Explore "Dieu D'Amour" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS.] One crept up the giddy stairways cut in the cliff-side, and through the passages of vaulted stone, holding one's breath; for at that hour the place was evil.
In the darker angles of the tunnel-like ascent, catamawfreys hung snout downward, nuzzling the dusk. People said they could sing like birds. Father Gregory, the oldest monk in the famous monastery of Belle Pais, below the castle of Dieu d'Amour, said that when he came out to Cyprus from France, years before, there was still at Belle Pais an aged father who had heard them. Others, however, asserted that when Saint Hilarion the Abbot, flying before the throngs of pilgrims who besieged his solitude in the Egyptian desert, had taken refuge in a cavern of the inaccessible peak of Dieu d'Amour, he had exorcised the creatures, and they had vanished in hissing and foul smoke, never to reappear till the coming of the present queen--who knows?