When we finish our hour with Frater Antony we go back to the fields. We pull weeds, spread fertilizer — it’s all organic, naturally — and plant seedlings. Here Oliver is at his best. He’s always tried to repudiate his farm-boy upbringing, but now suddenly he’s flaunting it, the way Eli flaunts his Yiddish vocabulary despite not having been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah. The more-ethnic-than-thou syndrome, and Oliver’s ethnos is rural-agricultural, so he goes at his hoeing and spading with formidable vim. The fraters try to slow him down: I think his energy appalls them, but also they worry about his chances of heatstroke; Frater Leon, the physician-frater, has spoken to Oliver several times, pointing out that the midmorning temperatures are in the low nineties and will soon be much higher than that. Still Oliver chugs furiously on. I find all this grubbing in the soil agreeably strange and strangely agreeable, myself. It appeals to the back-to-nature romanticism that I suppose lurks in the hearts of all excessively urbanized intellectuals. I’ve never done any manual labor more strenuous than masturbation before this, so the field chores are back-breaking as well as mindblowing for me, but I haul myself eagerly through the work. So far. Eli’s relationship to the farm stuff is very similar to mine, though if anything more intense, more romantic; he talks about drawing physical renewal from Mother Earth. And Timothy, who of course had never had to do so much as tie his own shoelaces, takes a lordly gentleman fanner attitude: noblesse oblige, he says with every languid gesture, doing as the fraters tell him but making it quite plain that he deigns to dirty his hands only because he finds it amusing to play their little game. Well, we all dig, each in his own way.

By ten or half past ten in the morning it becomes unpleasantly hot, and we leave the fields, all except three farmer-fraters whose, names I do not yet know. They spend ten or twelve hours outdoors each day: as a penance, perhaps? The rest of us, both fraters and the Receptacle, go to our rooms and bathe again. Then we four convene over in the far wing for our daily session with Frater Miklos, the history-frater.

Miklos is a compact, powerfully built little man, with forearms like thighs and thighs like logs. He gives the impression of being older than the other fraters, though I admit there’s something paradoxical about applying a comparative like “older” to a group of ageless men. He speaks with a faint and indefinable accent, and his thought processes are distinctly nonlinear: he rambles, he wanders, he slides unexpectedly from theme to theme. I believe it’s deliberate, that his mind is subtle and unfathomable rather than senile and undisciplined. Perhaps over the centuries he’s grown bored with mere consecutive discourse; I know I would.

