Dr. Raphael explained that it had been necessary to rely upon dictionaries to render the list of words from Bulgarian into Latin, which he then translated into French. He had searched a number of early Slavonic reference texts and found that there were indeed correspondences to the sounds represented in Latin. Endeavoring to smooth the inconsistencies over, he supplied what he believed to be the correct terms, checking each one with the surrounding context to assure that it made sense. At the time the lack of precision had struck Dr. Raphael as unfortunate but routine, the kind of guesswork one must make in any ancient manuscript. Now he saw that his method had corrupted the integrity of the language at the very least and, at worst, had led him to egregious errors in the translation.
Examining the list together, we soon isolated the early Bulgarian words that had been misrepresented. As the words were fairly elementary, I picked up Dr. Raphael’s fountain pen and demonstrated the errors. Deopus had written the word 3лOTO (evil), which Dr. Raphael thought to be 3лaTO (gold), and had translated the phrase “for the angel was formed of evil” as “for the angel was formed of gold.” Similarly, Deopus had written the word Дyx (spirit), which Dr. Raphael had mistranslated as Дъx (breath), rendering the sentence “It is thus that the spirit dies” as “It is thus that the breath dies.” For our purposes, however, the most intriguing question became whether Gyaurskoto Burlo, the name Clematis gave for the cavern, was an early Bulgarian place-name or if it had been corrupted in some fashion. With Dr. Raphael’s fountain pen, I transcribed Gyaurskoto Burlo in my remedial Cyrillic and then in Latin letters.
Γяypското Ъърло
GYAURSKOTO BURLO
I stared at the paper as if the exterior form of the letters might break open, seeping the essence of meaning upon the page. For all my efforts, I could not see how the words could have been misconstrued. While the question of the etymology of Gyaurskoto Burlo was well beyond my capabilities, I knew that there was one person who would understand the history of the name and the misrepresentations it had suffered at the hands of its translators. Dr. Raphael packed the manuscript into his leather case, wrapping it in its cotton cloth to protect it, and by nightfall the Valkos and I had arrived in my native village to speak with my grandmother.
The privilege of my access to the Valkos’ thoughts—not to mention their manuscripts—was something that I had long wished for. Only months before, I had been outside their notice, a mere student who wished to prove herself. Now the three of us were standing in the foyer of my family’s farmhouse, hanging our coats and wiping our shoes as my mother and father introduced themselves. Dr. Raphael was as polite and affable as ever, exemplifying the very embodiment of decorum, and I had to wonder if my image of him with Gabriella had been correct. I could not quite reconcile the perfect gentleman before me with the rapscallion I had witnessed holding his fifteen-year-old student in his arms.
We sat at the smooth wooden table in the kitchen of my parents’ stone house as Baba Slavka examined the manuscript. Although she had lived in our French village for many years, she had never come to resemble the women born there. She wore a bright cotton scarf tied over her hair, large silver earrings, and heavy eye makeup. Her fingers flashed with gold and gemstones. Dr. Raphael explained our questions and presented her with the manuscript and the list of words he had extracted from Deopus’s account. Baba Slavka read the list and, after considering the manuscript for some time stood, went to her room, and returned with a collection of loose sheets I soon understood to be maps. Opening a page, she showed us a map of the Rhodopes. I read the village names written in Cyrillic: Smolyan, Kesten, Zhrebevo, Trigrad. The names were those near the place of my grandmother’s birth.
Gyaurskoto Burlo, she explained, meant “Hiding Place of the Infidels,” or “Infidels’ Prison,” as Dr. Raphael had rightly translated it from Latin. “It was no wonder,” my grandmother continued, “that a place called Gyaurskoto Burlo has never been found, as it does not exist.” Placing her finger near the town of Trigrad, Baba Slavka pointed out a cavern that fit the description of the one we sought, a cavern that had long been held to be a mystical site, the place of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld, a geological marvel and a source of great wonder to the villagers. “This cave has the qualities that you describe, but it is not called Gyaurskoto Burlo,” Baba Slavka said. “It is called Dyavolskoto Gurlo, the Devil’s Throat.” Gesturing to the map, my grandmother said, “The name is not written there, or on any other map, and yet I have walked to the opening in the mountain myself. I have heard the music that emanates from the gorge. It is what made me wish for you to pursue your studies, Celestine.”
