I asked no questions and went. The lamps were under my bed, already filled with oil, and I had taken care to trim them in advance. I had the flint in my habit. With the two precious instruments clutched to my chest, I ran into the church.
William was under the tripod and was rereading the parchment with Venantius’s notes.
“Adso,” he said to me, “‘primum et septimum de quatuor’ does not mean the first and seventh of four, but of the four, the word ‘four’!” For a moment I still did not understand, but then I was enlightened: “Super thronos viginti quatuor! The writing! The verse! The words are carved over the mirror!”
“Come,” William said, “perhaps we are still in time to save a life!”
“Whose?” I asked, as he was manipulating the skulls and opening the passage to the ossarium.
“The life of someone who does not deserve it,” he said. We were already in the underground passage, our lamps alight, moving toward the door that led to the kitchen.
I said before that at this point you pushed a wooden door and found yourself in the kitchen, behind the fireplace, at the foot of the circular staircase that led to the scriptorium. And just as we were pushing that door, we heard to our left some muffled sounds within the wall. They came from the wall beside the door, where the row of niches with skulls and bones ended. Instead of a last niche, there was a stretch of blank wall of large squared blocks of stone, with an old plaque in the center that had some worn monograms carved on it. The sounds came, it seemed, from behind the plaque, or else from above the plaque, partly beyond the wall, and partly almost over our heads.
If something of the sort had happened the first night, I would immediately have thought of dead monks. But by now I tended to expect worse from living monks. “Who can that be?” I asked.
William opened the door and emerged behind the fireplace. The blows were heard also along the wall that flanked the stairs, as if someone were prisoner inside the wall, or else in that thickness (truly vast) that presumably existed between the inner wall of the kitchen and the outer wall of the south tower.
“Someone is shut up inside there,” William said. “I have wondered all along whether there were not another access to the finis Africae, in this Aedificium so full of passages. Obviously there is. From the ossarium, before you come up into the kitchen, a stretch of wall opens, and you climb up a staircase parallel to this, concealed in the wall, which leads right to the blind room.”
“But who is in there?”
“The second person. One is in the finis Africae, another has tried to reach him, but the one above must have blocked the mechanism that controls the entrances. So the visitor is trapped. And he is making a great stir because, I imagine, there cannot be much air in that narrow space.”
“Who is it? We must save him!”
“We shall soon know who it is. And as for saving him, that can only be done by releasing the mechanism from above: we don’t know the secret at this end. Let’s hurry upstairs.”
So we went up to the scriptorium, and from there to the labyrinth, and we quickly reached the south tower. Twice I had to curb my haste, because the wind that came through the slits that night created currents that, penetrating those passages, blew moaning through the rooms, rustling the scattered pages on the desks, so that I had to shield the flame with my hand.
Soon we were in the mirror room, this time prepared for the game of distortion awaiting us. We raised the lamps to illuminate the verse that surmounted the frame. Super thronos viginti quatuor . . . At this point the secret was quite clear: the word “quatuor” has seven letters, and we had to press on the q and the r. I thought, in my excitement, to do it myself: I rapidly set the lamp down on the table in the center of the room. But I did this nervously, and the flame began to lick the binding of a book also set there.
“Watch out, idiot!” William cried, and with a puff blew out the flame. “You want to set fire to the library?”
I apologized and started to light the lamp again. “It doesn’t matter,” William said, “mine is enough. Take it and give me light, because the legend is too high and you couldn’t reach it. We must hurry.”
“And what if there is somebody armed in there?” I asked, as William, almost groping, sought the fatal letters, standing on tiptoe, tall as he was, to touch the apocalyptic verse.
“Give me light, by the Devil, and never fear: God is with us!” he answered me, somewhat incoherently. His fingers were touching the q of “quatuor,” and, standing a few paces back, I saw better than he what he was doing. I have already said that the letters of the verses seemed carved or incised in the wall: apparently those of the word “quatuor” were metal outlines, behind which a wondrous mechanism had been placed and walled up.
When it was pushed forward, the q made a kind of sharp click, and the same thing happened when William pressed on the r. The whole frame of the mirror seemed to shudder, and the glass surface snapped back. The mirror was a door, hinged on its left side. William slipped his hand into the opening now created between the right edge and the wall, and pulled toward himself. Creaking, the door opened out, in our direction. William slipped through the opening and I scuttled behind him, the lamp high over my head.
Two hours after compline, at the end of the sixth day, in the heart of the night that was giving birth to the seventh day, we entered the finis Africae.
SEVENTH DAY
NIGHT
In which, if it were to summarize the prodigious revelations of which it speaks, the title would have to be as long as the chapter itself, contrary to usage.
We found ourselves on the threshold of a room similar in shape to the other three heptagonal blind rooms, dominated by a strong musty odor, as of mildewed books. The lamp, which I held up high, first illuminated the vault; then, as I moved my arm downward, to right and left, the flame cast a vague light on the distant shelves along the walls. Finally, in the center, we saw a table covered with papers, and behind the table a seated figure, who seemed to be waiting for us in the darkness, immobile, if he was still alive. Even before the light revealed his face, William spoke.
“Happy night, venerable Jorge,” he said. “Were you waiting for us?”
The lamp now illuminated the face of the old man, looking at us as if he could see.
“Is that you, William of Baskerville?” he asked. “I have been waiting for you since this afternoon before vespers, when I came and closed myself in here. I knew you would arrive.”
“And the abbot?” William asked. “Is he the one making that noise in the secret stairway?”
Jorge hesitated for a moment. “Is he still alive?” he asked. “I thought he would already have suffocated.”
“Before we start talking,” William said, “I would like to save him. You can open from this side.”
“No,” Jorge said wearily, “not any longer. The mechanism is controlled from below, by pressing on the plaque, and up here a lever snaps, which opens a door back there, behind that case.” He nodded over his shoulder. “Next to the case you could see a wheel with some counterweights, which controls the mechanism from up here. But when I heard the wheel turning, a sign that Abo had entered down below, I yanked at the rope that holds the weights, and the rope broke. Now the passage is closed on both sides, and you could never repair that device. The abbot is dead.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“Today, when he sent for me, he told me that thanks to you he had discovered everything. He did not yet know what I had been trying to protect—he has never precisely understood the treasures and the ends of the library. He asked me to explain what he did not know. He wanted the finis Africae to be opened. The Italians had asked him to put an end to what they call the mystery kept alive by me and my predecessors. They are driven by the lust for new things. . . .”
“And you no doubt promised him you would come here and put an end to your life as you had put an end to the lives of the others, in such a way that the abbey’s honor would be saved and no one would know anything. Then you
