I went into the room. Itwas decent; there was even a telephone. Too bad I didn't knowanyone I could call.
I dozed fitfully untilthree. Then I washed my face and headed for the Conservatoire. Nowthere was nothing else for me to do but enter the museum, stay onafter closing, and wait for midnight.
Which I did. And a fewhours before midnight, I found myself in the periscope,waiting.
Nezah, for someinterpreters, is the Sefirah of endurance, forbearance, constantpatience. In fact, a test lay ahead of us. But for otherinterpreters, it is victory. Whose victory? Perhaps, in this storyfull of the defeated, of the Diabolicals mocked by Belbo, of Belbomocked by the Diabolicals, of Diotallevi mocked by his cells, Iwas¡Xfor the moment¡Xthe only victorious one. Lying in wait in theperiscope, I knew about the others, but the others didn't knowabout me. The first part of my scheme had gone according toplan.
And the second? Wouldit, too, go according to plan, or would it go according to thePlan, which now was no longer mine?
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Four our Ordinances andRites: We have two very long and faire Galleries in the Temple ofthe Rosie Cross; In one of these we place patterns and samples ofall manners of the more rare and excellent inventions; In the otherwe place the Statues of all principal Inventours.
¡XJohn Heydon, TheEnglish Physitians Guide: Or A Holy Guide, London, Ferns, 1662, ThePreface
I had stayed in theperiscope too long. It must have been ten, ten-thirty. If somethingwas going to happen, it would happen in the nave, before thePendulum. I had to go down there and find a hiding place, anobservation post. If I arrived too late, after They entered (fromwhere?), They would notice me.
Go downstairs. Move...For hours I had waited for this, but now that it was possible, evenwise, to do it, I felt somehow paralyzed. I would have to cross therooms at night, using my flashlight only when necessary. The baresthint of a nocturnal glow filtered through the big windows. I hadimagined a museum made ghostly by the moon's rays; I was wrong. Theglass cases reflected vague glints from outside; that was all. If Ididn't move carefully, I could go sprawling on the floor, couldknock over something with a shatter of glass, a clang of metal. Nowand then I turned on the flashlight, turned it off. Proceeding, Ifelt as if I were at the Crazy Horse. The sudden beam revealed anakedness, not of flesh, but of screws, clamps, rivets.
What if I were suddenlyto reveal a living presence, the figure of an envoy of the Mastersechoing, mirroring my progress? Who would be the first to shout? Ilistened. In vain. Gliding, I made no noise. Neither didhe.
That afternoon I hadstudied carefully the sequence of the rooms, in order to be able tofind the great staircase even in the darkness. But instead I waswandering, groping. I had lost my bearings.
Perhaps I was going incircles, crossing some of the rooms for the second time; perhaps Iwould never get out of this place; perhaps this groping amongmeaningless machines was the rite.
The truth was, I didn'twant to go down. I wanted to postpone the rendezvous.
I had emerged from theperiscope after a long and merciless examination of conscience, Ihad reviewed our error of the last years and tried to understandwhy, without any reasonable reason, I was now here hunting forBelbo, who was here for reasons even less reasonable. But themoment I set foot outside the periscope, everything changed. As Iadvanced, I advanced with another man's head. I became Belbo. LikeBelbo, now at the end of his long journey toward enlightenment, Iknew that every earthly object, even the most squalid, must be readas the hieroglyph of something else, and that there is nothing, noobject, as real as the Plan. How clever I was! A flash of light, aglance, was all it took, and I understood. I would not let myselfbe deceived.
...Froment's Motor: avertical structure on a rhomboid base. It enclosed, like ananatomical figure exhibiting its ribs and viscera, a series ofreels, batteries, circuit breakers¡Xwhat the hell did the textbookscall them?¡Xand the thing was driven by a transmission belt fed bya toothed wheel... What could it have been used for? Answer: formeasuring the telluric currents, of course.
Accumulators. What didthey accumulate? I imagined the Thirty-six Invisibles as stubbornsecretaries (keepers of the secret) tapping all night on theirclavier-scribes to produce from this machine a sound, a spark, allof them intent on a dialog from coast to coast, from abyss tosurface, from Machu Picchu to Avalon, come in, come in, hello hellohello, Pamersiel Pa-mersiel, we've caught a tremor, current Mu 36,the one the Brahmans worshiped as the breath of God, now I'll plugin the tap, the valve, aU micro-macrocosmic circuits operational,all the mandrake roots shuddering beneath the crust of the globe,you hear the song of the Universal Sympathetic, over andout.
My God, armiesslaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurledanathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the huntinglodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuousfacade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House ofSolomon were listening for pale echoes from the UmbilicusMundi.
And as they operatedthese pseudothermic hexatetragrammatic electrocapillatories¡Xthat'show Garamond would have put it¡X every now and then someone wouldinvent, say, a vaccine or an electric bulb, a triumph in thewonderful adventure of metals, but the real task was quitedifferent: here they are, assembled at midnight, to spin thisstatic-electricity machine of Ducretet, a transparent wheel thatlooks like a bandoleer, and, inside it, two little vibrating ballssupported by arched sticks, and when they touch, sparks fly, andDr. Frankenstein hopes to give life to his golem, but no, thesignal has another purpose: Dig, dig, old mole...
A sewing machine (whatelse? One of those engraving-advertisements, along with pills fordeveloping one's bust, and the great eagle flying over themountains with the restorative cordial in its talons, Robur leConquerant, R. C.), but when you turn it on, it turns a wheel, andthe wheel turns a coil, and the
