Summary

It is 1832, just after the battlefield death of King Gustav Adolf of Sweden. At Gottorf Castle in Holstein in northern Germany, Father Athanasius Kircher, an esteemed, if eccentric professor of science at the prestigious Collegium Romanum in Rome, arrives on a secret mission from the Pope. He has been sent to Germany to decoct a cure for the bubonic plague that is just beginning to decimate central Europe. At the castle, he is introduced to a young Russian-born mathematician of some note named Adam Olearius. Kircher long ago established his reputation in the sciences by his work translating what had to that point been indecipherable hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt (although Middle Eastern scholars questioned the accuracy of his translations and raised the possibility that Kircher’s entire work is fraudulent). Kircher shares with Olearius the details of his...