How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!
I saw the lamb, to which this name was given as if in recognition of its purity and goodness. In fact the noun “agnus” derives from the fact that this animal “agnoscit”; it recognizes its mother, and recognizes her voice in the midst of the flock while the mother, among many lambs of the same form, with the same bleating, recognizes always and only her offspring, and nourishes him.
I saw the sheep, which is called “ovis” from “ab oblatione” because from earliest times it served for sacrificial rites; the sheep, which, as is its habit as winter approaches, seeks grass greedily and stuffs itself with forage before the pastures are seared by frost. And the flocks were watched by dogs, called “canes” from the verb “canor” because of their barking. The perfect animal among animals, with superior gifts of perception, the dog recognizes its master and is trained to hunt wild animals in the forests, to guard flocks against wolves; it protects the master’s house and his children, and sometimes in its office of defense it is killed.
King Garamant, who had been taken away to prison by his enemies, was brought back to his homeland by a pack of two hundred dogs who made their way past the enemy troops; the dog of Jason Licius, after its master’s death, persisted in refusing food until it died of starvation; and the dog of King Lysimachus threw himself on his master’s funeral pyre, to die with him. The dog has the power to heal wounds by licking them with his tongue, and the tongue of his puppies can heal intestinal lesions. By nature he is accustomed to making second use of the same food, after vomiting it. His sobriety is the symbol of perfection of spirit, as the thaumaturgical power of his tongue is the symbol of the purification of sins through confession and penance. But the dog’s returning to his vomit is also a sign that, after confession, we return to the same sins as before, and this moral was very useful to me that morning to admonish my heart, as I admired the wonders of nature.
Meanwhile, my steps were taking me to the oxen’s stable, where they were coming out in great number, led by their drovers. They immediately appeared to me as they were and are, symbols of friendship and goodness, because every ox at his work turns to seek his companion at the plow; if by chance the partner is absent at that moment, the ox calls him with affectionate lowing. Oxen learn obediently to go back by themselves to the barn when it rains, and when they take refuge at the manger, they constantly stretch their necks to look out and see whether the bad weather has stopped, because they are eager to resume work.
With the oxen at that moment also came from the barn the calves, whose name, “vituli,” derives from “viriditas,” or from “virgo,” because at that age they are still fresh, young, and chaste, and I had done wrong and was still wrong, I said to myself, to see in their graceful movements an image of the girl who was not chaste. I thought of these things, again at peace with the world and with myself, observing the merry toil of that morning hour. And I thought no more of the girl, or, rather, I made an effort to transform the ardor I felt for her into a sense of inner happiness and devout peace.
I said to myself that the world was good and admirable. That the goodness of God is made manifest also in the most horrid beasts, as Honorius Augustoduniensis explains. It is true, there are serpents so huge that they devour stags and swim across the ocean, there is the bestia cenocroca with an ass’s body, the horns of an ibex, the chest and maw of a lion, a horse’s hoofs but cloven like an ox’s, a slit from the mouth that reaches the ears, an almost human voice, and in the place of teeth a single, solid bone. And there is the manticore, with a man’s face, triple set of teeth, lion’s body, scorpion’s tail, glaucous eyes the color of blood, and a voice like the hissing of snakes, greedy for human flesh.
And there are monsters with eight toes, wolf’s muzzle, hooked talons, sheep’s fleece, and dog’s back, who in old age turn black instead of white, and who outlive us by many years. And there are creatures with eyes on their shoulders and two holes in the chest instead of nostrils, because they lack a head, and others that dwell along the river Ganges who live only on the odor of a certain apple, and when they go away from it they die. But even all these foul beasts sing in their variety the praises of the Creator and His wisdom, as do the dog and the ox, the sheep and the lamb and the lynx.
How great, I said to myself then, repeating the words of Vincent Belovacensis, the humblest beauty of this world, and how pleasing to the eye of reason the consideration of not only the modes and numbers and orders of things, so decorously established for the whole universe, but also the cycle of times that constantly unravel through successions and lapses, marked by the death of what has been born. I confess that, sinner as I am, my soul only for a little while still prisoner of the flesh, I was moved then by spiritual sweetness toward the Creator and the rule of this world, and with joyous veneration I admired the greatness and the stability of creation.
I was in this good frame of mind when my master came upon me. Drawn by my feet and without realizing it, I had almost circled the abbey, and found myself back where we had parted two hours before. There was William, and what he told me jolted me from my thoughts and directed my mind again to the obscure mysteries of the abbey.
William seemed well pleased. In his hand he had Venantius’s parchment, which he had finally deciphered. We went to his cell, far from indiscreet ears, and he translated for me what he had read. After the sentence in zodiacal alphabet (Secretum finis Africae manus supra idolum primum et septimum de quatuor), this is what the Greek text said:
The terrible poison that gives purification . . .
The best weapon for destroying the enemy . . .
Use humble persons, base and ugly, take pleasure from their defect. . . . They must not die. . . . Not in the houses of the noble and the powerful but from the peasants’ villages, after abundant meal and libations . . . Squat bodies, deformed faces.
They rape virgins and lie with whores, not evil, without fear.
A different truth, a different image of the truth . . .
The venerable figs.
The shameless stone rolls over the plain. . . . Before the eyes.
Deceit is necessary and to surprise in deceit, to say the opposite of what is believed, to say one thing and mean another.
To them the cicadas will sing from the ground.
That was all. In my opinion too little, almost nothing. The words seemed the ravings of a madman, and I said as much to William.
“Perhaps. And it surely seems even madder thanks to my translation. My knowledge of Greek is rather scanty. And yet, even if we assume that Venantius was mad or that the author of the book was mad, this would not tell us why so many people, not all of them mad, went to great trouble, first to hide the book and then to recover it. . . .”
“But do the things written here come from the mysterious book?”
“They are unquestionably things written by Venantius. You can see for yourself: this is not an ancient parchment. And these must be notes taken down while he was reading the book; otherwise Venantius would not have written in Greek. He has certainly copied, condensing them, some sentences he found in the book stolen from the finis Africae. He carried it to the scriptorium and began to read it, noting down what seemed to him noteworthy. Then something happened. Either he felt ill, or he heard someone coming up. So he put the book, with his notes, under his desk, probably planning to pick it up again the next evening.
In any case, this page is our only possible starting point in re-creating the nature of the mysterious book, and it’s only from the nature of that book that we will be able to infer the nature of the murderer. For in every crime committed to possess an object, the nature of the object should give us an idea, however faint, of the nature of the assassin. If someone kills for a handful of gold, he will be a greedy person; if for a book, he will be anxious to keep for himself the secrets of that book. So we must find out what is said in the book we do not have.”
“And from these few lines will you be able to understand
