CHAPTER SEVENI look at the remains of the Pharos, meet a man who believes that Alexander the Great is still buried in Alexandria, travel the desert road to Cairo, and see the ruins of the city of St. Mena. In the Wadi Natrun I visit four Coptic monasteries where Christian monks have lived since the Fourth Century.
§ I
ALEXANDRIA was looking her best that night. Her pearl necklace of lights was reflected in still water, the air was warm, and palm trees in the gardens below rose in a windless silence.
The first act of the desert traveller is to call for a bath and a barber. My barber, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, was a Greek. Alexandria is still one of the largest Greek cities in the world, and if someone who had never seen Athens were taken there blindfold and told he was in the capital of Greece, it might be some time before he discovered his mistake. Names are written above shops in what is more or less the alphabet which Plato knew. Greek newspapers are sold everywhere, and you can try to read them in Greek cafes while you sip a glass of ouzo or retsinata.
My Greek barber was a lively, bright-eyed man who professed an undying love for England. I positively blushed as I listened to the virtues which he attributed to us. There was nothing to be done, for obviously a man armed with a razor is a privileged conversationalist. He had at one time worked in the shop of a London hairdresser not far from Picca-dilly, and the fact that I had sometimes had my hair cut there seemed, to him, to establish a unique bond of sympathy between us. He talked of " dear old London." He asked me whether I had ever used a special kind of hair lotion sold in this shop, and I said that I had done so. We agreed that ten shillings a bottle was a fantastic price to pay, but I explained that I was only in the habit of buying it in days when I was very poor; which is true. Suddenly, with a dramatic gesture, for the Greeks are among the most transpontine of people, he pulled open the door of a cabinet which revealed itself to be full of bottles.
" I have taken the recipe! " he cried proudly. " Here is the same mixture . . . exactly, sir! And—to you—three shillings! "
In every Greek I meet I seem to encounter some resemblance, though it may only be a faint distorted one, to Ulysses: of course I bought a bottle, and so far as I can tell it is indeed the same mixture.
Later in the evening I was sitting in the lounge of the hotel when a young Englishman sat down at the next table. I had an idea that, like myself, he was a stranger in the country and we fell naturally into conversation. As he told me about himself, I marvelled at the queer jobs some men manage to find. He was employed by a firm of chocolate manufacturers, whose name is known to everyone, to find out what kind of chocolate the Egyptians like, and why they like it. This, I suppose, is scientific salesmanship. But as we sat in the lounge in Alexandria, it seemed sheer fantasy that this well-dressed, educated, and expensive young man should be going about asking the Orient if it preferred nut-milk or plain. He had recently received a cable asking him to discover why the products of a rival firm were selling so well in Baghdad.
" Do you really mean to tell me," I asked, " that you are going all the way to Baghdad to find out? "
" Oh, it's not so very far," he replied. " I shall fly there."
" And what will you do on your return ? "
" I shall fly over to Cyprus," he replied.There was something ambassadorial about him, and I thought him every bit as strange as any character in the Arabian Nights.
One of the strange things about Egypt is that Alexandria, having been a ruin from the Middle Ages until a century ago, has risen from its grave, not Arab, but almost European. It never belonged to Egypt. It has always been a piece of Europe grafted on to Africa. In the Hellenistic Age it belonged to Greece and, to a great extent, to the Jews; and to-day it belongs to the Levant.
The statement so frequently made that " there is nothing to see in Alexandria " is untrue. What memories crowd round the shores of the Eastern Harbour: memories of Alexander, of Ptolemy, of Caesar, Cleopatra, Antony; of the Seventy Rabbis translating the Septuagint; of St. Mark stepping ashore from his galley; of Bishop Alexander watching the young St. Athanasius playing at baptism on the edge of the sea.
Parts of Alexandria are beautiful, but it is a little difficult to understand why other parts should be so ugly. They might have passed unnoticed if my mind were not filled with a vision of the splendid city which has perished so completely. From a ship at sea Alexandria is entirely satisfactory, for then you might be looking at the marble city which Cleopatra knew. The pressed-concrete buildings and the buildings of stucco and plaster boldly group themselves until it seems that the great Pharos is once again standing out to sea, that the Museum is rising in pale marble above the city, and the Canopic Way, pillared from end to end, still sweeps in white majesty from the Gate of the Sun to the Gate of the Moon.
Nothing but legend is to be discovered of St. Mark's association with Alexandria. In early times there was a martyr's shrine dedicated to him near the Eastern Harbour, but even the site of this has been lost. When St. Paul and St. Barnabas quarrelled so bitterly on the question of St. Mark's fitness for the missionary life, these noble companions parted. St. Paul took Silas and went into Asia Minor; St. Barnabas and St. Mark went together to Cyprus, where St. Barnabas received martyrdom. The Copts say that after his friend's death, St. Mark took ship to Egypt and founded the Church there.
He then accompanied St. Peter to Rome and gleaned from him those vivid touches of the eye-witness which distinguish^ his gospel. It was in Rome at this time, or later, that St. Mark again met St. Paul, then an old man, and became reconciled, possibly because of his work in Egypt. Coptic legends say that St. Mark then returned to Alexandria, where he had ordained as Bishop of Alexandria his first convert, Annianus, a shoemaker. The martyrdom of the Evangelist is said to have taken place in the reign of Nero, and was caused by his protest against a public procession held in honour of the god Serapis. Infuriated by St. Mark's condemnation, the worshippers of Serapis seized him, tied a rope round his neck, and dragged him through the city, repeating this on the following day until death ended his sufferings.
