So, with torches, the page, and a couple of my servants, we entered the old shaft. Almost at once our torches died out; there was a brisk draft; some of our torches were wet. Somebody went back to the manor house for candles. The passage was difficult for a tall man. I had forgotten there were several curves. Bats annoyed us. We had to wade across rain pools where water was oozing in. I stumbled over bricks and stumbled over a rusty cuirass someone had leaned against the wall.
Holding up my torch I made out crude foreign names and initials and dates... VITELLI...was it really VITELLI? I thought I saw 1502 on the wall. Latin names. Gascon. 1601. 1502 again. Cesare Borgia, that Papal bastard had had Vitelli strangled on December 1, 1502. His name went on and on, as we tramped through the tunnel.
My hatred was everywhere.
The page opened the château door, and we ascended several flights of stairs, walked along halls, were stopped by guards at the King’s suite.
“His Majesty is asleep now,” a guard said.
Borrowing umbrellas and raincoats, we returned to the manor, preferring the paths and the road to the tunnel route.
How fitfully I slept while in Cesare Borgia’s camp...like Alexander the Great I slept with the Iliad and a dagger under my pillow.
It was Niccolò Machiavelli who stole horses for us—made our escape possible...horses...rain...all night the two of us rode through the rain.
Fibonacci’s dog-eared book, Liber Abaci, still interests me: what tattered covers, foxed pages, and scribbled margins! Too many fingers have flipped through this book. No matter... I have tried his famous rabbit problem once more and then once more. I see that each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, continuing ad infinitum. And it is true I can divide Fibonacci’s number (after the fourteenth in his sequence) by the next highest in number: it is precisely .618034 to 1.