Finally I came to the émetteur à étincelles soufflées designed for the Eiffel Tower, for the emission of time signals between France, Tunisia, and Russia, the Templars of Provins, the Paulicians, the Assassins of Fez. (Fez isn’t in Tunisia, and the Assassins, anyway, were in Persia, but you can’t split hairs when you live in the coils of Transcendent Time.) I had seen it before, this immense machine, taller than I, its walls perforated by a series of portholes, air ducts. The sign said it was a radio apparatus, but I knew better, I had passed it that same afternoon. The Beaubourg!
For all to see. And, for that matter, what was the real purpose of that enormous box in the center of Lutetia (Lutetia, the air duct in a subterranean sea of mud), where once there was the Belly of Paris, with those prehensile proboscises of vents, that insanity of pipes, conduits, that Ear of Dionysius open to the sky to capture sounds, messages, signals, and send them to the very center of the globe, and then to return them, vomiting out information from hell?
First the Conservatoire, a laboratory, then the Tower, a probe, and finally the Beaubourg, a global transmitter and receiver. Had they set up that huge suction cup just to entertain a handful of hairy, smelly students, who went there to listen to the latest record with a Japanese headset? For all to see. The Beaubourg, gate to the underground kingdom of Agarttha, the monument of the Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. And the rest—two, three, four billion of them—were unaware of this, or forced themselves to look the other way. Idiots and hylics. While the pneumatics headed straight for their goal, through six centuries.
Unexpectedly, I found the staircase. I went down, with increasing caution. Midnight was approaching. I had to hide in my observation post before They arrived.
It was about eleven. I crossed the Lavoisier hall without turning on the flashlight, remembering the hallucinations of that afternoon. I crossed the corridor with the model trains.
There were already people in the nave: dim lights moving, the sound of shuffling, of objects being dragged.
Would I have time to make it to the sentry box? I slipped along the cases with the model trains and was soon close to the statue of Gramme, in the transept. On a wooden pedestal, cubic in form (the cubic stone of Yesod!), it stood as if to guard the entrance to the choir. My Statue of Liberty was almost directly behind it.
The front panel of the pedestal had been lowered, a kind of gangplank allowing people to enter the nave from some concealed passage. In fact, an individual emerged from there with a lantern—a gas lantern, with colored glass, which illuminated his face in red patches. I pressed myself into a corner, and he didn’t see me. A second man joined him from the choir. “Vite,” he said. “Hurry. In an hour they’ll be here.”
So this was the vanguard, preparing something for the rite. If there weren’t too many of them, I could still reach Liberty before They arrived—God knows from where, and in what numbers—by the same route. For a long while I crouched low, following the glints of the lanterns in the church, the regular alternation of the lights between greater and lesser intensity. I calculated how far they moved away from Liberty and how much of it remained in shadow. Then, at a certain moment, I risked it, squeezed past the left side of Gramme, a tight fit, painful, even sucking in my stomach. Luckily, I was thin as a rail. Lia … I made a dash, slipped into the sentry box, where I sank to the floor and curled up in a fetal position. My heart raced; my teeth chattered.
I had to relax. I breathed through my nose rhythmically, my breaths gradually deeper and deeper. This is how, under torture, you can make yourself lose consciousness and escape the pain. And, in fact, I sank slowly into the embrace of the Subterranean World.
Our cause is a secret within a secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a secret that is veiled by a secret.
—Ja’far as-Ṣādiq, sixth Imam
Slowly, I regained consciousness, heard sounds; the light, now stronger, made me blink. My feet were numb. When I tried to get up, making no noise, I felt I was standing on a bed of spiny sea urchins. The Little Mermaid. Silently I stood on tiptoe, then bent my knees, and the pain lessened. Peering out cautiously, left and right, I saw that the sentry box was still pretty much in the shadows. Only then did I take in the scene.
The nave was illuminated on all sides. There were now dozens and dozens of lanterns, carried by new arrivals, who were entering from the passage behind me. They moved by on my left, into the choir, or lined up in the nave. My God, I said to myself, a Night on Bald Mountain, Walt Disney version.
They didn’t raise their voices; they whispered, together creating a noise like a crowd scene in a play: rhubarb rhubarb.
To the left, the lanterns were set on the floor in a semicircle, completing, with a flattened arc, the eastern curve of the choir, and touching, at the southernmost point, the statue of Pascal. A burning brazier had been placed there, and on it someone was throwing herbs, essences. The smoke reached me in the box, parched my throat, gave me a feeling of dazed excitement.
In the center of the choir, in the flickering of the lanterns, something stirred, a slender shadow.
The Pendulum! The Pendulum no longer swayed in its familiar place in the center of the transept. A larger version of it had been hung from the keystone in the center of the choir. The sphere was larger; the wire much thicker, like a hawser, I thought, or a cable of braided metal strands. The Pendulum, now enormous, must have appeared this way in the Panthéon. It was like beholding the moon through a telescope.
They had re-created the pendulum that the Templars first experimented with, half a millennium before Foucault. To allow it to sway freely, they had removed some ribs and supporting beams, turning the amphitheater of the choir into a crude symmetrical antistrophe marked out by the lanterns.
I asked myself how the Pendulum could maintain its constant oscillation, since the magnetic regulator could not be beneath it now, in the floor. Then I understood. At the edge of the choir, near the diesel engines, stood an individual ready to dart like a cat to follow the plane of oscillation. He gave the sphere a little push each time it came toward him, a precise light tap of the hand or the fingertips.
He was in tails, like Mandrake. Later, seeing his companions, I realized that he was indeed a magician, a prestidigitator from Le Petit Cirque of Madame Olcott; he was a professional, able to gauge pressures and distances, possessing a steady wrist skilled in working within the infinitesimal margins necessary in legerdemain. Perhaps through the thin soles of his gleaming shoes he could sense the vibrations of the currents, and move his hands according to the logic of both the sphere and the earth that governed it.
His companions—now I could see them as well. They moved among the automobiles in the nave, they scurried past the draisiennes and the motorcycles, almost tumbling in the shadows. Some carried a stool and a table covered with red cloth in the vast ambulatory in the rear, and some placed other lanterns. Tiny, nocturnal, twittering, they were like rachitic children, and as one went past me I saw mongoloid features and a bald head. Madame Olcott’s Freaks Mignons, the horrible little monsters I had seen on the poster in the Librairie Sloane.
The circus was there in full force: the staff, guards, choreographers of the rite. I saw Alex and Denys, les Gents d’Avalon, sheathed in armor of studded leather. They were giants indeed, blond, leaning against the great bulk of the Obeissante, their arms folded as they waited.
I didn’t have time to ask myself more questions. Someone had entered with solemnity, a hand extended to impose silence. I recognized Bramanti only because he was wearing the scarlet tunic, the white cape, and the miter I had seen on him that evening in Piedmont. He approached the brazier, threw something on it, a flame shot up, then thick, white smoke rose and slowly spread through the room. As in Rio, I thought, at the alchemistic party. And I didn’t have an agogô. I held my handkerchief to my nose and mouth, as a filter. Even so, I seemed to see two Bramantis, and the Pendulum swayed before me in several directions at once, like a merry-go-round.
Bramanti began chanting: “Alef
