"I gather it from your words."
His face was pink like flesh and his eyes were small.
"If you seek God," he said to me, "then it is for but one reason—to abase Him." He threatened me with his finger. "I know your kind. You will not read the Credo a hundred times. Well, read it, and all your foolishness will vanish like smoke. I would send all you heretics to Abyssinia, to the Ethiopians in Africa. There you would perish alive from the heat."
"Were you ever in Abyssinia?" I asked him.
"Yes," he answered.
"And you didn't perish?"
The monk became enraged.
Another time, near the Dneiper, I met a man. He sat on the banks opposite Lafra and he threw stones into the water. He was about fifty, bald, bearded, his face covered with wrinkles, and his head large. At that time I could tell by the eyes if a man was in earnest or not, and I walked up to him and sat down at his side. It was toward evening. The turbid Dneiper rolled its waters hurriedly. Behind it rose the mountains, gray with temples, where the proud golden heads of the churches shimmered in the sun, the crosses glistened and the windows sparkled like precious gems. It appeared that the earth opened its lap and showed her treasure to the sun in proud bounty.
The man next to me said in a low voice, and sorrowfully:
"They should cover Lafra with glass and drive all the monks away from it and permit no one to enter, for there is no man worthy to walk amid such beauty."