The Cathedral of St. Mark, which in time rose on the site of the place where the faithful had buried the saint, was burned during the Arab invasion, but was re-built in 838 A.D. The bones of St. Mark were at that time intact in the tomb. One of the caliphs is believed to have threatened to plunder the church, and, in order to save the relics, the Egyptians are said to have allowed two Venetian merchants, whose galley was in the harbour, to take them away. These two merchants, Buono Malamocco and Rustico de Torcello, placed the relics of St. Mark in a large basket covered with herbs and pork, which the Moslems, of course, abhorred. So, crying out the word " pork! " at intervals, they passed unquestioned by the customs to their galley. Hoisting sail, they were soon on their way to Venice, where the Cathedral of St. Mark, the glory of Venice, was built to enshrine the martyr's bones.
§ 2
I took a walk one morning to the Isle of Pharos, which is known nowadays as Kait Bey Fort. It stands on a rocky promontory which forms the northern arm of the Eastern Harbour, and is joined to the land by a narrow causeway.
I was more interested in it than I thought I should be, for in the foundations of the Fifteenth Century fortress may still be seen what appear to be the remains of that wonder of the ancient world, the Pharos of Alexandria. The old fort is now uninhabited and ungarrisoned, and I walked through dusty cavernous rooms and peered through embrasures and descended stone stairways, all the time hearing the crash of waves on the north wall, which faces the sea.
The fort is built on solid rock, and some of the huge granite blocks which lie in the sea round it may have belonged to the older building. I believe there are many huge blocks of Aswan granite, which can only be seen from a boat.
When the Arabs conquered Egypt the Pharos was still in working order. It was said to be six hundred feet in height, which is nearly twice the height of St. Paul's in London, and was a stone building formed of several towers, each one smaller than the one below. The first storey was square, the second was possibly octagonal, and the lantern was circular.
The stones were held together with molten lead, which was a better preservative than cement against the assaults of the sea. There are said to have been three hundred rooms in the Pharos, and an inclined roadway led to the lower half of the building, up a slope so gradual that chariots could be driven along it. Donkeys laden with fuel were constantly ascending, and when they had dropped their loads, the wood was lifted to the top of the building by machinery.
Ancient writers say that ships could pick up the beam of the Pharos nineteen miles out at sea, but no one has ever been able to find out whether the ancient Greeks had discovered the use of the lens. The classical writers were so eager to admire the Pharos that they did not explain very clearly how it was constructed or how the light was worked. I suppose they thought that everyone knew this, and they were perhaps unable to imagine a time when not one stone of it would be left upon another.
The Arab chroniclers write with maddening vagueness about a " great mirror " on the summit of the lighthouse, which could be turned to catch the sun's rays so as to burn ships at sea. Another story says that when you looked through the mirror it was possible to see ships as far off as Constantinople ! Putting these stories together, we seem to have a description of a telescope and also a lens. The mirror was reported to be made of " transparent stone," which must surely be a description of glass.
The end of the Pharos came about in this way. During the Ninth Century a Christian spy was sent from Constantinople to wreck the lighthouse because of its usefulness to Moslem shipping. The envoy set about his task in a way which leaves no doubt about his nationality: he was evidently a countryman of Ulysses.
Insinuating himself into the confidence of the Caliph Al-Walid, he said that a great treasure of gold was concealed beneath the lighthouse. There has never been a surer way of wrecking a building in the East.
When the Arabs had almost demolished the Pharos, they appear to have detected the hoax. They tried to rebuild it in brick, but were unable to lift the great mirror back into position. This precious relic, whose existence to-day would have solved the mystery of the Pharos, fell from a height and was shattered to pieces.
Although neglected for centuries, the remains of the Pharos were still visible in 1375, and if an earthquake had not tumbled them into the sea, they might still be in existence to-day.
The Arabs called the Pharos manar—the place where fire burns—a word that is related to the Hebrew menorah, the place of light, which was the word used for the Seven-branched Candlestick. The word manar passed from the Pharos into manaret or minaret, and was applied to the prayer towers of the mosques. I have read somewhere that the Pharos was, architectually, the parent of the minaret, but Dr. Creswell, the great authority on such matters, tells me that the earliest known minaret was a tower in Damascus.
§ 3
I met a man in Alexandria who believes that the body of Alexander the Great is still lying under the city and may some day be discovered. That this surprising theory is not as fantastic as it may sound, is indicated by the interest taken in it by a man who knows- everything there is to know about the archaeology of Alexandria, M. Breccia, once keeper of the Municipal Museum.
After Alexander's body had been brought from Babylon, it was laid to rest in a splendid tomb in Alexandria, where in the course of time all the Ptolemies, including the famous Cleopatra, were buried.
Alexander's tomb was the central feature of this extraordinary collection of defunct royalty, and was evidently a place which was freely visible. He was buried " in the Macedonian fashion "; that is to say, his corpse was placed on a stone plinth like a bed and laid to rest in a room with an open door, "which led to an apartment furnished with stone benches and a central altar, where members of the family would come from time to time to eat and make offerings, just as modem Moslems do to-day in the tombs outside Cairo. A number of Hellenistic tombs of this type have recently been unearthed at Chatby, near Alexandria, and these probably reproduce, though in a less splendid manner, the tomb of the great Conqueror.
