Where Tigers Are at Home (5 page)

While this was going on & to obey the orders of their superior, the eighty Jesuit pupils—not including five priests who decided to stay—left the college in small groups disguised as ordinary men. Fifteen of them were captured & taken to join the principal in prison. Accompanied by another student, Athanasius & Friedrich managed to leave the town with no problem.

On February 7, 1622 they reached the banks of the Rhine, in the vicinity of Düsseldorf. The river had frozen over only recently but the locals indicated a section where the ice was thicker & it was possible to cross—which was a brazen lie dictated solely by the desire to save money! The custom was to pay some poor devil every year to cross the river & thus test the ice. The three strangers were a godsend for the country folk & it was solely to save a few coppers that these miserly peasants showed no mercy & lied to then. In those times of misery & hardship men’s lives, &
a fortiori
the lives of strangers who seemed to be vile deserters, were not worth a cabbage stalk. The skinflints showed them a path by which, they claimed, everyone went across without mishap.

With the hotheadedness of youth & his experience of skating, Kircher took the lead & went on, twenty paces ahead of the other two, to make sure they at least would be safe. The weather was worsening rapidly. Masses of fog drifting down from the north were threatening to hide the shore. Athanasius hurried on. When he reached the middle of the river, he saw to his horror that the ice was melting there. He immediately turned around in order to rejoin his companions & warn them of the danger, but with an ominous cracking noise the ice split between him & his friends with the result that the part he was standing on started to drift on open water. Carried along by the current, shouting himself hoarse on his ice floe, Athanasius disappeared in the mist.

Fearing for his life, the young man threw himself wholeheartedly into prayer. After sweeping perilously downstream, by a happy chance the ice-raft came close to the frozen part of the river & Kircher nimbly jumped onto it &, without wasting a moment, set off for dry land & the completion of the crossing. However, at about twenty cubits from the bank, while he was still thanking Our Lord for letting him escape from such a dangerous situation, & fairly comfortably too, the ice split in front of him again. Blue with cold, covered in bruises from his repeated falls, Athanasius did not hesitate for one second but threw himself into the icy water & after a few strokes, which called on all his experience as a swimmer, managed to pull himself up onto the bank, more dead than alive.

Soaking wet, teeth chattering, he set off for the town of Neuss where there was a Jesuit college. After three hours of agony, he rang the bell of the college & collapsed in the porter’s arms. When he came to, he rejoiced to see his travelling companions, who had managed to cross the river at another place &, having assumed he had died, now wept tears of joy to see him safe & sound.

After three days of well-deserved rest they were fit enough again to reach Cologne without a stop. It was in that city that Von Spee had been ordained & on his advice Athanasius decided to abandon his façade of humility: even though they might offend some people’s susceptibilities, his knowledge & skill at reasoning were too important to be concealed. In a few months Athanasius completed his degree in philosophy with distinction, all the while continuing to study physics, languages & mathematics on his own. Impressed by his exceptional abilities, his teachers decided to send him to the college at Ingolstadt in Bavaria to complete his studies of the humanities & to teach
Ancient Greek. In obedience to his superiors, Athanasius left Cologne toward the end of 1622, but he was sick at heart: he was leaving Friedrich von Spee behind & with him all the joy of his youth & of learning. They were never to see each other again.

Kircher spent three years improving his knowledge in numerous disciplines. Under the direction of Christoph Schreiner, whose reputation is firmly established, he studied astronomy & mathematics without respite & was soon as outstanding in them as his master. He achieved the same in physiology, in alchemy & in many other subjects, at the same time deepening his knowledge of languages. At the age of twenty-three Kircher easily outshone all his colleagues, who agreed that he had a remarkable gift of memory in addition to an inventive mind & extraordinary mechanical skills.

At that time Ingolstadt was under the jurisdiction of Johann Schweickhardt, Archbishop of Mainz and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. Now it so happened that a delegation sent by His Grace was announced for the beginning of March. Such visits were not at all frequent and the town received the visitors with great pomp & ceremony.

