And Belbo, nowinvincible, said, "Ma gavte la nata..."
Aglie, even if he wasexpecting a refusal, blanched at the insult.
"What did he say?"Pierre asked, hysterical.
"He will not speak,"Aglie roughly translated. He lifted his arms in a gesture ofsurrender, of obedience, and said to Bra-manti: " He isyours.''
And Pierre said,transported: "Assez, assez, le sacrifice hu-main, le sacrificehumain!"
"Yes, let him die. We'llfind the answer anyway," cried Madame Olcott, equally carried away,as she now returned to the scene, rushing toward Belbo.
At the same time,Lorenza moved. She freed herself from the giants' grasp and stoodbefore Belbo, at the foot of the gallows, her arms opened wide, asif to stop an invading army. In tears, she exclaimed: "Are you allcrazy? You can't do this!"
Aglie, who waswithdrawing, stood rooted to the spot for a moment, then ran toher, to restrain her.
What happened next tookonly seconds. Madame Olcott's knot of hair came undone; all rancorand flames, like a Medusa, she bared her talons, scratched atAglie's face, shoved him aside with the force of the momentum ofher leap. Aglie fell back, stumbled over a leg of the brazier, spunaround like a dervish, and banged his head against a machine; hesank to the ground, his face covered with blood. Pierre, meanwhile,flung himself on Lorenza, drawing the dagger from the sheath on hischest as he moved, but he blocked my view, so I didn't see whathappened. Then I saw Lorenza slumped at Belbo's feet, her facewaxen, and Pierre, holding up the red blade, shouted: "Enfin, lesacrifice humain!" Turning toward the nave, he said in a loudvoice: "I'a Cthulhu! I'a S'ha-t'n!"
In a body, the horde inthe nave moved forward: some fell and were swept aside; others,pushing, threatened to topple Cug-not's car. I heard¡XI must haveheard it, I can't have imagined such a grotesque detail¡Xthe voiceof Garamond saying: "Gentlemen, please! Manners!..." Bramanti, inecstasy, was kneeling by Lorenza's body, declaiming: "Asar, Asar!Who is clutching me by the throat? Who is pinning me to the ground?Who is stabbing my heart? I am unworthy to cross the threshold ofthe house of Maat!"
* * *
Perhaps no one intendedit, perhaps the sacrifice of Lorenza was to have sufficed, but theacolytes were now pressing inside the magic circle, which was madeaccessible by the immobility of the Pendulum, and someone¡XArdenti,I think¡Xwas hurled by the others against the table, whichliterally disappeared from beneath Belbo's feet. It skidded away,and, thanks to the same push, the Pendulum began a rapid, violentswing, taking its victim with it. The wire, pulled by the weight ofthe sphere, tightened around the neck of my poor friend, yanked himinto the air, and he swung above and with the Pendulum, swungtoward the eastern extremity of the choir, then returned, I hopedwithout life, in my direction.
Trampling one another,the crowd drew back, retreated to the edges of the semicircle, toallow room for the wonder. The man in charge of the oscillation,intoxicated by the rebirth of the Pendulum, supplied pushesdirectly on the hanged man's body. The axis of motion made adiagonal from my eyes to one of the windows, no doubt the windowwith the colorless spot through which, in a few hours, the firstray of the rising sun would fall. Therefore, I did not see Belboswing in front of me, but this, I believe, was the pattern he drewin space...
His head seemed a secondsphere, trapped in the loops of the wire that stretched from thecenter of the keystone; and when the metal sphere tilted to theright, Belbo's head tilted to the left, and vice versa. For most ofthe long swing, the two spheres tended in opposite directions, oneon either side of the wire, so what cleaved the air was no longer asingle line, but a kind of triangular structure. And, while Belbo'shead followed the pull of the wire, his body¡Xat first in its finalspasms, then with the disarticulated agility of a woodenmarionette, arm here, leg there¡Xdescribed other arcs in the void,arcs independent of the head, the wire, and the sphere beneath. Ihad the thought that if someone were to photograph the scene usingMuybridge's system¡Xfixing on the plate every moment as asuccession of positions, recording the two extreme points the headreached in each period, the two rest points of the sphere, thepoints of intersection of the wire with time, independent of bothhead and sphere, and the intermediary points marked by the plane ofoscillation of the trunk and legs¡XBelbo hanged from the Pendulumwould have drawn, in space, the tree of the Sefirot, summing up inhis final moment the vicissitude of all universes, fixing foreverin his motion the ten stages of the mortal exhalation anddefecation of the divine in the world.
Then, as the Mandrake intails continued to encourage that funereal swing, Belbo's body,through a grisly addition and cancellation of vectors, a migrationof energies, suddenly became immobile, and the wire and the spheremoved, but only from his body down; the rest¡Xwhich connected Belbowith the vault-now remained perpendicular. Thus Belbo had escapedthe error of the world and its movements, had now become, himself,the point of suspension, the Fixed Pin, the Place from which thevault of the world is hung, while beneath his feet the wire and thesphere went on swinging, from pole to pole, without peace, theearth slipping away under them, showing always a new continent. Thesphere could not point out, nor would it ever know, the location ofthe World's Navel.
As the pack ofDiabolicals, dazed for a moment in the face of this portent, beganto yowl again, I told myself that the story was now finished. IfHod is the Sefirah of glory, Belbo had had glory. A single fearlessact had reconciled him with the Absolute.
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The ideal pendulumconsists of a very thin wire, which will not hinder flexion andtorsion, of length L, with the weight attached to its bary-center.For a sphere, the barycenter is the center; for
