Dante's Key

by G. L. Baron

  ‘You’re right! It seems…’

  ‘It seems like an eagle! It seems like the eagle of the white rose. The wings are open, preparing to dive just like the statue. It also has the same sharp beak.’

  ‘But how’s that possible?’

  ‘It’s a clue. I don’t know what it means, but it’s a clue that Raphael, for some reason, didn’t put in the final work.’

  Suddenly, the adrenaline began to flow in both of their veins.

  ‘It is not the only difference with the picture in the Stanza della Segnatura,’ the professor continued. ‘Look at Diogenes’ head.’

  ‘It’s true…’ she agreed. ‘In the fresco he has no headwear… here instead…’

  ‘He’s wearing a helmet.’

  ‘Let us examine the other sketches,’ she concluded, now certain that the professor had reason to believe those details to be clues. ‘Let’s look for other differences.’

  The two divided the task: Cassini examined the sketch on the left, and Julia that on the right. A few minutes passed in silence, then she spoke.

  ‘Here’s something, do you think this is a facial image of Christ?’

  There was a faint shadow under Euclid’s compass; he could see a face vaguely resembling that of the Turin Shroud.

  Cassini did not answer, but after a few seconds spun towards her. ‘Give me the lens.’

  ‘Did you find anything else?’

  ‘Heraclitus…’ he admitted. ‘According to scholars, Michelangelo in the philosopher’s role was added to the fresco later. If I remember correctly, the final study is retained in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, and Heraclitus is not there.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘So, that’s not the only difference. In the Roman fresco you can’t read what is written… but here, yes, look!’

  Julia came up to him, incredulous. She managed to read the three lines of text composed by Michelangelo well enough with the magnifying lens.

  Se virtù tua estima il lento passo

  sì da veder Antandro, Ettòr e l’alta luce

  della diritta via il seggio è ’l sasso

  (If you have understood the meaning of “slow pace”

  and you manage to see Antandros, Hector and the high light

  then the stone seat on the truthful way is the point of arrival)

  ‘What does it mean?’

  Cassini started laughing, first softly and then even louder. He went to sit on the couch and arched his back, as if stretching before a long session in the gym. ‘If you understood “slow step” and you have seen the city of Antandros, Hector and the high light,’ he explained, ‘The stone seat on the truthful way… the stone is the point of arrival.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Whoever the author of this triplet is, he’s telling us to read Canto VI of Paradise. There, the imperial eagle sees the city of Antandros and the river Simois, where Hector lies.’

  Julia looked at him uncertainly, but said nothing.

  ‘They are symbols; Antandros symbolizes the eagle, and the “high light” is used several times in the Comedy to identify God.’

  ‘If they are symbols… then…’ said Julia, approaching the sketch again.

  She stroked Diogenes’ head with her fingertip, he was wearing the helmet that they had seen earlier. ‘Maybe Hector could be symbolized by the helmet? The helmet of Hector?’

  Cassini licked his dry lips. He stayed still for a second with his pupils concentrated on the three sketches. Then he smiled again. ‘Observe the symbols. They are not randomly placed, they are equidistant from each other; the eagle below, the helmet above, Christ’s face on the right, the triplet written by Michelangelo on the left.’

  ‘They could be reference points? Another map?’

  ‘You’re right!’ Cassini snapped suddenly. He ran back into the bedroom, grabbed the laptop and brought it back into the living room.

  While the professor turned on the Mac, he repeated the triplet to himself, substituting the metaphoric clues he thought he had found in the drawings: ‘If you understood the meaning of “slow pace” and you manage to see the eagle, helmet and God, then… the stone seat on the truthful way is the point of arrival, the Journey’s End.’

  *

  ‘We’ve understood the significance of “slow pace”. We’ve found the Eagle…’ Julia stood for a few seconds in silence, wiping her sweat-soaked palms down her trousers, brooding. ‘But what about the rest?’

  Cassini called up some photographs of the Icelandic caldera. In most of the images they could only see the statue of the eagle, but in some, albeit in the distance and in the background, they could see something else. ‘What’s this in your opinion?’

  Julia approached the professor, who was pointing at a picture taken from behind the bird. He could see the other side of the amphitheatre, with some vehicles parked in a row behind a dome-shaped boulder.

  ‘Try to enlarge it,’ she urged him, excited.

  Cassini clicked the zoom. On the front side of the dome, the one facing south, two grooves and a protuberance could be seen. It was very rudimentary, but overall could remind one of a helmet.

  Julia realized it. ‘There was too much snow!’ she observed, as if to comfort the professor. ‘We could never have seen them without knowing what we were looking for.’

  ‘And look here, on the left of the eagle.’ Cassini showed another photo, where the snowy landscape was taken from a distance. On the left edge of the depression, there was a basaltic rock that soared over the others. ‘That block is on the western side of the amphitheatre. I remember it very well, it’s where we were kept hostage while we were excavating.’

  Julia stared at him. Even completely frozen over, the form of a box stood out with a bevelled corner. ‘Could it be the seat?’