The Jesuits, & Kircher in particular, were called upon to contribute to the festivities. Athanasius devised several spectacular events of his own invention that were much admired by the bishop’s delegates. To the amazement of the audience, he created optical illusions in midair, projecting fantastic shapes onto the trees in the park & the clouds—chimeras, sphinxes & dragons; he presented distorting mirrors that showed you upside down, aged or rejuvenated by several years, & concluded with a lavish fireworks display in which the rockets, as they burst, formed the imperial eagle & other emblematic animals. Accused of black magic by some simple or jealous people, Kircher had to demonstrate the mesoptic, catoptric & parastatic instruments
that he had used to create the spectacle & show the legates how they worked; they were all instruments of his own invention, which he later described in detail in his
Mundus Subterraneus
& his
Ars Magna Lucis & Umbrae
. The ambassadors were so delighted with the entertainment that they insisted the young prodigy stay with them until they left.

Charmed by the reports of his envoys, Johann Schweickhardt urged Kircher to come & see him without delay. Athanasius therefore went to see the old man in Aschaffenburg & made an excellent impression on him. Immediately taken into his service, he spent a large part of his time inventing & constructing numerous curious machines to amuse the archbishop during his leisure moments. Thus he made a speaking, moving statue, which appeared to be alive, &, among other marvels, explained the miraculous properties of the lodestone, showing how it could be used to cure nervous illnesses or transmit thoughts over a distance. At the request of Johann Schweickhardt he started to write down his reflections on magnetism, which a few years later were the subject of his first book, the
Ars Magnesia
.

The archbishop also charged Kircher with making a topographical survey of certain parts of the principality. He took only three months to complete it & was preparing to extend the task when his patron was suddenly called to meet his Maker.

At the end of 1625 Kircher returned to Mainz to follow a course in theology there. He studied the sacred texts rigorously & assiduously, but not without continuing his scientific work. Having bought one of the first telescopes in circulation, he spent a large part of his nights contemplating the stars. One morning he shut himself away in his cell to observe the sun. Following the instructions of Schreiner & Galileo, he had placed his telescope against a hole made in the shutter of his window
and put a sheet of white vellum under the concave glass so as to be able to see the image of the sun clearly on that piece of paper. As he watched the stormy sea of flames on the paper, he noticed numerous spots contrasting with it, appearing then disappearing. The sight filled him with amazement & from that day on astronomy became one of his main fields of study.

One morning in May 1628 he was scanning the shelves of the college library when he came across Mercati’s book about the obelisks erected by Pope Sixtus V. His curiosity was immediately aroused & he started to speculate on the meaning of the numerous hieroglyphs reproduced in the illustrations to the volume. Initially he took them for recent ornamentation, but on reading the book he soon learned that these figures or inscriptions had been carved on Egyptian obelisks since time immemorial & that no one had ever been able to decipher them. Put in his way by Divine Providence, this enigma was to demand twenty years of uninterrupted effort before finally coming to a happy resolution.

In December 1629, at the end of the last year of his course, Kircher was sent to Würzburg to teach mathematics, ethics & Biblical languages. It was at that college, where I was starting my noviciate, that I met him for the first time.

Sitting in our classroom, my fellow students and I were waiting for our new mathematics teacher, a certain Father Kircher, who had been greatly praised, but of whom we were already making fun, biased against him because of his excessively high reputation. I remember that I was not the last to snigger at him, outdoing the others in ironic remarks about this ‘Father Churcher’ coming down from the heavens with his extravaganzas. However, when he came in & ascended the rostrum silence fell without him having to utter a single word. Father Athanasius was twenty-seven & if ever a face showed the
harmony that arouses immediate attachment, as if by sympathy or magnetic attraction, then it was his: a noble and intelligent forehead, a straight nose such as you can see on the David of Michelangelo Buonarotti, a finely delineated mouth with red lips & the faintest downy shadow of an incipient beard—which he kept trimmed very short throughout his life—&, below thick, almost horizontal eyebrows, big, deep-set black eyes with the fascinating sparkle of an inquiring mind, always ready for repartee or debate.

