I hugged him, as he tore a cloth from a table and tried to cover me. We stopped and, finally defeated, observed what was going on around us.

There was a confused bustle, people going up the spiral staircase bare-handed and encountering others, bare-handed, who had been driven upstairs by their curiosity and were now coming down to look for vessels. Others, cleverer, had immediately started hunting for pans and basins, only to realize there was not sufficient water in the kitchen. Suddenly the great room was invaded by mules, bearing huge jars, and the cowherds driving the animals unloaded them and started to carry up the water. But they did not know how to climb to the scriptorium, and it was a while before some of the scribes told them, and when they went up they bumped into others rushing down, terrified. Jars broke and the water spread over the ground, though other jars were passed up the stairs by willing hands. I followed the group and found myself in the scriptorium. Thick smoke came from the access to the library; the last men who had tried to go up to the east tower were already coming down, coughing, red-eyed, and they announced it was no longer possible to penetrate that hell.

Then I saw Benno. His face distorted, he was coming up from the lower floor with an enormous vessel. He heard what those coming down were saying and he attacked them: “Hell will swallow you all, cowards!” He turned, as if seeking help, and saw me. “Adso,” he cried, “the library … the library…” He did not await my answer, but ran to the foot of the stairs and boldly plunged into the smoke. That was the last time I saw him.

I heard a creaking sound from above. Bits of stone mixed with mortar were falling from the ceiling of the scriptorium. The keystone of a vault, carved in the shape of a flower, came loose and almost landed on my head. The floor of the labyrinth was giving way.

I rushed downstairs and out into the open air. Some willing servants had brought ladders, with which they were trying to reach the windows of the upper floors, to take water up that way. But the highest ladders barely extended to the windows of the scriptorium, and those who had climbed up were unable to open them from the outside. They sent word down to have them opened from within, but at this point nobody dared try to go up there.

Meanwhile, I was looking at the windows of the top floor. The whole library by now must have become a single smoking brazier as the fire raced from room to room, spreading rapidly among the thousands of dry pages. All the windows were alight, a black smoke came from the roof: the fire had already spread to the beams. The Aedificium, which had seemed so solid and tetragonous, revealed in these circumstances its weakness, its cracks, the walls corroded from within, the crumbling stones allowing the flames to reach the wooden elements wherever they were.

Suddenly some windows shattered as if pressed by an inner force, the sparks flew out into the open air, dotting with fluttering glints the darkness of the night. The strong wind had become lighter: a misfortune, because, strong, it might have blown out the sparks, but light, it carried them, stimulating them, and with them made scraps of parchment swirl in the air, the delicate fragments of an inner torch. At that point an explosion was heard: the floor of the labyrinth had given way at some point and its blazing beams must have plunged to the floor below. Now I saw tongues of flame rise from the scriptorium, which was also tenanted by books and cases, and by loose papers, spread on the desks, ready to provoke the sparks. I heard cries of woe from a group of scribes who tore their hair and still thought of climbing up heroically, to recover their beloved parchments. In vain: the kitchen and refectory were now a crossroads of lost souls, rushing in all directions, each hindering the others. People bumped into one another, fell down; those carrying vessels spilled their redemptive contents; the mules brought into the kitchen had sensed the presence of fire and, with a clatter of hoofs, dashed toward the exits, knocking down the human beings and even their own terrified grooms. It was obvious, in any case, that this horde of villeins and of devout, wise, but unskilled men, with no one in command, was blocking even what aid might still have arrived.

The whole abbey was in the grip of disorder, but this was only the beginning of the tragedy. Pouring from the windows and the roof, the triumphant cloud of sparks, fostered by the wind, was now descending on all sides, touching the roof of the church. Everyone knows how the most splendid cathedrals are vulnerable to the sting of fire: the house of God appears beautiful and well defended as the heavenly Jerusalem itself thanks to the stone it proudly displays, but the walls and ceilings are supported by a fragile, if admirable, architecture of wood, and if the church of stone recalls the most venerable forests with its columns rising high, bold as oaks, to the vaults of the ceilings, these columns often have cores of oak—and many of the trappings are also of wood: the altars, the choirs, the painted panels, the benches, the stalls, the candelabra. And so it was with the abbatial church, whose beautiful door had so fascinated me on the first day. The church caught fire in no time. The monks and the whole population of the place then understood that the very survival of the abbey was at stake, and all began rushing even more earnestly, and in even greater confusion, to deal with the new danger.

To be sure, the church was more accessible, more easily defended than the library. The library had been doomed by its own impenetrability, by the mystery that protected it, by its few entrances. The church, maternally open to all in the hour of prayer, was open to all in the hour of succor. But there was no more water, or at least very little could be found stored, and the wells supplied it with natural parsimony and at a slow pace that did not correspond to the urgency of the need. All the monks would have liked to put out the fire of the church, but nobody knew how at this point. Moreover, the fire was spreading from above, and it was difficult to hoist men up to beat on the flames or smother them with dirt or rags. And when the flames arrived from below, it was futile by then to throw earth or sand on them, for the ceiling was crashing down on the firefighters, striking more than a few of them.

