Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

in a circle. They are creating a kind ofliving accumulator, to collect and concentrate the telluricvibrations. Now the cloud should appear..."

"What cloud?" Iwhispered.

"Tradition calls it thegreen cloud. Wait..."

I didn't really expect agreen cloud. Almost immediately, however, a soft mist rose from theground¡Xa fog, I would have said, if it had been thicker, morehomogeneous. But it was composed of flakes, denser in some placesthan in others. The wind stirred it, raised it in puffs, like spunsugar. Then it moved with the air to another part of the clearing,where it gathered. A singular effect. For a moment, you could seethe trees in the background, then they would be hidden in a whitishsteam, while the turf in the center of the clearing would smoke andfurther obscure our view of whatever was going on, as the moonlightshone around the concealed area. The flake cloud shifted, suddenly,unexpectedly, as if obeying the whims of a capriciouswind.

A chemical trick, Ithought, but then I reflected: we were at an altitude of about sixhundred meters, and it was possible that this was an actual cloud.Foretold by the rite? Summoned? Or was it just that the celebrantsknew that on that hilltop, under favorable conditions, thoseerratic banks of vapor formed just above the ground?

It was difficult toresist the fascination of the scene. The celebrants' tunics blendedwith the white of the cloud, and their forms entered and emergedfrom that milky obscurity as if it had spawned them.

There was a moment whenthe cloud filled the entire center of the little meadow. Somewisps, rising, separating, almost hid the moon, but the clearingwas still bright at its edges. We saw a Druidess come from thecloud and run toward the wood, crying out, her arms in front ofher. I thought she had discovered us and was hurling curses. Butshe stopped within a few meters of us, changed direction, and beganrunning in a circle around the cloud, disappearing in the whitenessto the left, only to reappear after a few minutes from the right.Again she was very close to us, and I could see herface.

She was a sibyl with agreat, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which openedlike a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and oneskewed canine. The eyes were shifty, hawklike, piercing. I heard,or thought I heard¡Xor think now that I remember hearing, but I maybe superimposing other memories¡Xa series of Gaelic words mixedwith evocations in a kind of Latin, something on the order of "Opegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!" Suddenly the fog lifted,disappeared, the clearing became bright again, and I saw that ithad been invaded by a troop of pigs, their short necks encircled bygarlands of green apples. The Druidess who had blown the trumpet,still atop the dolmen, now brandished a knife.

"We go now," Aglie saidsharply. "It's over."

I realized, as I heardhim, that the cloud was above us and around us, and I could barelymake out my companions.

"What do you mean,over?" Garamond said. "Looks to me like the real stuff is justbeginning!"

"What you were permittedto see is over. Now it is not permitted. We must respect the rite.Come."

He reentered the wood,was promptly swallowed up by the mist that enfolded us. We shiveredas we moved, slipping 01 dead leaves, panting, in disarray, like afleeing army, and regrouped at the road. We could be in Milan inless than two hours. Before getting back into Garamond's car, Agliesaid goodbye to us: "You must forgive me for interrupting the showfor you. I wanted you to learn something, to see the people forwhom you are now working. But it was not possible to stay. When Iwas informed of this event, I had to promise I wouldn't disturb theceremony. Our continued presence would have had a negative effecton what follows."

"And the pigs? Whathappens to them?" Belbo asked.

"What I could tell you,I have told you."

63

¡¥What does the fishremind you of?" ¡¥Other fish."

¡¥And what do other fishremind you of?" ¡¥Other fish."

¡XJoseph Heller,Catch-22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii

I came back fromPiedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgotthe desires that had grazed me.

Still, our expeditionleft other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time Iwasn't troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter bychapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals,but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any morethan I had been able to in Rio. How was this Reaumur cylindricalstove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, orfrom this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterusfor the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if theyhad installed the Deutsches Museum in the Piedmont castle I hadvisited the week before.

It was becoming harderfor me to keep apart the world of magic and what today we call theworld of facts. Men I had studied in school as bearers ofmathematical and physical enlightenment now turned up amid the murkof superstition, for I discovered they had worked with one foot incabala and the other in the laboratory. Or was I rereading allhistory through the eyes of our Diabolicals? But then I would findtexts above all suspicion that told me how in the time ofpositivism physicists barely out of the university dabbled instances and astrological cena-cles, and how Newton had arrived atthe law of gravity because he believed in the existence of occultforces, which recalled his investigations into Rosicruciancosmology.

I had always thoughtthat doubting was a scientific duty, but now I came to distrust thevery masters who had taught me to doubt.

I said to myself: I'mlike Amparo; I don't believe in it, yet I surrender to it. Yes, Icaught myself marveling over the fact that the height of the GreatPyramid really was one-billionth of the distance between the earthand the sun, and that you really could draw striking parallelsbetween Celtic and Amerind mythologies. And I began to questioneverything around me: the houses, die shop signs, the clouds in thesky, and the engravings in the library, asking them to tell me nottheir superficial story but another, deeper story, which theysurely were hiding¡Xbut