He introduced himself to us in Latin worthy of Cicero & began a lesson the least details of which remain imprinted on my memory. The subject of that lesson was to work out how many grains of sand the Earth contained, supposing that was what it was made of. Kircher walked along the rows of desks, giving each of us a pinch of sand that he took out of the pocket of his cassock & having done that told us to draw a line in our exercise books a twelfth of an inch long. Then he instructed us to place as many grains of sand side by side on the line as it would take: we were amazed to see that each time the line contained exactly 30 grains of sand. Following on from this experiment, which he assured us could be repeated with all the grains of sand that might be found throughout the world, he proceeded with his demonstration. If we imagined a sphere a twelfth of an inch in diameter, it would contain 27,000 grains of sand; a sphere one inch in diameter would contain 46,656,000, one a foot in diameter 80,621,568,000, one a league in diameter 272,097,792,000,000,000,000, hence if the whole Earth consisted of grains of sand it would contain 3,271,512,503,499,876,784,372,652,141,247,182 & 0.56 for it is 2,290 leagues in diameter & contains 12,023,296,769 & 0.3 spheres a league in diameter …

One can easily imagine our amazement at such knowledge & above all at the ease with which he dispensed it. From that day
on my admiration & respect for Father Kircher knew no bounds & nothing has happened since then to lessen them. I ceaselessly sought out his company & he favored me, if not with his friendship, then at least with his generous patronage. His favor brought me the jealousy of my comrades & various annoyances, which are not relevant here but which I am happy to forgive in view of the immense honor that was granted me.

Two happy years passed in this way. Kircher enjoyed Würzburg & tirelessly continued with his own work alongside his duties as a teacher. Through his correspondence with the greatest names of the time & the missionaries of the Society scattered over the globe, he was kept informed of all the new developments in the sciences. And protected as we were in a profoundly Catholic kingdom, the war raging between Reformers & the partisans of the Counter-Reformation seemed a long way away, although we regularly heard the most terrible reports.

It looked as if everything was going to continue in studious tranquillity when Athanasius Kircher had a strange experience: one stormy night, suddenly wakening with a start at an unusual noise, he saw a crimson light at his window. Jumping out of bed, he opened the skylight to see what was happening. To his great surprise he saw that the college courtyard was full of armed men drawn up in ranks! Horrified, he ran to his neighbor’s cell, but found him so fast asleep he could not wake him & it was the same with all the other Jesuits he tried to warn. Worried that he was suffering from hallucinations, he came to get me and took me to a place overlooking the courtyard. The armed men had disappeared.

During the following two weeks Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, joined the war on the side of the Reformers. Reverses for the Catholic side came thick & fast, & after the battle of
Breitenfeld & his victory over Tilly, the Swedish army entered Franconia: we received news that the fiends were marching on Würzburg! Kircher’s worst fears were being realized … We only had time to gather a few belongings together & fly. Würzburg having no garrison, no reserves, no help of any kind, the college dispersed within twenty-four hours. The enemy was approaching & it was said that the Swedes showed no mercy toward Jesuits. We were caught up in unspeakable chaos; we had to flee to Mainz & on October 14, 1631 we set off with little more than what we stood up in. My master had to leave behind the manuscript of his
Institutiones Mathematicæ
, the fruit of several years’ work & a loss it took him several months to get over.

Whenever Eléazard felt dazed from having spent too long sitting at his computer, he would put his machine into sleep mode, watch the constellations moving across the star-studded night on the screen for a moment, then go and sit down in front of the large mirror in the living room. There he would practice manipulating the ping-pong balls with which his pockets were now filled. There was nothing that could empty his mind so well as repeating the precise movements governing the appearance and disappearance of the objects. He would watch the balls emerge between his fingers, or multiply, correcting the positioning of his hands, trying his utmost to make their dexterity more automatic. This fad had started only a few months ago, the day when he had admired the astonishing dexterity of a juggler in an alleyway in São Luís: a grubby, skinny little
matuto
with a mouth devoid of teeth,
but who was sticking an unlikely number of very long nails up his nose. More than the act itself, Eléazard had admired the man’s perfect control over his body and the almost mathematical elegance he gave his movements. Spurred on by a feeling of urgency, he had scoured all the bookshops in the town to buy an introductory manual on these skills. He had been disappointed at how poor the books on that subject were. Most of those devoted to conjuring went no further than to reveal the secrets of a few ploys that might fool children. What he wanted to learn was how to be able to produce pigeons out of hats or pull miles of scarves out of someone’s ear, tricks that bordered on the miraculous. Having exhausted all the possibilities, he wrote off to France for a book that would meet his demands.