Alexander's mummy was enclosed in a golden coffin in which it remained until Ptolemy IX had it melted down to pay his Syrian mercenaries. It was then placed in a coffin of crystal in which it was to be seen when Strabo was in Alexandria in 24 A.D. The Roman emperors showed reverence for this tomb. Augustus paid it a pious visit and Caracalla left there his mantle, his belt, and his jewels, as an offering, so that even at this late period the body of Alexander must have been lying in its crystal coffin.
If the tomb was rifled during the revolutions and wars of the Third Century, or when Alexandria fell into ruin some time after the Arab Invasion, there is no record left of it. And it is surely unlikely that a tomb venerated alike by Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, for Alexander figures as a hero in the Koran, could have been sacked in secret, or that no one should have put it on record.
That the tomb was lost among the ruins of the royal palaces is evident from a remark in one of the homilies of St. John Chrysostom. " Tell me," he asks, " where the Sema (the tomb) of Alexander is? " It is clear that he is asking what he feels to be the impossible. So at the end of the Fourth Century the whereabouts of Alexander's burial place had been forgotten.
Archaeologists believe that the place known to have been occupied by the Sema of Alexander is to-day an ancient mosque dedicated to a deeply venerated saint said to be the Prophet Daniel. Those who support the theory that Alexander's body was never destroyed, but was merely lost, believe that Daniel is Alexander: " Everything goes to show that Alexander's Tomb was in the vicinity of the Mosque of Nebi Daniel, if not under the mosque itself," says M. Breccia. The theory is that the Arabs discovered an imposing tomb containing an unknown body, which, for want of a better name, they called Daniel, and they built a mosque over it.
The ground under the mosque has never been disturbed, and every time this has been suggested religious objections are put in the way. The idea that Daniel is Alexander is not a novel theory: it has apparently been in existence for centuries. When that delightful traveller, George Sandys, whose bones now lie in Boxley Church, near Maidstone, visited Alexandria in 1610, he was told of " a little Chappell within a tombe, much honoured and visited by the Mahometans, where they bestow their almes supposing his (Alexander's) body to lie in that place."
Seventy-eight years ago considerable impetus was given to the story when a dragoman named Schilizzi, in the service of the Russian Consulate, claimed to have descended into the tomb chamber of the mosque. He said that in 1850 he had penetrated into the vaults below the mosque and had come to a wooden door with a hole in it. Looking through this hole, he saw a " human body whose head was crowned with a diadem," preserved in a cage made of glass. The figure was not lying down, but was, so far as he could make out in ,the dim light, sitting bent on what looked like a throne or elevation of some sort. A number of books and papyri were scattered about.
This story has always been regarded as a dragoman's tale, and no importance has ever been placed on it. Even though we may dismiss Schilizzi as a liar, we must admit that he was voicing the tradition of centuries.
When I went to visit this mosque, which stands near the tramlines running down the Sharia Nebi Daniel, I found it closed on account of some feast day. It is an ordinary looking mosque with a minaret and several domes, as well as a pleasant little garden at the back where a few palm trees grow.
§ 4
I decided to take the new desert road from Alexandria to Cairo to see the four Coptic monasteries of the Wadi Natrun, which lie half way between these cities. I started one morning at six o'clock and was soon driving rapidly across a Roman-straight ribbon of tar that in some miraculous way had been laid on the desert. This road looks like a black tape stretching to the sky, and on either side of it there is nothing but a gaunt, yellow emptiness. It is, however, a dangerous and deceptive road. The desert is never flat for long, and the result is that the road is full of sudden long dips which conceal an approaching car until it is almost on top of you. We had a pointed warning when a lorry driven at fifty miles an hour shot up in front of us as suddenly as a demon in a pantomime; and had we been following the fashion and driving on the wrong side of the road, nothing could have saved us.
After about ten miles a narrow track sprawled off to the west. I saw that it led to the ruined city of St. Mena, a saint who is not very well known in the west. I wondered what remained of this city, and so we turned off and were soon alone among miles of sand and dunes.
Years ago my attention was first drawn to St. Mena in a small shop on West Hill, Wandsworth. It is the only one of its kind that I know of in London where you can buy fragments of the ancient world for an absurdly reasonable price. From a mass of pottery I drew out several small flat clay flasks, each impressed with a raised design showing a man in Roman dress flanked by two animals which looked like camels. After I had bought them, I discovered that they were pilgrim oil flasks from the Church of St. Mena in Maryut, and that the man was the saint himself.
Mena was born of Christian parents in the Third Century, in answer to a prayer which his mother addressed to an ikon of the Blessed Virgin. As she finished her prayer, she heard a voice from the ikon agreeing to grant her wish, and she caught the sound of the word " amen," which was pronounced in the eastern manner as " amin." When the child was born, he was called Amen, or Mena, which preserves the second syllable of the eastern pronunciation. He grew up and entered the army, and was eventually promoted to be a military governor. When Diocletian persecuted the Church, it was the duty of Mena to imprison the Christians in his own district. This he refused to do. He wandered out in the desert to ask God's help, and while he was kneeling in prayer, he heard a voice saying: " Whosoever bears suffering for the name of Christ shall wear such crowns as these "; looking up, he saw a host of martyrs wearing crowns that shone with more than the splendour of gold.
He returned to the city and declared himself a Christian. He was tortured and martyred, and his body was buried at Cotyaea, in Phrygia. Some time after, when Christian troops were leaving this town for Egypt, they took the body of St. Mena and carried it along with them. Some accounts say that during the voyage strange creatures came out of the sea with heads like camels and attempted to lick the body, but flames came forth and drove them back into the water.
