NIGHT
In which the labyrinth is finally broached, and the intruders have strange visions and, as happens in labyrinths, lose their way.

We climbed back up to the scriptorium, this time by the east staircase, which rose also to the forbidden floor. Holding the light high before us, I thought of Alinardo’s words about the labyrinth, and I expected frightful things.
I was surprised, as we emerged into the place we should not have entered, at finding myself in a not very large room with seven sides, windowless, where there reigned—as, for that matter, throughout the whole floor—a strong odor of stagnation or mold. Nothing terrifying.
The room, as I said, had seven walls, but only four of them had an opening, a passage flanked by two little columns set in the wall; the opening was fairly wide, surmounted by a round-headed arch. Against the blind walls stood huge cases, laden with books neatly arranged. Each case bore a scroll with a number, and so did each individual shelf; obviously the same numbers we had seen in the catalogue. In the midst of the room was a table, also covered with books. On all the volumes lay a fairly light coat of dust, sign that the books were cleaned with some frequency. Nor was there dirt of any kind on the floor. Above one of the archways, a big scroll, painted on the wall, bore the words “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi.” It did not seem faded, even though the lettering was ancient. We noticed afterward, also in the other rooms, that these scrolls were actually carved in the stone, cut fairly deeply, and the depressions had subsequently been filled with color, as painters do in frescoing churches.
We passed through one of the openings. We found ourselves in another room, where there was a window that, in place of glass panes, had slabs of alabaster, with two blind walls and one aperture, like the one we had just come through. It opened into another room, which also had two blind walls, another with a window, and another passage that opened opposite us. In these two rooms, the two scrolls were similar in form to the first we had seen, but with different words. The scroll in the first room said “Super thronos viginti quatuor,” and the one in the second room, “Nomen illi mors.” For the rest, even though the two. rooms were smaller than the one by which we had entered the library (actually, that one was heptagonal, these two rectangular), the furnishing was the same.
We entered the third room. It was bare of books and had no scroll. Under the window, a stone altar. There were three doors: the one by which we had entered; another, leading to the heptagonal room already visited; and a third, which led to a new room, no different from the others except for the scroll, which said “Obscuratus est sol et aer,” announcing the growing darkness of sun and air. From here you went into a new room, whose scroll said “Facta est grando et ignis,” threatening turmoil and fire. This room was without other apertures: once you reached it, you could pro?ceed no farther and had to turn back.
“Let us think about this,” William said. “Five quadran?gular or vaguely trapezoidal rooms, each with one window, arranged around a windowless heptagonal room to which the stairway leads. It seems elementary to me. We are in the east tower. From the outside each tower shows five windows and five sides. It works out. The empty room is the one facing east, the same direction as the choir of the church; the dawn sun illuminates the altar, which I find right and pious. The only clever idea, it seems to me, is the use of alabaster slabs. In the daytime they admit a fine light, and at night not even the moon’s rays can penetrate. Now let’s see where the other two doors of the heptagonal room lead.”
My master was mistaken, and the builders of the library had been shrewder than we thought. I cannot explain clearly what happened, but as we left the tower room, the order of the rooms became more confused. Some had two doorways, others three. All had one window each, even those we entered from a windowed room, thinking we were heading toward the interior of the Aedificium. Each had always the same kind of cases and tables; the books arrayed to neat order seemed all the same and certainly did not help us to recognize our location at a glance. We tried to orient ourselves by the scrolls. Once we crossed a room in which was written “In diebus illis,” “In those days,” and after some roaming we thought we had come back to it. But we remem?bered that the door opposite the window led into a room whose scroll said “Primogenitus mortuorum,” “The firstborn of the dead,” whereas now we came upon another that again said “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi,” though it was not the heptagonal room from which we had set out. This fact convinced us that sometimes the scrolls repeated the same words in different rooms. We found two rooms with “Apocalypsis” one after the other, and, immediately following them, one with “Cecidit de coelo stella magna,” “A great star fell from the heavens.”
The source of the phrases on the scrolls was obvious?—they were verses from the Apocalypse of John—but it was not at all clear why they were painted on the walls or what logic was behind their arrangement. To in?crease our confusion, we discovered that some scrolls, not many, were colored red instead of black.
At a certain point we found ourselves again in the original heptagonal room (easily identified because the stairwell began there), and we resumed moving toward our right, trying to go straight from room to room. We went through three rooms and then found ourselves facing a blank wall. The only opening led into a new room that had only one other aperture, which we went through, and then, after another four rooms, we found ourselves again facing a wall. We returned to the previ?ous room, which had two exits, took the one we had not tried before, went into a new room, and then found ourselves back in the heptagonal room of the outset.
