The fraters are in love with us. No other term applies. They try to be poker-faced, solemn, hieratic, aloof, but they cannot conceal the simple joy our presence brings them. We rejuvenate them. We have rescued them from an eternity of repetitious toil. Not for an eon and a half have they had novices here, have they had new young blood on the premises; just the same closed society of fraters, fifteen of them in all, going about their devotions, working in the fields, doing the chores. And now we are here to be led through the rituals of initiation, and it is something novel for them, and they love us for having come.

They all participate in our enlightenment. Frater Antony presides over our meditations, our spiritual exercises. Frater Bernard leads us in the physical exercises. Frater Claude, the kitchen-frater, supervises our diet. Frater Miklos instructs us circumvolutely in the history of the order, providing us in his ambiguous way with the proper background information. Frater Javier is the father-confessor who will guide us, some days hence, through the psychotherapy that seems to be a central part of the entire process. Frater Franz, the work-frater, shows us our responsibilities as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Each of the other fraters has his special role to play, but we have not yet had occasion to meet with them. Also there are women here, an unknown number of them, perhaps only three or four, perhaps a dozen. We see them peripherally, a glance now, a glance then. Always they move across our field of vision at a distance, going from room to room on mysterious private errands, never pausing, never looking at us. Like the fraters, the women all are garbed alike, in brief white frocks rather than ragged blue shorts. Those that I’ve seen have long dark hair and full breasts, nor have Timothy, Eli, and Oliver noticed any willowy blondes or redheads. They bear close resemblance to one another, which is why I’m uncertain of their number; I never can tell whether the women I see are different ones each time, or the same few. The second day here, Timothy asked Frater Antony about them, but he was told gently that it was forbidden to ask a direct procedural question of any member of the Brotherhood; all will be made manifest to us at the proper time, Frater Antony promised. With that we must be content.

Our day is fully programed. We rise with the sun; lacking windows, we depend on Frater Franz, who goes at dawn down the dormitory wing hammering on doors. A bath is the mandatory first deed. Then we go into the fields for an hour of labor. The fraters raise all their food themselves, in a garden about two hundred yards behind the building. An elaborate irrigation system pumps water from some deep spring; it must have cost a fortune to install, just as the House of Skulls must have cost a fortune and a half to build, but I suspect the Brotherhood is enormously wealthy. As Eli has pointed out, any self-perpetuating organization that can compound its assets at 5 or 6 percent for three or four centuries would end up owning whole continents. The fraters grow wheat, herbs, and an assortment of edible fruits, berries, roots, and nuts; I have no idea yet what most of the crops are that we weed and tend so lovingly, and I suspect that many of them are exotic plants. Rice, beans, corn, and “strong” vegetables such as onions are forbidden here. Wheat, I gather, is tolerated only grudgingly, deemed spiritually unworthy but somehow necessary: it undergoes a rigorous fivefold sifting and tenfold milling, accompanied by special meditations, before it is made into bread. The fraters eat no meat, nor shall we as long as we remain here. Meat, apparently, is a source of destructive vibes. Salt is banished. Pepper is outlawed. Black pepper, that is; chili pepper is within the pale, and the fraters dote on it, consuming it as the Mexicans do in any number of ways — fresh peppers, dried pods, chili powder, pickled peppers, etc., etc., etc. The stuff they grow here is fiery. Eli and I are spice freaks, and we use it liberally even though it sometimes brings tears to our eyes, but Timothy and Oliver, reared on blander diets, can’t handle it at all. Another favorite food here is eggs. There’s a hatchery out back full of busy hens, and eggs in some form appear on the menu three times a day. The fraters also produce certain mildly alcoholic herb-liqueurs, under the supervision of Frater Maurice, the distiller-frater.

When we have done our hour of service in the fields a gong summons us; we go to our rooms to bathe again, and then it is breakfast-time. Meals are served in one of the public rooms, at an elegant stone bench. The menus are calculated according to arcane principles not yet disclosed to us; it seems as if the color and texture of what we eat has as much to do with the planning of meals as the nutritional value. We eat eggs, soups, bread, vegetable mashes, and so forth, copiously seasoned with chili; for beverages we have water, a kind of wheat-beer, and, in the evening, the herb-liqueurs, but nothing else. Oliver, a steak-eater, complains a good deal about the lack of meat I missed it at first but by now have completely adapted to this odd regimen, as has Eli. Timothy grumbles to himself and swills the liqueurs. At lunch the third day he had too much beer and threw up on the marvelous slate floor; Frater Franz waited until he was finished, then handed him a cloth and wordlessly ordered him to clean up his own mess. The fraters plainly dislike Timothy, and perhaps fear him, for he’s half a foot taller than any of them and must outweigh the heaviest by ninety pounds. The rest of us, as I say, they love, and in the abstract they love Timothy too.

After breakfast comes morning meditations with Frater Antony. He says little, merely provides a spiritual context for us with a minimum of words. We meet in the other long rear wing of the building, opposite the dormitory wing; this is entirely given over to the monastic functions. Instead of bedrooms, there are chapels, eighteen of them, I suppose corresponding to the Eighteen Mysteries; they are as sparsely furnished and as powerfully austere as the other rooms, and contain a series of overwhelming artistic masterpieces. Most of these are pre-Columbian, but some of the chalices and carvings have a medieval European look, and there are certain abstract objects (of ivory? bone? stone?) that are completely unfamiliar to me. This side of the building also has a large library, crammed with books, rarities, by the looks of the shelves; we are forbidden at present to enter that room, though its door is never locked. Frater Antony meets with us in the chapel closest to the public wing. It is empty except for the ubiquitous skull-mask on the wall. He kneels; we kneel; he removes from his breast his tiny jade pendant, which unsurprisingly is carved in the shape of a skull, and places it on the floor before us as a focus for our meditations. As frater-superior, Frater Antony has the only jade pendant, but Frater Miklos, Frater Javier, and Frater Franz are entitled to wear similar pendants of polished brown stone — obsidian, I imagine, or onyx. These four are the Keepers of the Skulls, an elite group within the fraternity. What Frater Antony urges us to contemplate is a paradox: the skull beneath the face, the presence of the death-symbol hidden under our living masks. Through an exercise of “interior vision,” we are supposed to purge ourselves of the death-impulse by absorbing, fully comprehending, and ultimately destroying the power of the skull. I don’t know how successful any of us has been at achieving this: another thing we are forbidden to do is compare notes on our progress. I doubt that Timothy is much good at meditation. Oliver evidently is; he stares at the jade skull with lunatic intensity, engulfing it, surrounding it, and I think his spirit goes forth and enters it. But is he moving in the correct direction? Eli, in the past, has complained to me of the difficulties he’s had in reaching the highest levels of mystic experience on drugs; his mind is too agile, too jumpy, and he’s spoiled several acid trips for himself by darting hither and thither instead of settling down and gliding into the All. Out here, too, I think he’s having trouble getting it together; he looks tense and impatient during the meditation sessions and seems to be forcing it, trying to push himself into a region he can’t really attain. As for me, I rather enjoy the daily hour with Frater Antony; the paradox of the skull is, of course, precisely my line of irrationality, and I think I’m grooving properly with it, though I recognize the possibility that I’m deceiving myself. I’d like to discuss the degree of my progress, if any, with Frater Antony, but all such self-conscious inquiries are prohibited for now. So I kneel and stare at the little green skull each day, and cast forth my soul, and conduct my perpetual internal struggle between corrosive cynicism and abject faith.