“You have been to the cavern?” I asked, astonished that the answer to the Valkos’ search had been so close at hand all along.
My grandmother gave a strange and mysterious smile. “It is near the ancient village of Trigrad that I met your grandfather, and it was in Trigrad that your father was born.”
After my part in locating the cavern, I had expected to return to Paris to assist the Valkos in preparations for the expedition. But with the danger of invasion looming, Dr. Raphael would hear nothing of it. He spoke with my parents, arranging for my belongings to be sent to me by train, and then the Valkos left. Watching them go, I felt that all my dreams and all my work had been for naught. Abandoned in Alsace, I waited for news of our impending journey.
At long last we were approaching the Devil’s Throat. Vladimir stopped the van at a dull wooden sign with a scattering of black Cyrillic letters painted upon it. At Dr. Seraphina’s instruction, he followed the sign toward the village, driving along a narrow, snow-covered road that lifted sharply up into the mountain. The incline was icy and steep. When the van slid backward, Vladimir downshifted, grinding the gears against gravity. The van’s tires spun on the packed snow, gained traction, and carried us lurching ahead into the shadows.
When we reached the top of the road, Vladimir parked the van at the ledge of the mountain, a vast snowy wasteland opening before us. Dr. Seraphina turned to address us. “You’ve all read the Venerable Clematis’s account of his journey. And we have all been through the logistics of entering the cavern. You are aware that the dangers we’re facing ahead are unlike any we’ve encountered before. The physical process of descending the gorge will take all of our strength. We must go in with precision and speed. We have no margin for error. Our equipment will be of great use, but there are more than the physical challenges. Once we are inside the cavern itself, we must be prepared to face the Watchers.”
“Whose strength is formidable,” Vladimir added.
Looking carefully at us, the full gravity of the mission etched into her expression, Dr. Seraphina said, “‘Formidable’ doesn’t adequately describe what we may find. Generations of angelologists have dreamed that we would one day have the capability to confront the imprisoned angels. If we succeed, we will have accomplished something no other group has before.”
“And if we fail?” I asked, hardly allowing myself to think of the possibility.
“The powers they hold,” Vladimir said, “and the destruction and suffering they could bring to humanity are unimaginable.”
Dr. Seraphina buttoned her wool coat and pulled on a pair of leather military gloves, preparing to face the cold mountain wind. “If I’m right, the gorge is at the top of this pass,” she said, stepping out of the van.
I walked from the van to the mountain ledge and looked over the strange, crystalline world that had materialized around me. Above, a wall of black rock rose to the sky, casting a shadow over our party, while ahead a snow-covered valley fell steeply away. Without delay, Dr. Seraphina trekked toward the mountain. Following close behind, I climbed through drifts of snow, my heavy leather boots breaking my path. Clutching a case filled with medical equipment tightly in my hand, I tried to bring my thoughts to focus upon what lay ahead. I knew we would need to be precise in our efforts. Not only were we to face the rugged descent into the gorge, it might be necessar
y to navigate the spaces beyond the river, the honeycomb of caverns in which Clematis had encountered the angels. There would be no room for mistakes.
As we entered the mouth of the cave, a heavy darkness descended upon us. The interior space was barren and chill, filled with the ominous echoing rush of the underground waterfall Clematis had described. The flat rock at the entrance had none of the pockmarks and vertical shafts I had expected from my studies of Balkan geology but had been mantled with a thick, even layer of glacial deposit. The amount of snow and ice packed into the rock made it next to impossible to know what lay beneath.
