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By Root 847 0

another the latest connection. We read everything we could lay our hands on—encyclopedias, newspapers, cartoon strips, publishers’ catalogs—and read it squinting, seeking possible shortcuts. At every bookstall we stopped and rummaged; we sniffed newsstands, stole abundantly from the manuscripts of our Diabolicals, rushed triumphantly into the office, slamming the latest find on a desk. As I recall those weeks, everything seems to have taken place at a frenzied pace, as in a Keystone Kops film, all jerks and jumps, with doors opening and closing at supersonic speed, cream pies flying, dashes up flights of steps, up and down, back and forth, old cars crashing, shelves collapsing in grocery stores amid avalanches of cans, bottles, soft cheeses, spurting siphons, exploding flour sacks. Yet the intermissions, the idle moments—the rest of life going on around us—I remember as a story in slow motion, the Plan taking gradual shape with the discipline of gymnastics, or like the slow rotation of the discus thrower, the cautious sway of the shot-putter, the long tempos of golf, the senseless waits of baseball. But whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections—always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else...

I said nothing about it to Lia, to avoid irritating her, and I even neglected Giulio. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the realization, for example, that Ren6 des Cartes could make R.C. and that he had been overenergetic in seeking and then denying having found the Rosicrucians. Why all that obsession with Method? Because it was through Method that you arrived at the solution to the mystery that was fascinating all the initiates of Europe...And who had celebrated the enchantment of Gothic? Rene de Chateaubriand. And who, in Bacon’s time, wrote Steps to the Temple! Richard Crashaw. And what about Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, Ren6 Char, Raymond Chandler? And Rick of Casablanca?

86

This science, which was not lost, at least as far as its practice was concerned, was taught to the cathedral builders by the monks of Ci-teaux...They were known, in the last century, as Compagnons du Tour de France. It was to them that Eiffel turned to build his tower.

—L. Charpentier, Les mysteres de la cathedrale de Chartres, Paris, Laffont, 1966, pp. 55-56

Now we had the entire modern age filled with industrious moles tunneling through the earth, spying on the planet from below. But there had to be something else, another venture the Baconians had set in motion, whose results, whose stages were before everyone’s eyes, though no one had noticed them...The ground had been punctured and the deep strata tested, but the Celts and the Templars had not confined themselves to digging wells; they had planted their stations and aimed them straight to the heavens, to communicate from megalith to megalith, and to catch the influences of the stars.

The idea came to Belbo during a night of insomnia. He leaned out the window and saw in the distance, above the roofs of Milan, the lights of the steel tower of the Italian Radio, the great city antenna. A moderate, prudent Babel. And he understood.

“The Eiffel Tower,” he said to us the next morning. “Why didn’t we think of it before? The metal megalith, the menhir of the last Celts, the hollow spire taller than all Gothic spires. What need did Paris have of this useless monument? It’s the celestial probe, the antenna that collects information from every hermetic valve stuck into the planet’s crust: the statues of Easter Island; Machu Picchu; the Statue of Liberty, conceived first by the initiate Lafayette; the obelisk of Luxor; the highest tower of Tomar; the Colossus of Rhodes, which still transmits from the depths of a harbor that no one can find; the temples of the Brahman jungle; the turrets of the Great Wall; the top of Ayers Rock; the spires of Strasbourg, which so delighted the initiate Goethe; the faces of Mount