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Ferris’s puffy eyes widened, and he laughed out loud. “This rash? Believe me, Professor, if I had the plague, I would not be treating it with an over-the-counter antihistamine.” He pulled a small tube of medicine from his pocket and tossed it to Langdon. Sure enough, it was a half-empty tube of anti-itch cream for allergic reactions.
“Sorry about that,” Langdon said, feeling foolish. “Long day.”
“No worries,” Ferris said.
Langdon turned toward the window, watching the muted hues of the Italian countryside blur together in a peaceful collage. The vineyards and farms were becoming scarcer now as the flatlands gave way to the foothills of the Apennines. Soon the train would navigate the sinuous mountain pass and then descend again, powering eastward toward the Adriatic Sea.
I’m headed for Venice, he thought. To look for a plague.
This strange day had left Langdon feeling as if he were moving through a landscape composed of nothing but vague shapes with no particular details. Like a dream. Ironically, nightmares usually woke people up … but Langdon felt as if he had awoken into one.
“Lira for your thoughts,” Sienna whispered beside him.
Langdon glanced up, smiling wearily. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up at home and discover this was all a bad dream.”
Sienna cocked her head, looking demure. “You wouldn’t miss me if you woke up and found out I wasn’t real?”
Langdon had to grin. “Yes, actually, I would miss you a little.”
She patted his knee. “Stop daydreaming, Professor, and get to work.”
Langdon reluctantly turned his eyes to the crinkled face of Dante Alighieri, which stared blankly up from the table before him. Gently, Langdon picked up the plaster mask and turned it over in his hands, gazing down into the concave interior at the first line of spiral text:
O you possessed of sturdy intellect …
Langdon doubted he qualified at the moment.
Nonetheless, he set to work.
Two hundred miles ahead of the speeding train, The Mendacium remained anchored in the Adriatic. Belowdecks, facilitator Laurence Knowlton heard the soft rap of knuckles on his glass cubicle and touched a button beneath his desk, turning the opaque wall into a transparent one. Outside, a small, tanned form materialized.
The provost.
He looked grim.
Without a word, he entered, locked the cubicle door, and threw the switch that turned the glass room opaque again. He smelled of alcohol.
“The video that Zobrist left us,” the provost said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I want to see it. Now.”
CHAPTER 63
ROBERT LANGDON HAD now finished transcribing the spiral text from the death mask onto paper so they could analyze it more closely. Sienna and Dr. Ferris huddled in close to help, and Langdon did his best to ignore Ferris’s ongoing scratching and labored breathing.
He’s fine, Langdon told himself, forcing his attention to the verse before him.
O you possessed of sturdy intellect,
observe the teaching that is hidden here …
beneath the veil of verses so obscure.
“As I mentioned earlier,” Langdon began, “the opening stanza of Zobrist’s poem is taken verbatim from Dante’s Inferno—an admonition to the reader that the words carry a deeper meaning.”
Dante’s allegorical work was so replete with veiled commentary on religion, politics, and philosophy that Langdon often suggested to his students that the Italian poet be studied much as one might study the Bible—reading between the lines in an effort to understand the deeper meaning.
“Scholars of medieval allegory,” Langdon continued, “generally divide their analyses into two categories—‘text’ and ‘image’ … text being the literal content of the work, and image being the symbolic message.”
“Okay,” Ferris said eagerly. “So the fact that the poem begins with this line—”
“Suggests,” Sienna interjected, “that our superficial reading may reveal only part of the story. The true meaning may be hidden.”
“Something like that, yes.” Langdon returned his gaze to the text and continued reading aloud.
Seek the treacherous doge of Venice
who severed the heads from horses …
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