Dr. Seraphina turned on a flashlight and brought the beam over the craggy interior. Ice clung to the rock face and, high in the dome of the cave, bats clung to the stone in tight mounds. The light fell over the razor-shorn walls, flickering upon mineral folds, along the rough-hewn stone floor, and then, with the slightest adjustment, the beam dissolved into blackness as it disappeared over the edge of the gorge. Looking about the cavern, I wondered what had become of the objects Clematis had described. The clay amphorae would have crumbled in the moisture long ago if they had not been taken by villagers to store olive oil and wine. But the cave contained no amphorae. Only rock and thick ice remained.
Holding the case of medical equipment with both hands, I walked toward the ledge, the rush of water growing more distinct with each step. As Dr. Seraphina moved the beam of the flashlight before her, something small and bright caught my eye. I squatted to the ground and, placing my hand upon the freezing rock, felt the icy metal of an iron stake, its head hammered flush with the cave’s floor. “This is a remnant of the First Expedition,” Dr. Seraphina said as she knelt at my side to examine my discovery. As I traced the cold iron stake with the tip of my finger, a great sense of wonder came over me: Everything I had studied, including the iron ladder that Father Clematis had described, was real.
And yet there was no time to ponder this truth. In haste Dr. Seraphina knelt at the precipice and examined the steep drop. The shaft plunged in a straight, lightless verticality. As she removed a rope ladder from her pack, my heart began to beat faster at the idea of stepping away from the ledge and relinquishing myself to the dark insubstantiality of air and gravity. The crossbars of the ladder were fastened to two strips of synthetic rope the likes of which I had never seen before, most likely the very newest technology developed for the war effort. I crouched at her side as Dr. Seraphina dropped the rope into the gorge.
Using a hammer, Vladimir secured the iron spikes into the rock, pinching the rope under iron clasps. Dr. Seraphina stood over him, watching his movements with great attention. She gave the ladder a hard shake, a test to determine that it would hold. When satisfied with its strength, she instructed the men—who carried the sacks of equipment, heavy burlap bags of twenty kilograms each—to secure their packs and follow us down.
I listened to the depths, trying to determine what lay beyond. In the stomach of the cavern, water pounded against rock. Looking over the ledge, I could not be sure if the earth below me remained stable or if it was I who had begun to tremble. I placed my hand upon Dr. Seraphina’s shoulder, to hold myself steady against the nauseating spell the cavern had cast upon me.
She took me by the hand and, seeing my distress, said, “You must calm yourself before you proceed. Breathe deeply and do not think of how far you have to go. I’ll lead you. Keep one hand on the crossbar and the other on the rope. If you somehow slip, you won’t lose your footing completely, and if you should fall, I will be directly below to catch you.” Then, without another word, she descended.
Gripping the cold metal with my bare hands, I followed. Trying to find comfort, I recalled the joyous account Clematis had written about the ladder. The simplicity of his pleasure had inspired me to memorize the words he’d written: “One can hardly imagine our delight upon gaining passage into the abyss. Only Jacob in his vision of the mighty procession of Holy Messengers might have beheld a ladder more welcome and majestic. To our divine purpose we proceeded into the terrible blackness of the forsaken pit, filled with expectation of His protection and Grace.”
We formed a line, each angelologist moving slowly down the rock face into the darkness, the sound of crashing water growing louder as we descended. The air became frigid as we moved deeper and deeper into the earth. A startling heaviness began to spread through my limbs, as if a vial of mercury had been released in my blood. It seemed that no matter how often I blinked, my eyes were filled with tears. In my panic I imagined that the narrow walls of the gorge would pinch together and I would be trapped in a granite vise, fixed in a stifling darkness. Clutching the cold, wet iron, the rush of the waterfall in my ears, I felt as if I were moving into the heart of a whirlpool.