St. Mena was buried under the cottage floor where he had been born, beside the Lake of Mareotis. The time came when the troops were again moved and once more they gathered his bones with the object of taking them away, but the camel on which they were placed refused to move. Another camel was brought and he also refused; therefore the soldiers, seeing the will of God in this, buried the martyr where the camels had stood, and went their way.
The simple grave was quite forgotten until one day a shepherd passed by with a flock of sick sheep. There was a spring of water near, and when a sheep entered this water and rolled on the ground, the shepherd saw that it became cured. The news of the healing spring began to spread itself about the world until it reached distant Constantinople, where the Emperor's daughter lay smitten with leprosy. It was decided to send her to Alexandria in the hope that the spring of water might do for her what all the doctors had failed to do. She arrived, and after mixing some dust with the water, rubbed her body with it and slept that night near the spring. While she slept St. Mena appeared to her in a dream and told her that he was buried in that place. She returned, cured, to her father, who erected a splendid church there as a thankoffering. In the Fourth Century the Emperor Arcadius added to this church.
By this time the shrine of St. Mena had become known over the Christian world. From the Fifth Century to the Seventh it was the Lourdes of Egypt. Pilgrims came from all parts to visit the tomb and to take away some of the spring water, which was sold in small flasks of clay impressed with the image of St. Mena and the camels.
Like the other warrior saint, St. Sergius of Resafa, St. Mena crossed the Mediterranean, and churches were dedicated to him in Rome, 'Aries, and Cologne. The Roman church stood on the Via Ostia, not far from the bridge across the Almone and close to its junction with the Tiber. As recently as 1350 a hospital was attached to it which, says Dom Leclerq, was no doubt " the religious centre of the Alexandrian colony of sailors and merchants whose business transactions brought them to Rome." Both church and hospital have now disappeared.
We travelled for some ten or twelve miles across a sandy desert, along a track that was rarely used. There was nothing to see but flat brown country rising here and there in low ridges and lying beneath an arc of intense blue. As we went on, I thought how literally the Roman army in the first three centuries might be termed " soldiers of Christ." Saint after saint in Egypt's martyrology was a Roman soldier turned Christian, who suffered death for his Saviour's sake. Common soldiers and officers stand together in the ranks of Egyptian sainthood in such numbers that it would seem almost as if the mantle of the apostles had been changed into a military cloak.
Mikhail suddenly pointed ahead, saying "Abu Mena!". Looking into the yellow glare, I made out the ruins of a large city lying uninhabited and desolate in the desert. I was soon climbing over the ruins, looking at shattered roadways and gazing from the immense piles of debris which shone here and there with chips of snow-white marble. I went into the largest of three churches, the superb basilica Arcadius. What a lovely church this must have been, a building sheeted with every colour of rare marble, a pavement of tinted polished stone stretching its whole length, and its roof upheld by fifty-six columns with richly carved capitals, of which only the bases and an occasional fallen capital now remain.
The ruins are confusing until you realise that three large churches of different periods have been built together, east end to west end, forming one enormous building but at the same time still retaining their own separate characters and purposes. The first church is a beautiful octagonal baptistry; even in its ruin, I think it is the most beautiful I have ever seen. In the centre of the marble pavement stands a long marble font designed for the total immersion of a great number of converts. It is level with the floor and those to be baptised descended marble steps and walked through the water, ascending a corresponding flight of marble steps at the opposite end.
The next church is of the same early period. It is the original church, in whose centre, just as the column of St. Simeon Stylites occupies the centre of Kala'at Si'man, rises the marble balustrade from which steps descend to the burial crypt of St. Mena. The third church is the huge cruciform building erected by Arcadius, with a pillared nave leading to a high altar placed at the meeting of the wide transepts. The altar stood beneath a marble canopy lifted on marble columns, and behind it there are the remains of a tribune in the curve of a marble apse.
All round the church lie the remains of the guest-houses, the shops, the baths, and the potteries where the small clay flasks of St. Mena were made. Here in Egypt, fifteen centuries or more ago, crowds of invalids and those who had made a pilgrimage for the sake of someone they loved, who was too ill to travel, gathered to pray at the shrine of the saint and to take home the precious oil, or water, in the little flasks with their effigy of a Roman soldier and two camels.
I wondered how such a solid town as this could have tumbled so quickly into ruins. Its later history is not completely known, but it seems clear that disaster after disaster came upon it after the Moslem Conquest, culminating in the destruction of the whole town to provide stone for the new buildings which the Caliph Mu'tasim erected at Samarra, near Baghdad, about 836 A.D. I suppose if one looked carefully among the buildings at Samarra in that sconeless country, one would discover many a trace of the once glorious marble sanctuary of Egypt's soldier saint.
Yet Christianity in Egypt is extraordinarily resilient, and as you turn the pages of history after a major disaster to the Church, you see that candles are still burning in the sanctuary, that incense still ascends before the altar. It was so with Abu Mena.
After the Caliph's destruction of the town, after thousands of tons of marble had been carried to Irak, and after the very pavement had been prized up and carted away, the church was quietly rebuilt; and it was flourishing in the Eleventh Century. An Arab writer, El Bekri, is our sole authority. He was travelling in the district at that time, and says that he came to " a great church which contains statues and sculptures of the greatest beauty. The lamps burn day and night, without ceasing. At one end of this building is a great dome containing the image of a man standing with each foot upon a camel, one of his hands is open and the other closed. This group, all in marble, represents, they say, Abu Mena."