He has two subjects: the origin and development of the Brotherhood and the history of the concept of human longevity. On the first of these he is at his most elusive, as if determined never to give us a straightforward outline. We are very old, he keeps saying, very old, very old, and I have no way of knowing whether he means the fraters or the Brotherhood itself, though I think perhaps both; perhaps some of the fraters have been in it from the beginning, their lives spanning not merely decades or centuries but entire millennia. He hints at prehistoric origins, the caves of the Pyrenees, the Dordogne, Lascaux, Altamira, a secret confraternity of shamans that has endured out of mankind’s dawn, but how much of this is true and how much is fable I cannot say, any more than I know if the Rosicrucians really do trace their genesis to Amenhotep IV. But as Frater Miklos speaks I have visions of smoky caverns, flickering torches, half-naked artists clad in the skins of woolly mammoths and daubing bright pigments on walls, medicine men conducting the ritual slaughter of aurochs and rhinoceros. And the shamans whispering, huddling, whispering, saying to one another, We shall not die, brothers, we will live on, we will watch Egypt rise out of the swamps of the Nile, we will see Sumer born, we will live to behold Socrates and Caesar and Jesus and Constantine, and yes! we will still be here when the fiery mushroom flares sun-bright over Hiroshima and when the men from the metal ship descend the ladder to walk the face of the moon. But did Miklos tell me this, or did I dream it in the haze of noonday desert heat? Everything is obscure; everything shifts and melts and runs as his mazy words circle round themselves, circle round themselves, twist, dance, tangle. Also he tells us, in riddles and periphrasis, of a lost continent, of a vanished civilization, from which the wisdom of the Brotherhood is derived. And we stare, wide-eyed, exchanging little covert glances of astonishment, not knowing whether to snicker in skeptical scorn or gasp in awe. Atlantis! How did Miklos do it, conjuring in our minds those images of a glittering land of gold and crystal, broad leafy avenues, towering white-walled buildings, shining chariots, dignified philosophers in flowing robes, the brassy instruments of forgotten science, the aura of beneficent Karma, the twanging sound of strange music echoing through the halls of vast temples dedicated to unknown gods. Atlantis? How narrow a line we tread between fantasy and foolishness! I have never heard him utter the name, but he put Atlantis into my mind the first day, and now my conviction grows that I am correct, that he indeed claims for the Brotherhood an Atlantean heritage. What are these emblems of skulls on the temple facade? What are these jeweled skulls worn as rings and pendants in the great city? Who are these missionaries in auburn fabric, crossing to the mainland, making their way to the mountain settlements, dazzling the mammoth-hunters with their flashlights and pistols, holding high the sacred Skull and calling upon the cave-dwellers to drop down, give knee. And the shamans in the painted caves, crouched by their sputtering fires, whispering, conniving, at length rendering homage to the splendid strangers, bowing, kissing the Skull, burying their own idols, the fat-thighed Venuses and the carved slivers of bone. Life eternal we offer thee, say the newcomers, and they show a shimmering screen within which swim images of their city, towers, chariots, temples, jewels, and the shamans nod, they crack their knuckles and pass water on the holy fires, they dance, they clap hands, they submit, they submit, they stare into the shimmering screen, they kill the fatted mastodon, they offer their guests a feast of fellowship. And so it commences, that alliance between mountain-men and island-men, in that chilly dawn, so it starts, the flow of karma to the icebound mainland, the awakening, the transfer of knowledge. So that when the earthquake comes, when the veil is rent asunder and the pillars tremble and a black pall hangs over the world, when the avenues and the towers are swallowed by the angry sea, something lives on, something survives in the caves, the secrets, the rituals, the faith, the Skull, the Skull, the Skull! Is that how it was, Miklos? And is that how it has been, across ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years, out of a past that we choose to deny? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! And you are still here, Frater Miklos? You have come down to us out of Altamira, out of Lascaux, out of doomed Atlantis itself, you and Frater Antony and Frater Bernard and the rest, outlasting Egypt, outlasting the Caesars, giving knee to the Skull, enduring all things, hoarding wealth, tilling the soil, moving from land to land, from the blessed caves to the newborn neolithic villages, from the mountains to the rivers, across the earth, to Persia, to Rome, to Palestine, to Catalonia, learning the languages as they evolve, speaking to the people, posing as men of their gods, building your temples and monasteries, nodding to Isis, to Mithra, to Jehovah, to Jesus, this god and that, absorbing everything, withstanding everything, putting the Cross over the Skull when the Cross was in fashion, mastering the arts of survival, replenishing yourselves now and then by taking in a Receptacle, demanding always new blood though your own grew never thin. And then? Moving on to Mexico after Cortes broke her people for you. Here was a land that understood the power of death, here was a place where the Skull had always reigned, perhaps brought there as well as to your own land by the island-folk, eh, Atlantean missionaries in Cholula and Tenochtitlan also, showing the way of the deathmask? Fertile ground, for a few centuries. But you insist on constant renewal, and so you went onward, taking your loot with you, your masks, your skulls, your statues, your paleolithic treasures, north, into the new country, the empty country, the desert heart of the United States, into the bomb-land, into the pain-land, and with the compound interest of the ages you built your newest House of Skulls, eh, Miklos, and here you sit, and here sit we. Is that how it was? Or have I hallucinated it all, bum-tripping your vague and muddy words into a gaudy self-deceptive dream? How can I tell? How will I ever know? All I have is what you tell me, which blurs and trembles and flees my mind. And I see what is around me, this contamination of your primordial imagery by Aztec visions, by Christian visions, by Atlantean visions, and I can only wonder, Miklos, how is it you are still here when the mammoth has shuffled off the stage, and am I a fool or a prophet?