Kinbote document
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The so-called Kinbote-document was found in a leather-bound folder at the Chateau de Aiguille du Midi in Provins.
The apocryphal document -- a short, first-person description of a Hadean descent in a cable car -- is sometimes attributed to the Russian writer Ulrich Kinbote (b. 1773) who stayed at the Chateau de Aiguille in 1821, shortly before his disappearance.
This popular chateau was walking distance from the funiculaire de la ville haute, an 18th-century cable car to a small belvedere on the rocky outcrop of the Briard plate that overlooked the Durteint valleys and Voulzie rivers beyond. The funiculaire, however, was famously condemned by the mayor of Provins -- one Montague Auguste Aglie -- and demolished in 1926.
Other than Aglie's edict that the cable car was a curse on the face of Provins, no reason was given. History remembers Aglie as a puritanical Luddite or, if his use of the word curse is taken literally, a superstitious halfwit. As for the Kinbote document, it has been called a hoax, and little attention was given to it by serious academics.
However, in 1934, William Roscommon, an English chirographer, publicly claimed that he believed the manuscript was written in Kinbote's hand.
Further interest in the document was generated in 1951 when an Oxford student of palaeography, Percy Brooke, used a process known as radiocarbon dating (developed by William Frank Libby four years earlier in 1947) to establish that the Kinbote document was written "with a standard deviation of 30 radiocarbon years" in the early 18th-century, the time of Kinbote's disappearance.
Because the document was untitled, it is sometimes called the Facilis Descensus, in reference to the Latin prologue scrawled at the top of the first page:
- Facilis descensus Averno: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis.
- Easy is the way down to the Underworld: by night and by day dark Hades’ door stands open.
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