  He nodded, smiling.

  ‘Remember the cornerstone in the School of Athens, the one which Michelangelo leans on to write,’ she agreed.

  ‘Or perhaps Beatrice’s seat in the white rose!’ Cassini added, turning and sitting down on the couch and closing his eyes, breathing slowly. ‘If you have understood the meaning of “slow pace” and you manage to identify the eagle, the helmet and the statue of Christ, then… the stone seat on the truthful way is the point of arrival. Beatrice’s seat.’

  Julia was silent for several seconds, meditating. ‘But, what does all this mean?’ she said finally.

  Cassini stared at her and then with half-opened lips: ‘It means that the treasure exists… and it could be very near where we excavated before!’

  Part 2

  The White rose, July 8th.

  Three months later.

  The excavator bucket finished removing surface rocks shortly after noon.

  The day was warm, the sky clear. A slight wind blew and ruffled Julia’s hair, she was standing at the edge of the excavation, in shorts, a plaid shirt and sunglasses.

  Around the area that Cassini had identified, there were only people he trusted. Joonas Eklöf had not been called and there were none of the men who had participated in the previous February’s excavation.

  During the three months since the discovery of the so-called “Raphael triplet”, the professor had to act rapidly. He had obtained new permits for excavation from the Icelandic consulate. Once he had authorization, he had recruited a new team of geologists and archaeologists and had involved three of his best students in the project: two girls and a young man, all in their early twenties.

  While Julia watched them, bent over the bottom of the excavation, she thought back to the words found in Raphael’s sketches: “If you have understood the meaning of “slow pace” and you manage to see Antandros, Hector and the high light then the stone seat on the truthful way is the point of arrival”.

  The triplet’s meaning had stimulated them to return to Iceland, where they had received confirmation of the validity of their theories. The place looked completely different without snow, with faded yellowish rocks and mosses highlighting the sc
ulptures even more. They seemed to recall the drawn sketches of the Urbino painter, and were in the same exact position as in the scrolls left to Julia: the eagle was in the south, the helmet north, and the seat west.

  The reference to the high light, Christ’s image, which they had identified in the third sketch and mentioned in the triplet found by Cassini, was missing. While they had failed to locate a similar sculpture on the east-side of the amphitheatre, they had been able to identify certain rocks; despite them having crumbled, it was easy to see that in the past there must have been something there.

  They were not concerned because the clue that interested them was the block of basalt. Without snow, it was very similar to one of the seats Dante described when he spoke of the White rose.

  “The stone seat on the truthful way is the point of arrival” the last sentence of the triplet and the significance did not need questioning. In the last part of Purgatory, the poet had identified the journey’s end with “the stone”. So those lines meant that the seat – the block of marble identified with the stone – was the journey’s end.

  Back in Iceland, they had dug under the rock with a small excavator and had removed the top layer of earth. Filled with good intent, they then continued for several hours equipped with bailer, brushes and a lot of hope.

  *

  ‘Hey. Maybe there’s something here!’ one of the students shouted to Cassini. She was kneeling at the bottom of the excavation, her voice quivering as she spoke.

  Julia climbed down into the ditch immediately – a square hole, three metres by three metres and two metres deep. ‘What is it?’ she asked, staring at the irregular terrain.

  ‘It seems like a wooden board. Maybe it’s the top of a box!’ the young colleague next to her suggested.

  ‘Remove the soil slowly,’ commanded Cassini, taking off his sunglasses and trying to breathe calmly. He was as excited as a child on Christmas morning, even though he tried to hide it. ‘Be careful, look for the corners.’

  They spent long interminable minutes, while the students cleared the surface around the identified segment. Eventually, they unearthed a horizontal dark wooden slab the size of a suitcase. It seemed well-kept and you could see the corners of the metal reinforcements that were greenish in colour.

  ‘It could be the top of a trunk,’ the other girl announced, as she began to clean the edge of the object with the brush.

  Julia moved closer. In fact, the black slab looked like the top of a money-chest or something similar. It just needed all four sides to be freed from the earth.

  It took another good hour, while the sky clouded over and cleared twice. After the painstakingly-hard work, a big trunk was perfectly visible at the bottom of the excavation, with metal corner protectors and bronze mounts.

  ‘There is the Templar cross on the lock,’ one of the two students observed, kneeling next to the relic.

  ‘Pull it out,’ the professor ordered, his voice breaking with emotion. ‘Gently…’

  Later on, when he would recount the adventure, he said he could not remember exactly what happened next. In that moment he was in a trance, as if his senses seemed to have suddenly stopped communicating with his brain. He seemed to be living in a dream, where everything was moving in slow motion and people were surrounded by an aura of light.

  ‘We found it!’ Julia whispered in his ear, tears in her eyes and her hands trembling.

  He hugged her. A long embrace full of warmth, and suddenly it seemed to erase all the expedition’s hardships from his memory. The inner wounds that he still carried within him, all the wrongs – from the kidnapping to the use of the Brain Control device – were swept away by the sight of this simple object blackened by time.