He also gives us a curious piece of information. He says that part of the church was a mosque! In one portion men prayed to Christ; in the other to Mohammed. So the Lamb lay down with the lion, as indeed happened once in the Monastery of Mount Sinai, where to this day a mosque is to be found within the Christian walls, side by side with one of the oldest churches in the world.
Mr. Anthony de Cosson, who has studied the Maryut district of Egypt, and whose book Mareotis is the only one of its kind, tells me that he believes the final blow was given to Abu Mena by the Black Death. He thinks that plague fell upon this place of healing and even Abu Mena was powerless to help. Desolate and deserted, the town fell into decay. Earthquakes shattered it. Year after year the wind drove the sand over the stones until even the name of the town was forgotten. But from time to time little flat flasks were dug up on which St. Mena was seen standing beside his camels. It was not until 1905 that Monsignor Kaufmann of Frankfurt, searching in the desert, identified the mounds which the Arabs called Tell Aboma as the pilgrimage town which had been lost for something like five centuries. He received permission to dig there, and what he found now lies open to the blue sky of Egypt.
§ 5
We were travelling again towards Cairo when we came to the only sign of life on the roadside: a tent, a petrol pump, and a stone building in the process of erection. A Greek emerged from the tent and presented his card, on which I read with appreciation the name D. Xenophon. As I ate lunch in the tent, Mr. Xenophon explained that the new road to Alexandria had seemed to demand some public-spirited effort in the matter of rest and accommodation, and he had therefore decided to build an hotel in the desert. It was the unfinished building I had seen. We climbed all over it after lunch and, perilously mounting ladders, reached the roof. The view over the desert was superb.
Mr. Xenophon is not aware perhaps that he has made it easy to visit one of the most interesting sights in Egypt, the last four inhabited monasteries of the Wadi Natrun. The few travellers who visited them in the old days, and Robert Curzon is, perhaps, the best known, describe weary journeys by camel before they could be reached. It was necessary to take a tent and to camp out there, and so to move, camping from time to time, until all four monasteries had been seen. But to-day you can reach them in two to three hours from Alexandria or Cairo, and, if you want to see them in a leisurely and comfortable way, you will be able to stay with Mr. Xenophon.
The desert begins to slope down to the west immediately behind the hotel, and this slope descends into a valley about twenty miles long, and is seventy-six feet below the level of the sea. This is the Wadi Natrun—the Natron Valley. In the deepest part of the valley are lakes which almost dry up in summer, but are filled again by the infiltration of Nile water during the inundation. During the hot weather the water evaporates, leaving plentiful deposits of natron behind; this chemical is a compound of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, which the water brings up from the beds of the lakes.
The natron in this valley has been gathered for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians used it in the process of mummification, for the manufacture of glass, for cooking, and in medicine. Modern Egyptians use it for glass and soap making and the bleaching of linen, and some of them are in the habit of mixing it with tobacco and chewing it.
Bidding farewell to Mr. Xenophon, we motored down the sandy slope and slowly descended into a hot, windless valley, and with an eagerness which I cannot exaggerate, I looked forward to seeing the four monasteries which have been in existence in the Wadi Natrun since the Fourth Century.
Egypt is the home of the monastery, and monasticism is Egypt's gift to the Church. The first Christian monks and nuns were men and women of the Fourth Century who turned their backs on life and went out into the desert to be alone with God, and to lead lonely lives of prayer and fasting. What made this movement so extraordinary was its national character. Within a generation the land was covered with monasteries and cells in which a large proportion of the population was segregated. Young and old, rich and poor, went out with gladness to seek a spiritual life. Whole towns like Oxyrhynchus were inhabited by monks and nuns. Everywhere up and down the Nile the temples of the old gods had been turned into monasteries. On the slopes of desolate and inaccessible mountains, and on flat wastes of burning sand, stood still more monasteries; and caves and tombs were tenanted by hermits who gazed with fear and horror at the pictures which their ancestors had painted on the walls.
Towards the end of the century the Government was seriously embarrassed in its attempt to raise levies, because so great a proportion of the young manhood of the country had embraced the monastic life and claimed to be exempt from military service. Indeed, the administrators of that day saw whole cities and districts pledged to celibacy, and must have feared the possibility that the race might end, extinguished by its own fear of the physical.
This is a strangely blank period in Egyptian history. Everyone knows the story of the Pharaohs, which went before, and equally well known is the time that came after, the period of Arab rule. In between is this queer gap of something like four or five centuries, during which the Egyptian people are a mystery. It was at this time that the whole nation seemed to change its habits and its characteristics.
The ancient Egyptians whom we know so well were gay, laughter-loving people, who liked the easy, comfortable things of life. We can see them depicted in the tombs, sitting in the shade of their vines, listening to music, and watching dancers; or grouped round the festive table, drinking, sometimes too much, and eating large quantities of delicious food. Then the curtain falls on them. We see nothing for a time but Greeks and Jews in Alexandria. The curtain rises on the Egyptians again—but is it possible that these are the descendants of the old Egyptians ? It is a most remarkable transformation. Here is a nation in sack-cloth and ashes. Here are half-naked hermits lifting emaciated arms to God in the lonely places of the land. Here are thousands of men and women vowed to poverty and hardship. Here is a nation striving to stamp out all the desires of the body in order that the soul may rise triumphant. Such is the Egypt of the Desert Fathers.
