. “He’s here, too, in the house of Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante! We have to get moving.”
Quickening our steps, we arrived at the door of a hovel in a poorly lit alley, sinister and Semitic.
We knocked, and the door opened as if by magic. We entered a spacious room: there were seven-branched candelabra, tetragrams in relief, Stars of David like monstrances. Old violins, the color of the veneer on certain old paintings, were piled in the entrance on a refectory table of anamorphic irregularity. A great crocodile hung, mummified, from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the dim glow of a single torch, or of many, or of none. In the rear, before a kind of curtain or canopy under which stood a tabernacle, kneeling in prayer, ceaselessly and blasphemously murmuring the seventy-two names of God, was an old man. I knew, by a sudden stroke of nous, that this was Heinrich Khunrath.
“Come to the point, Dee,” he said, turning and breaking off his prayer. “What do you want?” He resembled a stuffed armadillo, an ageless iguana.
“Khunrath,” Dee said, “the third encounter did not take place.”
Khunrath exploded in a horrible curse: “Lapis exillis! Now what?”
“Khunrath,” Dee said, “you could throw out some bait; you could put me in touch with the German line.”
“Let me see,” Khunrath said. “I could ask Maier, who is in touch with many people at the court. But you will tell me the secret of Virgin’s Milk, the Most Secret Oven of the Philosophers.”
Dee smiled. Oh the divine smile of that Sophos! He concentrated then as if in prayer, and said in a low voice: “When you wish to translate into water or Virgin’s Milk a sublimate of Mercury, place the Thing duly pulverized over the lamina between the little weights and the goblet. Do not cover it but see that the hot air strikes the naked matter, administer it to the fire of three coals, and keep it alive for eight solar days, then remove it and pound it well on marble until it is a fine paste. This done, put it inside a glass alembic and distill it in a Balneum Mariae over a cauldron of water set in such a way that it does not touch the water below by the space of two fingers but remains suspended in air, and at the same time light the fire beneath the Balneum. Then, and only then, though the Silver does not touch the water, finding itself in this warm and moist womb, will it change to liquid.”
“Master,” said Khunrath, sinking to his knees and kissing the bony, diaphanous hand of Dr. Dee. “Master, so I will do. And you will have what you wish. Remember these words: the Rose and the Cross.