This was the climax, the topstone of the pinnacle of virtues and accomplishments of this marvellous race of beings. The Bedawîn looked incredulous. Miss B. said a few words to the youth in Arabic, when the whole company raised a shout of delight exclaiming—

“See! Hark! She speaks our language like the Holy Prophet! Praised be Allah!”

The Convent of Mar Saba is built on the side of a precipice, four hundred feet high. It clings to the cliff, while its walls are supported by huge buttresses. It is brown, like everything else in the district. Deep silence surrounds it. There it stands, melancholy and alone, without a tree or shrub in sight. Every breeze is shut out by great crags. The sigh of the wind is never heard. Solitude and death seem to reign everywhere. We heard that the wretched inmates—monks exiled for crimes or small offences—become as fossilised as their surroundings.

It was in 480 A.D. St. Saba and St. Euthymius, following the general custom of ascetics, established the first nucleus of the present monastery.

There is a solitary palm growing high up on the side of the building, said to have been planted by the Saint, which sprang up bearing dates without stones on the same day.

There is also a cavern in the rock (into which we did not go) where the Saint lived with his lion, which at first had occupied the whole of the cave, but, finding the Saint refused to be ejected, he gave up the contest and contented himself with a cupboard three feet square, where he slept.

One traveller says that “the monks may scarcely read the valuable manuscripts in their library, yet they hide them carefully from the eyes of heretics. Within the walls they may neither smoke nor eat meat, yet raw spirits find their way past the porter, as we were able to prove. A more hopeless, purposeless, degraded life can scarcely be imagined than that of such hermits.”

Elizabeth and I, accompanied by Mustapha, descended into the Fire Valley, as the huge gorge is called, by which the waters of Jerusalem are carried down to the Dead Sea. It was dry now, and as we looked up at the stern frowning monastery and its solitary palm tree with its bright green leaves, our spirits were depressed, and we hastened on.

It was in that melancholy prison that St. Bernard conjured up the vision of beauty and happiness expressed in his hymn—

“Those eternal bowers