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I sat down on a box of old parchments and leafed quickly through the manuscript. Twelve sheets or so, all embellished with grotesqueries of the grave — crossed thigh-bones, toppled tombstones, a disembodied pelvis or two, and skulls, skulls, skulls, skulls. Translating it on the spot was beyond me; much of the vocabulary was obscure, being neither Latin nor Catalan but some dreamy, flickering intermediate language. Yet the broad sense of what I had found quickly came clear. The text was addressed to some prince by the abbot of a monastery under his protection and was, essentially, an invitation to the prince to withdraw from the mundane world in order to partake of the “mysteries” of the monastic order. The disciplines of the monks, the abbot said, were aimed toward the defeat of Death, by which he meant not the triumph of the spirit in the next world but rather the triumph of the body in this one. Life eternal we offer thee. Contemplation, spiritual and physical exercises, proper diet, and so forth — these were the gateways to everlasting life.
An hour of sweaty toil gave me these passages:
“The First Mystery is this: that the skull lieth beneath the face, as death lieth alongside life. But, O Nobly-Born, there is no paradox in this, for death is the companion of life, life is the messenger of death. If one could but reach through the face to the underlying skull and befriend it, one might [unintelligible]…
“The Sixth Mystery is this: that our gift shall always be despised, that we shall ever be fugitives among men, so that we flee from place to place, from the caves of the north to the caves of the south, from the [uncertain] of the fields to the [uncertain] of the city, and so has it been in the hundreds of years of my life and the hundreds of years of my forebears…
“The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions, and therefore we ask of thee that the ordinated balance be gladly sustained. Two of thee we undertake to admit to our fold. Two must go into darkness. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live. Is there one among thee who will relinquish eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial? And is there one among thee whom his comrades are prepared to sacrifice, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of exclusion? Let the victims choose themselves. Let them define the quality of their lives by the quality of their departures…”
There was more, eighteen Mysteries in all, plus a peroration in absolutely opaque verse. I was captured. It was the intrinsic fascination of the text that caught me, its somber beauty, its ominous embellishments, its gonglike rhythms, rather than any immediate co
Three days of hard work gave me a reliable translation of perhaps 85 percent of the text and a working understanding of the rest. I did it mostly by myself, though I consulted Professor Vasquez Ocana about some of the more troublesome phrases, concealing from him, however, the nature of my project. (When he asked if I had found the Maura Gudiol cache I replied vaguely.) At this point I still thought of the whole thing as a charming fantasy. I had read Lost Horizon when I was a boy; I remembered Shangri-la, the secret monastery in the Himalayas, the monks practicing yoga and breathing pure air, that wonderful shocker of a line, “That you are still alive, Father Perrault.” One didn’t take such stuff seriously. I visualized myself publishing my translation in, say. Speculum, with appropriate commentary on the medieval belief in immortality, references to the Prester John my-thos, to Sir John Mandeville, to the Alexander romances. The Brotherhood of the Skulls, the Keepers of the Skulls who are its high priests, the Trial which must be undergone by four simultaneous candidates, only two of whom are permitted to survive, the hint of ancient mysteries passed down across mille