We had been assigned work suited to our scholarly strengths, which were as opposite as our appearances. Whereas I loved the technical components of our coursework—the physiology of angelic bodies, the composition ratios of matter to spirit in created beings, and the mathematical perfection of early taxonomies—Gabriella was attracted to the more artistic elements of angelology. She liked to read the grand epic histories of battles between angelologists and the Nephilim; she could gaze at religious paintings and find symbolism that surely would have been lost upon me; she parsed ancient texts with such care that one believed that the meaning of a single word had the power to change the course of the future. She had faith in the progress of good, and over our first year of studies she made me believe that such progress was possible, too. Accordingly, Dr. Seraphina assigned Gabriella to work through the mythical texts, leaving me the more systematic task of sorting the empirical data of previous attempts to find the gorge, sifting geological information of various epochs, and collating outdated maps.
From the look of satisfaction upon Gabriella’s face, they must have been chatting for some time. A series of wooden crates sat at the center of the office, their rough-hewn edges pressing upon the red and gold Oriental carpet. Each crate had been stuffed with field notebooks and loose papers, as if they had been packed in haste.
My astonishment at Gabriella’s presence, not to mention my curiosity regarding the crates of notebooks, did not go unnoticed. Dr. Seraphina waved me into the room, asking me to close the door and join them. “Come in, Celestine,” she said again as she gestured for me to sit on a divan near the bookshelves. “I was wondering when you might arrive.”
As if to second Dr. Seraphina’s remark, a grandfather clock at the far end of the office chimed eight o’clock. I was an hour early. “I thought we began at nine,” I said.
“Gabriella wanted to get a head start,” Dr. Seraphina said. “We have been looking through some of the new materials that you will catalog. These boxes are Raphael’s papers. He brought them from his office last night.”
Walking to her desk, Dr. Seraphina took a key and unlocked a cupboard. The shelves were filled with notebooks, each shelf ordered and meticulous. “And these are my papers. I have arranged them by subject and date, the years of my schooling are on the lower shelves, and my most recent notes—mostly quotations and outlines for articles—are on the top. I have refrained from cataloging my work for years. Secrecy has been a large factor, but, more important, I have been waiting for the right assistants. You are both bright students with exposure to the basic fields of angelology—teleology, transcendental frequencies, theories of morphistic angelology, taxonomy. While you have studied these at an introductory level, you have also learned a bit about our field of antediluvian geology. You are hardworking and meticulous, knowledgeable and talented in different ways, but not specialized. I am hoping that you will come to the task with fresh eyes. If there is anything in the boxes that we’ve missed, I know that you girls will catch it. I am also going to require that you sit in on my lectures. I realize that you completed my introductory course last year, but the subject matter is of special significance to our task.”
Running her fingers along a row of journals, she extracted a number of volumes and placed them on the coffee table between us. Although my first instinct was to take one of the journals, I waited, endeavoring to follow Gabriella’s lead. I did not want to appear too anxious.
“You may want to begin with these,” Seraphina said, settling lightly upon the settee. “I think you will find Raphael’s files to be a bit of a challenge to put in order.”
“There are so many,” I said, enthralled by the sheer amount of papers to go through and curious as to how we would document such a mass of information.
“I have already given Gabriella precise instructions about our methodology for cataloging the papers,” Seraphina said. “She will pass those instructions on to you. There is only one directive I will repeat: You must remember that these notebooks are exceptionally precious. They form the bulk of our original research. Although we have excerpted some of the material for publication, none of these has been copied in its entirety. I ask that you take special care to preserve the more delicate notebooks, particularly the texts outlining our expeditions. These papers cannot leave my office, I’m afraid. But as long as you work through the material in a timely fashion, you may read them as you wish. I believe that there is much to learn, however disorderly the papers may be. Indeed, I am hoping that our work will help you to understand the history of our struggle and, if we are very lucky, help us discover what we are seeking.”