  After the embrace, the professor came up to the boys and technicians who had supported the excavation and shook hands with everyone. ‘Good work,’ he gushed, with a look of satisfaction on his face. ‘Now, we have to just see what it contains.’

  They had no idea what to expect when it was opened. While images of students heaving the Templars treasure were running before his eyes, he thought back to the Sheikh’s words. ‘There would be four relics that make up the Grail: the cup itself, the spear, the sword and the plate.’

  Opening the locks took just a few minutes, but when they were unlocked and the sun returned to illuminate the contents of the trunk after eight hundred years, he saw none of that.

  ‘What are they?’ Julia asked amazed, with a hint of disappointment in her voice.

  Cassini did not answer, breathless. Inside, resting on a metal plate, there were a dozen rolls of perfectly preserved papyrus.

  After a few moments, he pulled a pair of cotton gloves from his pocket and put them on. Gently taking a roll, he opened it and began to read.

  ‘It is written in Greek and Hebrew,’ he announced in a low voice to the students, who had gathered round.

  The professor picked up another papyrus and then another.

  Julia stared at him in silence, thinking of Mohamed bin Saif Al Husayn. If he had still been alive, his hopes of healing would have been dashed with those simple papyri. There was no Grail and none of the objects that he would have expected. ‘So much effort for this?’ she asked, putting her hands in the pockets of her Bermuda’s and sighing.

  At a certain point, the professor began to read aloud a significant passage from the document; ‘Vaheb in Suf, and the rivers of Arnon, and the bed of the river, that it turns there where sits Ar, and touches the borders of Moab.’

  ‘I seem to have heard something like this,’ said a student, fiddling with the brush between her fingers.

  Cassini nodded. He seemed more excited with each passing second. He began to read more and more frantically, moving his lips and squinting when a phrase from the Greek did not seem clear.

  ‘It is a passage from the Bible,’ pronounced the other girl after consulting her smartphone. ‘It’s slightly different, but the words are similar to the verses of Numbers 21:14.’

  ‘You’re right. That’s where I read it,’ confirmed the other, crossing her arms. ‘If I remember correctly, eleven books are mentioned in the Bible that have never been found. The “Book of Jasher” is spoken about in Joshua, the “Books of the Seers” in the Chronicles, and in Numbers the “Book of Yahweh’s Wars” is mentioned.’

  Suddenly the professor stood up, the papyrus in his hand, and a barely visible smile on his lips.

  He stood staring at the chest on the edge of the excavation and then began to climb up the caldera towards Julia.

  When he was at the top, he scanned the horizon, the low, thick profile of the Langjökull glacier. The slight breeze from before had become a strong, cold wind. A cloudy black squall was coming towards them.

  ‘A storm is coming,’ he thought.

  ‘But if they really are the “Books of the Seers” it would be a sensational discovery,’ the girl added, telling her colleague. ‘It is said that they were lost in the Marsoretic time.’

  ‘They weren’t lost… They were just hidden!’ Cassini corrected, as he walked away slowly. Then he added softly, ‘And when the Vatican finds out that they have reappeared, the storm will come for real.’

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  Author’s Note

  The clues that the characters use to locate the treasure of the Templars are absolutely real. They are the interpretations of Dante’s triplets and the details that are described in Leonardo’s, Botticelli’s and Raphael’s paintings.

  I say this because the research in Iceland, based on what I have called “The key
to Dante”, is completely real. The engineer, Giancarlo Gianazza, has been continuing his excavations passionately in the land of Snorri, every summer since 2004.

  As I understand it, the treasure has not yet been found; however, it could be discovered at any time, to use his words.

  We will see. If in the meantime you wish to go digging where Cassini and friends went, I must warn you right away that you probably will not find anything there. If it is true that the evidence interpreted by my characters is the same as that described by the eclectic scholar in his essay, I Custodi del Messaggio3, in some places, as in the calculation of the co-ordinates, for example, I had to simplify them and take license to make for easier reading.

  Unfortunately, they are part of my imagination. In addition to Raphael’s triplet, even The School of Athens sketches and the engravings of the Transfiguration by Marcantonio Raimondi are works that I invented for narrative needs.

  Having said that, perhaps you are now probably wondering what else is true in the book and what, instead, has been invented; do the ultrasound discs, biological chips and, above all, the technology, exist to record and track your thoughts?

  The answer is yes to all these questions, even if there are some distinctions. While prototypes of chip actin and ultrasonic discs exist and function more or less as I recounted in the book, the subject is a bit more complex for research in the field of Brain Control.

  The devices on the market today are able, by monitoring a few tens of neurons, to interpret some thoughts. They allow, for example, the handicapped to perform simple tasks, such as moving a chair, or turning on or off a device. The more fascinating prospects are moving precisely in the direction that I have described. By using electroencephalographs – a technology already available – it will be possible to monitor almost all the brain cells and open up unimaginable horizons for us. And at that point, it will be an easy step forward…