Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [210]
I thought of the Black Work, of Lia’s belly, of the Thing that was struggling to break out of its sweet volcano.
“...and whatever takes place in the world of men is planned below.”
“Does Padre Kircher say that, too?”
“No. He concerns himself only with nature...But it is odd that the second part of this book is on alchemy and the alchemists, and that precisely here, you see, there is an attack on the Rosicrucians. Why attack the Rosicrucians in a book on the underground world? Our Jesuit knew a thing or two; he knew that the last Templars had taken refuge in the underground kingdom ofAgarttha...”
“And they’re still there, it seems,” I ventured.
“They’re still there,” Salon said. “Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us, right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who directed the excavations?”
“Expert engineers, I’d say.”
“Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books....How many Jews are there among your authors?”
“We don’t ask our authors to fill out racial forms,” I replied stiffly.
“You mustn’t think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends...I have in mind a certain kind of Jew....”
“What kind?”
“I know what kind...”
79
He opened his coffer. In indescribable disorder it contained collars, rubber bands, kitchen utensils, badges of different technical schools, even the monogram of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. On everything, in his madness, he saw the seal of the Antichrist, in the form of two linked triangles.
—Alexandre Chayla, “Serge A. Nilus et les Protocoles,” La Tribune Juive, May 14, 1921, p.3
“You see,” Salon went on, “I was born in Moscow. And it was in Russia, when I was a youth, that people discovered the secret Jewish documents that said, in so many words, that to control governments it was necessary to work underground. Listen.” He picked up a little notebook, in which he had copied out some quotations. “ ‘Today’s cities have metropolitan railroads and underground passages: from these we will blow up all the capitals of the world.’ Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Document Number Nine!”
It occurred to me that the collection of spinal columns, the box with the eyes, the skins stretched over armatures came from some extermination camp. But no, I was dealing with an elderly man nostalgic about the old days of Russian anti-Semitism. “If I follow you, then, there’s a conventicle of Jews—some Jews, not all—who are plotting something. But why underground?”
“That’s obvious! Any plotter must plot underground, not in the light of day. This has been known from the beginning of time. Dominion over the world means dominion over what lies beneath it. The subterranean currents.”
I remembered a question of Agile’s in his study, and then the Druidesses in Piedmont, who called on telluric currents.
“Why did the Celts dig sanctuaries in the heart of the earth, making tunnels that communicated with a sacred well?” Salon continued. “The well goes down into radioactive strata, as everyone knows. How was Glastonbury built? And isn’t the island of Avalon where the myth of the Grail originated? And who invented the Grail if not a Jew?”
The Grail again, my God. But what grail? There was only one grail: my Thing, in contact with the radioactive strata of Lia’s womb, and perhaps now swimming happily toward the mouth of that well, perhaps now preparing to come out, and here I was among stuffed owls, among a hundred dead and one pretending to be alive.
“All Europe’s cathedrals are built where the Celts had their menhirs. Why did the Celts set these stones in the ground, considering the effort it cost them?”
“Why did the Egyptians go to so much trouble to erect the pyramids?”
“There you are. Antennas,