The ancient Egyptians believed, as the moderns do, that the desert was haunted by evil spirits and that was one of the reasons why the hermits went to live there: they deliberately entered Satan's country in order that they might pit the strength of their faith against the evil which they felt to exist all round them. It is wrong to think that these men entered the desert to escape temptation. It was the exact opposite, for to an Egyptian of that time the desert contained infinitely more temptation than a city, and, as the tempters were supernatural, they were more difficult to fight.
The hermit guarding his soul in the desert might not relax his vigilance for one instant, or the devils would be at him. He was on perpetual sentry duty, pacing the ramparts of his soul, ever on the watch for the enemy and for the spies. of the enemy, for Satan was always sending out scouts^ They came in disguise, sometimes even in the habit of holy-men and speaking in a voice of hypocritical sanctity; therefore it behoved every hermit to look beyond the exterior and the fair face of words into the soul of things, if he would not be lured away. A dangerous adversary was Satan's daughter, in whose existence the early hermits firmly believed. She was a woman, more than presentable, who, like all the fiends of hell, had the freedom of the desert and would often be sent out by her parent when other more obvious troops had failed to carry an objective.
There was only one way to keep evil at bay: by unceasing prayer. All the fiends together, led by Satan himself, were powerless against the pure soul of a truly holy man. Thus the great hermits, though they were encompassed by clouds of devils, remained safe and secure in the strongholds of their sanctity. Every hermit was surrounded by a wall of prayer which grew higher and stronger with the years. Every day and night spent on the knees in communion with God added another stone to the protective rampart.
St. Anthony, though so mighty a man of prayer, was one of the most devil-pestered of all hermits. And this, of course, was natural, for the greater the man the greater Satan's triumph in his capture; the higher, the more impregnable the fortress of faith, the greater the satisfaction of the enemy in the fall of such a citadel of God. The name of Christ and the Sign of the Cross were two infallible protections against the attacks of devils. When St. Anthony saw them prowling round the ramparts, looking this way and that for a possible breach in the defences, he would often blow a puff of wind at them and make the Sign of the Gross, and, lo, they would vanish into thin air, although a moment before they had seemed solid creatures of the earth.
In order to become a monk, it was necessary to take nothing into the desert but love of God, humility, and a determination to stamp out every bodily desire. " As the body groweth the soul becometh weak; the more the body becometh emaciated the more the soul groweth," was a saying of Anba Daniel, and another holy man, Anba Poemen, used to say, " the Spirit of God never entereth into the house wherein there are delights and pleasures."
Dry bread, baked perhaps once in six months or a year, and softened in water before use, salt, and herbs, were the diet of a monk, but the more advanced ascetics did not eat every day. An ordinary monk would eat in the evening, but he would strive to subdue his appetite until he could go without food for two days, then perhaps for three days, and so forth, until eventually he would be able to fast without difficulty for a week. Some of the more severe Fathers considered that even dry bread inflamed the passions. Theodotus said, " Abstinence from bread quieteth the body of a monk." Others declined to touch herbs that had been cooked, and took as their ideal the saying, " eat grass, wear grass, and sleep on grass," a maxim which some actually put into practice.
Silence was another rule of the monastic life. Arsenius said that even the twittering of a sparrow would prevent a monk from acquiring repose of heart, while the sound of wind in the reeds would make it absolutely impossible. A naturally talkative monk named Agathon only learned silence by holding a stone in his mouth for three years. Sleep also had to be conquered. Arsenius trained himself until one hour's sleep a night was enough for him. Anba Sisoes was in the habit of spending the night standing on the very edge of a precipice, so that one moment of unconsciousness would have hurled him to death.
Yet when the great Macarius visited a sick brother and asked what he wanted, and the brother replied, " I want some honey-cakes," Macarius, without a word, set out for Alexandria, sixty miles away, and procured them. Love and charity were as important as humility and endurance. Once when the holy Bishop Ammon visited a community, he was asked to take disciplinary action because one of the monks had harboured a woman in his cell. The others, outraged by this offence, asked Ammon to expel him from the community. The bishop entered the cell with a search party, knowing full well that the woman was hidden all the time beneath a large water-jar. He sat on this while the monks searched here and there for the emissary of Satan, and after they had gone away, the bishop said to the erring monk, " Take heed to thy soul," and quietly departed.
The childlike charm of desert life is beautifully illustrated by a story told by Rufinus in his Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Two ancient hermits had lived peacefully together for years. " At last one of them said to the other, simply, ' Let us have a quarrel, as other men have.' And when the other answered that he did not know how to quarrel, the first replied, ' Look here, I will place this stone in the midst between you and me; I will say it is mine, and do you say that that is not true, but that it is yours—and in this manner we will make a quarrel.' And placing the stone in the midst, he said, ' This stone is mine!' And the other said ' No, it is mine!' And the first said, ' It is not yours, I say, but mine!' And the other said, ' If it be yours, then take it.' And, in short, they could by no means contrive to quarrel, being so accustomed to peace."
Another beautiful story—told by Palladius, who lived for years with the monks—is that of the drudge of a convent, a woman who waited on all the sisters and performed so many duties that, as Palladius perfectly terms it, she was the " broom of the whole nunnery." She wore over her head a piece of roughly cut cloth instead of the well-made veils worn by her sisters. The others would not let her sit down with them, and when she was eating, they never looked at her. She never touched an unbroken piece of bread, but was content to eat the scraps left by the others, and she drank the rinsings of the basins.