Taking a leather notebook and giving it to me, she said, “These are some of my writings from my student years. There are notes from lectures, some conjectures about angelology and its historical development. It’s been so long since I’ve looked at it that I cannot fully account for what you might find. I was once an ambitious student myself and, like you, Celestine, spent many, many hours in the Athenaeum. With so much information about the history of angelology, I felt that I needed to make it all a bit more compact. I’m afraid some of my rather naïve speculations may be included, which you should take with a grain of salt.”
I struggled to imagine Dr. Seraphina as a student, learning the very things we were learning. It was difficult to imagine her ever having been naïve about anything.
Dr. Seraphina said, “The notes from later years might be more engrossing. I rewrote the material from this journal into a more—how shall I say it?—succinct account of the history of our work. One objective that our scholars and agents have tried to adhere to is that angelology is purely functional—we use our study as a concrete tool. Theory is only as good as its execution, and in our case historical research plays a large role in our ability to fight the Nephilim. Personally, I have a rather empirical mind. I am not at all adept at understanding abstractions, and so I used narrative to make angelological theories more tangible to me. It is much the same way that I order my lectures. While the use of narrative is commonplace in many aspects of theology—allegories and the like—the church eschewed such an approach when speaking of angelological systems. As you perhaps know, hierarchical systems were often constructed as a kind of argument by the church fathers. They believed that as God created hierarchies of angels, so He made hierarchies on earth. Explaining one would illuminate the other. For example: As the seraphim are superior angelic intelligences to the cherubim, so, too, is the archbishop of Paris to the farmer. You see how it might work: God created hierarchies, and everyone must remain in their God-appointed place. And pay their taxes,
bien sûr.
The church’s angelic hierarchies reinforced the social and political structures. They also offered a narrative of the universe, a cosmology that gave order to the seeming chaos of ordinary people’s lives. Angelologists, of course, diverged from this path. We observe a horizontal structure, one that allows intellectual freedom and advancement through merit. Our system is quite unique.”
“How could such a system survive?” Gabriella asked. “Surely the church would not have allowed it.”
Startled by Gabriella’s brazen question, I looked down at my hands. Never would I be able to question the church in such a forthright manner. Perhaps it was a detriment, my belief in the soundness of the church.
“I believe that this question has been asked many times before,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The founding fathers of angelology developed the perimeters of our work at a grand meeting of angelologists in the tenth century. There is a wonderful account of the meeting, written by one of the fathers in attendance.” Dr. Seraphina returned to the cupboard and removed a book. Turning through the pages, she said, “I suggest that you read it when you have the chance, which will not be now, as you have more than your share of work ahead of you this morning.”
Seraphina placed the book on the table. “Once you begin reading the history of our group, you will see that there is more to angelology than study and debate. Our work grew from the wise decisions of a band of serious, spiritual men. The First Angelological Expedition, the very first physical attempt made by angelologists to uncover the prison of the angels, arose when the Venerable Fathers, at the invitation of their Thracian brothers, organized the Council of Sozopol. It was the founding meeting of our discipline, and according to the Venerable Father Bogomil, one of the greatest of the founding fathers, the council was a huge success, not only in forging the standards of our work, but in bringing together the foremost religious thinkers of the time—not since the Council of Nicea had such a large assembly of extradenominational representatives gathered. Priests, deacons, acolytes, rabbis, and Manichaean holy men participated in a flurry of debate over dogma in the main hall. But a secret gathering was taking place elsewhere. An old priest called Clematis, a bishop of Thracian birth who lived in Rome, had called together a select group of sympathetic fathers who shared his great passion for finding the cavern of the Watchers. As a matter of fact, he had developed a theory of the location of the cave, positing that it, like the remnants of Noah’s Ark, were to be found in proximity to the Black Sea coast. Eventually Clematis went to the mountains to test this theory. Dr. Raphael and I have assumed—although we have no proof to bear out our assumptions—that Clematis had drafted a map.”