And so the cries of regret for the many riches burned were now joined by the cries of pain at seared faces, crushed limbs, bodies buried under a sudden collapse of the high vaults.

The wind had become furious again, and more furiously helped spread the fire. Immediately after the church, the barns and stables caught fire. The terrified animals broke their halters, kicked down the doors, scattered over the grounds, neighing, mooing, bleating, grunting horribly. Sparks caught the manes of many horses, and there were infernal creatures racing across the grass, flaming steeds that trampled everything in their path, without goal or respite. I saw old Alinardo wandering around, not understanding what was happening, knocked down by the magnificent Brunellus, haloed by fire; the old man was dragged in the dust, then abandoned there, a poor shapeless object. But I had neither means nor time to succor him, or to bemoan his end, because similar scenes were taking place everywhere.

The horses in flames had carried the fire to places where the wind had not yet brought it: now the forges were burning, and the novices’ house. Hordes of people were running from one end of the compound to another, for no purpose or for illusory purposes. I saw Nicholas, his head wounded, his habit in shreds, now defeated, kneeling in the path from the gate, cursing the divine curse. I saw Pacificus of Tivoli, who, abandoning all notion of help, was trying to seize a crazed mule as it passed; when he succeeded, he shouted to me to do the same and to flee, to escape that horrid replica of Armageddon.

I wondered where William was, fearing he had been trapped under some collapsing wall. I found him, after a long search, near the cloister. In his hand he had his traveling sack: when the fire was already spreading to the pilgrims’ hospice, he had gone up to his cell to save at least his most precious belongings. He had collected my sack, too, and in it I found something to put on. We paused, breathless, to watch what was happening around us.

By now the abbey was doomed. Almost all its buildings, some more, some less, had been reached by the fire. Those still intact would not remain so for long, because everything, from the natural elements to the confused work of the rescuers, was now contributing to the spread of the fire. Only the parts without buildings remained safe, the vegetable patch, the garden outside the cloister…. Nothing more could be done to save the buildings; abandoning the idea of saving them, we were able to observe everything without danger, standing in an open space.

We looked at the church, now burning slowly, for it is characteristic of these great constructions to blaze up quickly in their wooden parts and then to agonize for hours, sometimes for days. The conflagration of the Aedificium was different. Here inflammable material was much more abundant, and the fire, having spread all through the scriptorium, had invaded the kitchen floor. As for the top floor, where once, and for hundreds of years, there had been the labyrinth, it was now virtually destroyed.

“It was the greatest library in Christendom,” William said. “Now,” he added, “the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more. For that matter, we have seen his face tonight.”

“Whose face?” I asked, dazed.

“Jorge, I mean. In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

“But, master,” I ventured, sorrowfully, “you speak like this now because you are wounded in the depths of your spirit. There is one truth, however, that you discovered tonight, the one you reached by interpreting the clues you read over the past few days. Jorge has won, but you have defeated Jorge because you exposed his plot….”

“There was no plot,” William said, “and I discovered it by mistake.”

The assertion was self-contradictory, and I couldn’t decide whether William really wanted it to be. “But it was true that the tracks in the snow led to Brunellus,” I said, “it was true that Adelmo committed suicide, it was true that Venantius did not drown in the jar, it was true that the labyrinth was laid out the way you imagined it, it was true that one entered the finis Africae by touching the word ‘quatuor,’ it was true that the mysterious book was by Aristotle…. I could go on listing all the true things you discovered with the help of your learning….”

“I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. I arrived at Jorge through an apocalyptic pattern that seemed to underlie all the crimes, and yet it was accidental. I arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we discovered that each crime was committed by a different person, or by no one. I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, Jorge himself was overcome by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”

“But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something….”

“What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, so er an ir ufgestigen…. Is that how you say it?”

“That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?”

“A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”

“You have no reason to reproach yourself: you did your best.”

“A human best, which is very little. It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.”

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?”

William looked at me without betraying any feeling in his features, and he said, “How could a learned man go on communicating his learning if he answered yes to your question?” I did not understand the meaning of his words. “Do you mean,” I asked, “that there would be no possible and communicable learning any more if the very criterion of truth were lacking, or do you mean you could no longer communicate what you know because others would not allow you to?”

At that moment a section of the dormitory roof collapsed with a huge din, blowing a cloud of sparks into the sky. Some of the sheep and the goats wandering through the grounds went past us, bleating horribly. A group of servants also went by us, shouting, nearly knocking us down.

“There is too much confusion here,” William said. “Non in commotione, non in commotione Dominus.”