Angelology(46)

within her, as if she had come to St. Rose for the very purpose of hearing them. Even so, the possible

connection between Celestine’s history and her own caused Evangeline the most profound agitation.

Her one consolation was that the library was utterly still. She sat at a table near the fireplace,

placed her pointy elbows upon the wooden surface, and rested her head in her hands, trying to clear

her mind. Although the fire had risen, a trickle of freezing air seeped from the fireplace, creating a

current of intense heat and biting cold that resulted in a strange mixture of sensations upon her skin.

She tried to reconstruct Celestine’s jumbled story as best she could. Taking a piece of paper and a

red marker from a drawer in the table, she jotted the words in a list:

Devil’s Throat Cavern

Rhodope Mountains

Genesis 6

Angelologists

When in need of guidance, Evangeline was more like a tortoise than a young woman—she retreated

into a cool, dark space inside herself, became completely still, and waited for the confusion to pass.

For half an hour, she stared at the words she had written— “Devil’s Throat, Rhodope Mountains,

Genesis 6, Angelologists.” If anyone had told her the previous day that these words would be written

by her, confronting her when she least expected them, she would have laughed. Yet these very words

were the pillars of Sister Celestine’s story. With Mrs. Abigail Rockefeller’s role in the mystery—as

the letter she’d found implied—Evangeline had no choice but to decipher their relation.

While her impulse was to analyze the list until the connections magically revealed themselves,

Evangeline knew better than to wait. She crossed the now-warm library and removed an oversize

world atlas from a shelf. Opening it upon a table, she found a listing for the Rhodope Mountains in the

index and turned to the appropriate page at the center of the atlas. The Rhodopes turned out to be a

minor chain of mountains in southeastern Europe spanning the area from northern Greece into southern

Bulgaria. Evangeline examined the map, hoping to find some reference to the Devil’s Throat, but the

entire region was a mottle of shaded bumps and triangles on the map, signifying elevated terrain.

She recalled that Celestine had mentioned entering the Rhodopes through Greece, and so, running

her finger south, to the sea-locked Grecian mainland, Evangeline found the point where the Rhodopes

rose from the plains. Green and gray covered the areas near the mountains, pointing to a depressed

level of population. The only major roads seemed to emerge from Kavala, a port city on the Thracian

Sea where a network of highways extended to the smaller towns and villages in the north. Moving her

eye to the south of the mountain chain and down into the peninsula, she saw the more familiar names

of Athens and Sparta, places she’d read of in her study of classical literature. Here were the ancient

cities she had always associated with Greece. She’d never heard of the remote sliver of mountain that

fell over its northernmost border with Bulgaria.

Realizing that she could learn only so much about the region from a map, Evangeline turned to a set

of careworn 1960s encyclopedias and located an entry on the Rhodope Mountains. At the center of

the page, she found a black-and-white photograph of a gaping cave. Below the photo she read:

The Devil’s Throat is a cavern cut deep into the core of the Rhodope mountain chain. A narrow gap

sliced into the immense rock of the mountainside, the cavern descends deep below the earth, forming

a breathtaking shaft of air in the solid granite. The passageway is marked by a massive internal

waterfall that cascades over the rock, leveling to form a subterranean river. A series of natural

enclosures at the bottom of the gorge have long been the source of legend. Early explorers reported

strange lights and feelings of euphoria upon entering these discrete caves, a phenomenon that may be

explained by pockets of natural gases.

Evangeline went on to find that the Devil’s Throat had been declared a UNESCO landmark in the

1950s and was considered an international treasure for its vertiginous beauty and its historical and

mythological importance to the Thracians, who lived in the area in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.

While the physical descriptions of the cave were interesting enough, Evangeline was curious to know

more about its historical and mythological importance. She opened a book of Greek and Thracian

mythology, and after a number of chapters describing recent archaeological digs into Thracian ruins,

Evangeline read:

The ancient Greeks believed that the Devil’s Throat was the opening to the mythological underworld

through which Orpheus, king of the Thracian tribe of the Cicones, traveled to save his lover,