“What was the name of the last room, the one where we began retracing our steps?” William asked.
I strained my memory and, I had a vision of a white horse: “Equus albus.”
“Good. Let’s find it again.” And it was easy. From there, if we did not want to turn back as we had before, we could only pass through the room called “Gratia vobis et pax,” and from there, on the right, we thought we found a new passage, which did not take us back. Actually we again came upon “In diebus illis” and “Primogenitus mortuorum” (were they the rooms of a few moments earlier?); then finally we came to a room that we did not seem to have visited before: “Tertia pars terrae combusta est.” But even when we had learned that a third of the earth had been burned up, we still did not know what our position was with respect to the east tower.
Holding the lamp in front of me, I ventured into the next rooms. A giant of threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form came toward me, like a ghost.
“A devil!” I cried and almost dropped the lamp as I wheeled around and took refuge in William’s arms. He seized the lamp from my hands and, thrusting me aside, stepped forward with a decisiveness that to me seemed sublime. He also saw something, because he brusquely stepped back. Then he leaned forward again and raised the lamp. He burst out laughing.
“Really ingenious. A mirror!”
“A mirror?”
“Yes, my bold warrior. You flung yourself so courage?ously on a real enemy a short while ago in the scriptorium, and now you are frightened by your own image. A mirror that reflects your image, enlarged and distorted.”
He took me by the hand and led me up to the wall facing the entrance to the room. On a corrugated sheet of glass, now that the light illuminated it more closely, I saw our two images, grotesquely misshapen, changing form and height as we moved closer or stepped back.
“You must read some treatise on optics,” William said, amused, “as the creators of the library surely did. The best ones- are by the Arabs. Alhazen wrote a treatise, De aspectibus, in which, with precise geometrical demonstrations, he spoke of the power of mirrors, some of which, depending on how their surface is gauged, can enlarge the tiniest things (what else are my lenses?), while others make images appear upside down, or oblique, or show two objects in the place of one, and four in place of two. Still others, like this one, turn a dwarf into a giant or a giant into a dwarf.”
“Lord Jesus!” I exclaimed. “Are these, then, the vi?sions some say they have had in the library?”
“Perhaps. A really clever idea.” He read the scroll on the wall, over the mirror: “Super thronos viginti quatuor.” “ ‘The twenty-four elders upon their seats.’ We have seen this inscription before, but it was a room without any mirror. This one, moreover, has no windows, and yet it is not heptagonal. Where are we?” He looked around and went over to a case. “Adso, without those wondrous oculi ad legendum I cannot figure out what is written on these books. Read me some titles.”
I picked out a book at random. “Master, it is not written!”
“What do you mean? I can see it is written. What do you read?”
“I am not reading. These are not letters of the alphabet, and it is not Greek. I would recognize it. They look like worms, snakes, fly dung. ...”
“Ah, it’s Arabic. Are there others like it?”
“Yes, several. But here is one in Latin, thank God. Al ... Al-Kuwarizmi, Tabulae.”
“The astronomical tables of Al-Kuwarizmi, translated by Adelard of Bath! A very rare work! Continue.”
“Isa ibn-Ali, De oculis; Alkindi, De radiis slellatis ...”
“Now look on the table.”
I opened a great volume lying on the table, a De bestiis. I happened on a delicately illuminated page where a very beautiful unicorn was depicted.
“Beautifully made,” William commented, able to see the illustrations well. “And that?”
I read: “Liter monstrorum de diversis generibus. This also has beautiful images, but they seem older to me.”
William bent his face to the text. “Illuminated by Irish monks, at least five centuries ago. The unicorn book, on the other hand, is much more recent; it seems to me made in the French fashion.” Once again I admired my master’s erudition. We entered the next room and crossed the four rooms after it, all with windows, and all filled with volumes in unknown languages, in addition to some texts of occult sciences. Then we came to a wall, which forced us to turn back, because the last five rooms opened one into the other, with no other egress possible.
“To judge by the angles of the walls, I would say we are in the pentagon of another tower,” William said, “but there is no central heptagonal room. Perhaps we are mistaken.”
“But what about the windows?” I asked. “How can there be so many windows? It is impossible for all the rooms to overlook the outside.”
“You’re forgetting the central well. Many of the win?dows we have seen overlook the octagon, the well. If it were day, the difference in light would tell us which are external windows and which internal, and perhaps would even reveal to us a room’s position with respect to the sun. But after dusk no difference is perceptible. Let’s go back.”
We returned to the room with the mirror and head?ed for the third doorway, which we thought we............