Now while the holy Anba Piterius, " that man of wonder," was living in the Mountain of Porphyry, an angel appeared to him and told him that in the nunnery at Tabenna was a woman who was his superior in saintliness. He was rebuked (and no saint is too great to suffer such rebukes) and told to go to the nunnery and look for a nun with a piece of rough cloth cast over her head. " Her whole heart is set upon God," concluded the angel, "whilst, as for thee, though thou dwellest here, thy mind wandereth about in many countries."
When the holy man arrived, all the sisters gathered to receive his blessing, save only " the broom of the whole nunnery." Looking round, and unable to see a nun wearing a piece of rough cloth, Piterius asked for her. " Master, she is of no account," he was told. Piterius said, " Bring her that I may see her also." The nuns went out and returned dragging the protesting sister, snatched from some rough labour. As soon as Piterius saw her, he bowed down before her, saying, " Bless me, mother," and she fell at his feet, saying unto him, " Bless thou me, master." When the sisters, struck with wonder, ventured to interrupt, saying that the nun was a person of no account, the holy Piterius turned on them in anger, crying, " Ye yourselves are creatures of no account, but this woman is your mother and mine, and I entreat God that He will give unto me a portion with her in the Day of Judgment." Then the sisters fell at her feet and implored her forgiveness for their conduct towards her.
This is not the end of the story. The ending seems to me truly characteristic of the desert. Palladius tells us that unable to endure the penitence and the praise to which her companions subjected her from that moment, the humble sister quietly disappeared and no one ever discovered where she went—" and where she died no man knoweth."
The founder of Christian monasticism was St. Anthony, whose temptations are so celebrated. Although there were isolated hermits before his time, he is regarded as the founder of monastic rule because he was the first saint round whom other monks grouped themselves in a desire to follow his way of life.
He was the son of well-to-do Egyptian parents and was bom in Middle Egypt about the year 250 A.D. He was a shy, delicate boy and did not go to school because he disliked the roughness of the other boys. He grew up without a knowledge of Greek and was never a bookman. When he was twenty years of age his father died, leaving him the possessor of property and the guardian of a small sister. One day when he was in church, St. Anthony heard the voice of God:
" If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me."
St. Anthony sold his possessions, and leaving his sister in the care of a pious woman, retired to a ruin not far away, where he lived in solitude for twenty years. His austerities, his temptations, and his triumphant life of prayer spread his fame throughout Egypt, so that he became much troubled by visitors. He escaped into more remote solitudes. Other men who desired to be like him gathered about him and he was obliged to make the choice either of escaping from them or of coming forth and leading them. It was an historic moment when Anthony came out of his cell and decided to teach his brethren; for in that moment monasticism was born.
Even so, it was necessary for the life of his soul that he should live alone. Joining a caravan, he journeyed across the Arabian desert and found a cave high in a steep mountain, where he lived until his death. The monks would visit him for guidance and he would visit them in return at frequent intervals, to supervise their way of life. At least twice he went to Alexandria, where his appearance caused a sensation. The first occasion was during the persecution of Maximin, when he comforted those in prison, and the second was to support his friend, St. Athanasius, against the heretic Arians.
He died aged one hundred and five years, leaving two sheepskins as his sole possessions. He left one to St. Athanasius and the other to Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis. All his life he had been haunted by a horror of mummies and mummification, for it was still the custom for Egyptian Christians to mummify their dead and to keep the mummies in the house for some time, in order that the deceased might be visited by friends and relatives. The aged Anthony, pledging the two disciples who tended him in the last years to bury him in the earth in some secret place, fell asleep in God with a blessing on his lips; and no man knows where he lie?
Though the inspirer of monasticism, St. Anthony was not the organiser. He had all the charm of a dreamer and an idealist, but he was not a practical man. His monks were solitaries who were subject to no rules save those of conscience, and who performed no tasks save the austerities which they copied from those of their master. The man whose genius organised monastic life was Pakhom, or Pachomius, an Egyptian born of pagan parents about the year 285 A.D. He is said to have been converted to Christianity while watching the endurance of martyrs during the persecutions under Diocletian. He served in the army during the reign of Constantine, and there can be no doubt that the order and discipline which he introduced into the individualistic life of the desert was due to this military training. When he left the army, he went for instruction to a hermit in the Thebaid, and then began to found monasteries with a definite rule of life. The monks had to work for their living at the various trades to which they had been accustomed. Houses were set apart in which were grouped men of various trades: a " House of Bakers," a " House of Potters," a " House of Weavers," and so forth. Each monastery was under the rule of an abbot and each house under that of a prior. Like a true soldier, he prescribed a uniform for his monks, and he invented the cowl. They wore a rough tunic tied with a girdle, with a hood hanging at the back which could be drawn over the head during meal times. Monks had to sleep three in a cell and to eat in a common messroom, or refectory. Each monastery was as orderly and as organised as a camp. It was surrounded by a wall, and contained a church, a refectory, a library, kitchens, workshops, wash-houses, an infirmary, and a garden.
Newcomers who wished to enter the Pachomian monasteries had to wait outside the gate for some days, while they were coached in the proper psalms and prayers under the care of the doorkeepers. There was then a long period of probation before they could become monks. Chastity, poverty, obedience, and work, were among the rules of the Pachomian System. The work undertaken by the monks was handicrafts which were taken at intervals to the nearest markets and sold, the proceeds going to the upkeep of the monasteries. Discipline was strict and punishment was administered to offenders by the abbot.
