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Schweickhardt he started to write down his reflections on magnetism, which a few years later were the subject of his first book, the
Ars Magnesia
.
    The archbishop also charged Kircher with making a topographical survey of certain parts of the principality. He took only three months to complete it & was preparing to extend the task when his patron was suddenly called to meet his Maker.
    At the end of 1625 Kircher returned to Mainz to follow a course in theology there. He studied the sacred texts rigorously & assiduously, but not without continuing his scientific work. Having bought one of the first telescopes in circulation, he spent a large part of his nights contemplating the stars. One morning he shut himself away in his cell to observe the sun. Following the instructions of Schreiner & Galileo, he had placed his telescope against a hole made in the shutter of his windowand put a sheet of white vellum under the concave glass so as to be able to see the image of the sun clearly on that piece of paper. As he watched the stormy sea of flames on the paper, he noticed numerous spots contrasting with it, appearing then disappearing. The sight filled him with amazement & from that day on astronomy became one of his main fields of study.
    One morning in May 1628 he was scanning the shelves of the college library when he came across Mercati’s book about the obelisks erected by Pope Sixtus V. His curiosity was immediately aroused & he started to speculate on the meaning of the numerous hieroglyphs reproduced in the illustrations to the volume. Initially he took them for recent ornamentation, but on reading the book he soon learned that these figures or inscriptions had been carved on Egyptian obelisks since time immemorial & that no one had ever been able to decipher them. Put in his way by Divine Providence, this enigma was to demand twenty years of uninterrupted effort before finally coming to a happy resolution.
    In December 1629, at the end of the last year of his course, Kircher was sent to Würzburg to teach mathematics, ethics & Biblical languages. It was at that college, where I was starting my noviciate, that I met him for the first time.
    Sitting in our classroom, my fellow students and I were waiting for our new mathematics teacher, a certain Father Kircher, who had been greatly praised, but of whom we were already making fun, biased against him because of his excessively high reputation. I remember that I was not the last to snigger at him, outdoing the others in ironic remarks about this ‘Father Churcher’ coming down from the heavens with his extravaganzas. However, when he came in & ascended the rostrum silence fell without him having to utter a single word. Father Athanasius was twenty-seven & if ever a face showed theharmony that arouses immediate attachment, as if by sympathy or magnetic attraction, then it was his: a noble and intelligent forehead, a straight nose such as you can see on the David of Michelangelo Buonarotti, a finely delineated mouth with red lips & the faintest downy shadow of an incipient beard—which he kept trimmed very short throughout his life—&, below thick, almost horizontal eyebrows, big, deep-set black eyes with the fascinating sparkle of an inquiring mind, always ready for repartee or debate.
    He introduced himself to us in Latin worthy of Cicero & began a lesson the least details of which remain imprinted on my memory. The subject of that lesson was to work out how many grains of sand the Earth contained, supposing that was what it was made of. Kircher walked along the rows of desks, giving each of us a pinch of sand that he took out of the pocket of his cassock & having done that told us to draw a line in our exercise books a twelfth of an inch long. Then he instructed us to place as many grains of sand side by side on the line as it would take: we were amazed to see that each time the line contained exactly 30 grains of sand. Following on from this experiment, which he assured