Uluru

Uluru, also called Ayers Rock, is a landmark that the novel’s fabricated esoteric history transforms into a clue to invisible planetary forces. The rock’s supposed inscriptions become an unreadable alphabet, while its place in a chain of megaliths and towers helps the conspirators make the Plan seem to explain the whole world.

Uluru in the Invented History

In the account devised by Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi, knowledge of telluric currents passes through a succession of mythical migrations. The Atlantideans learn it from ancestors who travel from Avalon across the continent of Mu to the central desert of Australia, when all the continents supposedly form Pangaea. Uluru’s carved boulder is imagined to preserve the alphabet that could reveal the Answer. The Aborigines are said to be able to read it but to remain silent, making the imagined key both present and inaccessible.

The theory then gives Uluru a cosmic counterpart: it is described as the antipode of an unknown mountain identified as the occult Pole. The visible pole, accessible to ordinary explorers, is dismissed as false; only adepts can see the real one, and they keep its secret. This opposition turns an actual geographical landmark into a hinge between ordinary travel and an unseen sacred geography.

From Megaliths to a Global Network

The conspirators’ account assigns different functions to ancient structures. Menhirs act like sensitive devices placed where telluric currents branch or change direction; leys trace routes already identified; and dolmens serve as chambers in which Druids accumulate energy and use geomantic instruments to infer the global pattern. Cromlechs and Stonehenge become observatories where the arrangement of the stars is read as a model of terrestrial currents. Uluru’s alleged alphabet belongs to the same system: the landscape is treated not as scenery but as a coded instrument whose parts disclose a hidden design.

Belbo extends this invented network into the modern world. He casts the Eiffel Tower as a metal menhir and celestial probe, collecting signals from underground sites and comparing them with signals from the sky. His catalogue ranges from Easter Island and Machu Picchu to the Statue of Liberty, the obelisk of Luxor, Tomar, the Great Wall, and Uluru. The rock thus becomes one node among many in an imagined communications system, connecting ancient monuments, modern structures, and the conspirators’ account of scientific history.

Place, Memory, and the Plan

Uluru’s role in the Plan depends on a deliberate reversal: the conspirators do not uncover a secret already embedded in the world; they construct a secret by fitting disparate places and traditions together. Their confident language turns speculation into apparent proof, while the claim that the Aborigines remain silent protects the theory from verification. Uluru’s remoteness and its imagined unreadable script serve the same narrative purpose: they make the promised answer seem materially present yet forever withheld.

That procedure echoes the novel’s treatment of remembered places. Belbo recalls the wartime world of his youth as a rare period of clarity, when opposing sides seemed distinct and a corpse was simply a corpse; later, the ambiguities of the Diabolicals and Colonel Ardenti’s disappearance unsettle that certainty. Against such unstable history, the Plan offers a total map in which every site confirms every other. Uluru’s transformation from physical landmark into occult sign shows both the attraction and the danger of that promise: geography appears to settle uncertainty, but the apparent order has been made by the people seeking it.