“But how can you be so certain that there is anything there?” Gabriella said. “What evidence do we have? What if there is no cavern and it is just a legend?”
“There must be a basis of truth in it,” I said, feeling that Gabriella was too quick in her desire to challenge our teacher.
“Clematis found the cavern,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The Venerable Father and his team are the only ones to have discerned the actual location of the pit, the only ones to have descended into it, and the only people in many thousands of years to have seen the disobedient angels. Clematis died for the privilege. Thankfully, he dictated a brief account of the expedition before his death. Dr. Raphael and I have used this account as our primary text in our search.”
“Surely the account points to the location,” I said, anxious to understand the details of Clematis’s expedition.
“Yes, there is a location mentioned in Clematis’s account,” Dr. Seraphina said. Taking a piece of paper and a fountain pen, she wrote a series of letters in Cyrillic and presented them to us.
ΓяypcκoTo Бърло
“The name given in Clematis’s account is Gyaurskoto Burlo, which means “Infidels’ Prison” in Old Bulgarian or, more loosely, ”The Hiding Place of the Infidels“—an accurate description of the Watchers, who were called disobedient or unfaithful by Christians of the era. The Turks occupied the region around the Rhodope Mountains from the fourteenth century until the Russians assisted the Bulgarians in driving them out in 1878, and this serves to complicate the modern hunt: The Muslims referred to the Bulgarian Christians as infidels, placing another layer of meaning over the original description of the cave. We made a number of trips to Greece and Bulgaria in the twenties, but to our great disappointment we found no caves matching this name. When questioned, the villagers associate the name with the Turks or say they have never heard of the cave at all. After years of cartographic hunting, we have been unable to find the name on any map of the region. Whether by carelessness or design, the cave does not exist on paper.”
“Perhaps it is more correct to conclude,” Gabriella said, “that Clematis erred and that there is no such cave.”
“There you are wrong,” Dr. Seraphina said, the quickness of her response giving evidence of her passion for the subject. “The prison of the disobedient angels exists. I have wagered my career upon it.”
“Then there must be a way to find it,” I said, understanding for the first time the full extent of the Valkos’ desire to solve the riddle. “We need to study Clematis’s account.”
“That,” Seraphina said, going to her cupboard once again, “is for another time, after you have completed the work at hand.”
I opened the volume before me, curious about what lay under its covers. I could not help but feel satisfied that my ideas were so aligned with Dr. Seraphina’s work and that Gabriella—who usually won the Valkos’ admiration—had clashed with our teacher. Yet, to my dismay, Gabriella was utterly untouched by Dr. Seraphina’s disapproval. In fact, she appeared to be thinking of something else entirely. It was clear to me that Gabriella did not harbor the same sense of rivalry that I did. She felt no need to prove herself.
Seeing how eager I was to begin, Dr. Seraphina stood. “I will leave you to your work,” she said. “Perhaps you will see something in these papers that has eluded me. I have found that our texts will speak deeply to someone or they will say nothing whatsoever. It depends upon your sensitivity toward the subject. The mind and spirit become ripe in their own fashion and at their own pace. Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.”
From my first days as a student, it was my habit to arrive at the Valkos’ lectures early, so as to secure a spot among the multitude of students. Despite the fact that Gabriella and I had sat through the Valkos’ lectures the previous year, we continued to attend them each week. I was drawn to the ambience of passionate inquiry and the illusion of scholarly unity that the lectures presented, while Gabriella appeared to revel in her status as a second-year student from a well-known family. The younger students stared at her throughout the lecture as if gauging her reaction to the Valkos’ assertations. The lectures were conducted in a small limestone chapel built on the fortifications of a Roman temple, its walls thick and calcified, as if they had risen from the quarries that stretched below. The chapel’s ceilings were composed of crumbling brick buttressed by wooden beams, which appeared so rickety that when the rumbling of cars outside became strong, I believed the noise might send the whole edifice tumbling down upon us.