Quickly I went, letting gravity take me. As the shaft deepened, the darkness thickened to a cool, opaque soup. I could see no farther than the whites of my knuckles wrapped around the ladder’s rung. The wooden soles of my boots slipped on the metal, knocking me ever so slightly off balance. Clutching the case tightly to my side, so as to regain balance, I slowed my pace. Measuring each step, I positioned my feet carefully, delicately, one after the other. The blood rushed in my ears as I looked up at the dissolving track of the ladder. Poised at the center of the void, I had no choice but to continue into the watery darkness. A biblical passage rushed into my thoughts, and I could not help but whisper it, knowing that the crashing waterfall would wash away my voice the moment I spoke the words: “‘And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’ ”
As I reached the bottom of the descent, the soles of my boots leaving the last swinging rung of the rope ladder and brushing the solid earth, I knew that Dr. Seraphina had discovered something momentous. The angelologists quickly unpacked the burlap sacks and lit our battery-operated lanterns, placing them at intervals across the flat rock floor of the cavern so that a fitful, oily light opened the darkness. The river, described in Clematis’s account as the boundary of the angels’ prison, coursed by in the distance, a glimmering black ribbon of movement. I could see Dr. Seraphina ahead, shouting orders, but the sound of the waterfall consumed her words.
When I reached her, she stood over the body of the angel. Upon taking my place at her side, I, too, fell under the trance of the creature. It was even more beautiful than I had imagined it to be, and I could do nothing for some time but stare, so overwhelmed was I by its perfection. The creature’s physical properties were identical to the description I had read in the literature at the Athenaeum: elongated torso, gaunt features, massive hands and feet. Its cheeks retained the vivacity of a living being’s. Its robes were pristine white, woven of a metallic material that wrapped about the body in luxurious folds.
“The First Angelological Expedition occurred in the tenth century, and still the body has the appearance of vitality,” Vladimir said. He bent before the creature and lifted the white metallic gown, rubbing the fabric between his fingers.
“Be careful,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The level of radioactivity is very high.”
Vladimir considered the angel. “I’ve always believed that they could not die.”
“Immortality is a gift that can be taken as easily as it is bequeathed,” Dr. Seraphina said. “Clematis believed that the Lord struck the angel down as vengeance.”
“Is that what you believe?” I asked.
“After its role in bringing the Nephilim into the world, killing this devilish creature seems perfectly justified,” Dr. Seraphina said.
“Its beauty is incomprehensible,” I said, struggling to reconcile the fact that beauty and evil could be so intertwined in one body.
“What remains a mystery to me,” Vladimir said, looking beyond the body of the angel to the far side of the cavern, “is that the others were allowed to live.”
The party split into groups. Half stayed to document the body—extracting cameras and lenses a
nd the aluminum case filled with biological testing apparatus from the heavy burlap bags holding them—and the other half set off to search for the lyre. Vladimir led the latter group, while Dr. Seraphina and I stayed with the angel. At our side, the remaining members of our party examined the half-buried bones of two human skeletons. The bodies of Clematis’s brothers had remained exactly as they fell one thousand years before.
At Dr. Seraphina’s orders, I put on protective gloves and lifted the angel’s head in my hands. Running my fingers through the creature’s glossy hair, I brushed the forehead, as if comforting a sick child. My touch was blunted by the gloves, but it seemed to me that the angel was warm with life. Smoothing the metallic gown, I unfastened two brass buttons at the clavicle and tugged at the fabric. It fell away, revealing a flat chest, smooth, without nipples. A clutch of ribs pressed against taut, translucent skin.
From head to foot, the creature looked to be over two meters tall, a length that, in the ancient system of measurement the founding fathers had used, translated to 4.8 Roman cubits. Other than the golden ringlets falling about the shoulders, the body was completely hairless, and, to Dr. Seraphina’s delight—she had staked her professional reputation upon the very question—the creature had distinct sexual organs. The angel was male, as all the imprisoned Watchers had been. As Clematis’s account attested, one of the wings had been torn away and hung at an odd angle to the body. There could be no doubt that this was the very creature the Venerable Clematis had killed.