This system brought the ideal of monasticism from the clouds down to earth, and continued side by side with the older method of monastic life. They were in no sense rivals. i There was room for both of them. St. Anthony had heard 1'1 of the Pachomian System and thought highly of it, and was sorry that he never had the chance of meeting its originator. Although a much younger man than St. Anthony, Pachomius died ten years before that saint.
The solitary type of monasticism was, however, always more popular in Egypt than organised monasticism, and it was the Life of Anthony, by St. Athanasius, which introduced the monastic ideal to the West. If the life of Pachomius had been circulated instead, perhaps the world would not have waited so long for St. Benedict.
There are only seven monasteries in Egypt still inhabited by monks. Four of them are in the Wadi Natrun, the famous holy district of Scetis; one is at Asyut; and two are in the Arabian desert, not far from the Red Sea, Der Anba Bula, the Monastery of St. Paul, and Der Anba Antonious, the Monastery of St. Anthony.
These monasteries have a history which links them with the Fourth Century, and they are the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. You may imagine with what keen interest I now found myself descending the sandy slopes of the Wadi Natrun to find out what the modern monks of Egypt are like, how they live, and what resemblance, if any, they bear to their famous predecessors.
§ 6
The desert slopes gradually to the natron lakes, where the red chimney of a chemical factory lifts itself in a great expanse of sand. A factory in the desert is an unusual sight. It looked to me rather like a prehistoric monster that had come to drink the turgid natron water; a creature that, aware of its vulnerability in open country, was lifting its tall red neck with a certain apprehension.
The factory workers live in a village near by, in which there is also a post of the Frontiers Administration. Hearing the sound of a car, the post, and that part of the village which was not at work, which included all the children and dogs, turned out to greet us. The captain of the post politely asked where I was going, and then offered to send the local sheik and a sergeant with me. The sheik was a middle-aged man with the moustache of a -Guards sergeant-major. He had a heavy gold egal binding his keffieh, such as I have seen before only on the brows of Arabian royalty, and at his belt was a leather holster from which protruded the butt of a revolver. The sergeant was a six-foot Sudanese in khaki, who grasped a long hide camel-whip.
These two climbed into a desert patrol lorry and led the way across the slopes of sand which rise into the bare fastness of the Desert of Scetis, a desert which stretches without a break westward to the boundary of Tripoli, and then, still westward, into the Sahara, with its three and a half million square miles of desolation.
As we mounted the sandhills, we saw three touches of white on the desert, about four miles away: one was standing by itself, and there were two close together. It was like sighting ships at sea, for there was nothing else to attract the eye. These were the walls of the desert monasteries. Stopping the patrol car, the sheik pointed towards them and told me their names. That to the right, standing by itself, was Der el-Baramus; then, six miles to the left, Der Anba Bishoi and Der es-Syriani stood together, a mile of sand separating them. To which should we go first? I told him to go to Der el-Baramus. But where was Der Macarius, the most famous monastery of them all ? The sheik pointed to the left and said that it was twelve miles away, out of sight.
For a time we had all three monasteries in view, and I could see that they were built on the same plan. Each one lay within a high, rectangular wall, and each had only one gateway. There was absolutely nothing round them but the flat desert, stretching as far as the eye could see. No roads led to the gates, no wheel-tracks, no footprints of man or beast lay around them. A remarkable air of alert-ness was given to them by the absence of any kind of outbuildings. They were three white boxes on a brown table.
At first I saw only the walls shining against the sand, but as we approached Baramus, squat white domes and the tops of buildings and a few palm trees showed above the ramparts, for ramparts they were. Each monastery proclaimed itself a fortress built to endure siege and assault, and to their history is due their permanent air of watchfulness. The buildings fell back within the enclosure as we drew into the long shadow of the wall.
The sheik pulled a bell-rope that hung from the top of the wall'. A faint tinkle sounded on the other side. But nothing 'happened. The monastery remained as silent as the tomb. An earthenware pot of water stood on a flat stone near the gate, and the sheik told me that it was the custom—" from old, old times "—for the monks to place water outside for travellers and Bedouin. Every monastery, he said, had its water-jar. Thus at the gates of my first monastery, in the last abode of the Desert Fathers, I encountered a relic of that charity and thoughtfulness for others which the hermits and monks prized so highly in their Golden Age.
I was impressed not only by the strength of the wall, but also by the vast archway which formed so strange a contrast to the gate itself. The archway was made for giants, but the gate for dwarfs. There was no need to ask the reason for this narrow postern; it spoke eloquently enough of desert raids.
At last we heard a voice, and we saw above us a brown old man gazing down from the top of the wall with a puzzled expression. He wore a white skull-cap and a dusty black shirt. Did we want to come in? Who were we? He asked a lot of questions and at last said that he would come down and open the gate. Eventually we heard the noise of many keys turned, of many a bar shot back, and the tiny gate opened gingerly to reveal our ancient friend of the ramparts, holding three or four immense keys, one of them a wooden toothed dabba about two feet in length.
Although I was impatient to see the inside of this queer place, I spent some moments examining the door. Never have I seen one so loaded with chains, bolts, locks, and wooden cross-bars. It looked as though the inventors of such things had been practising on it for the past ten centuries. As if this were not enough, the narrow passage behind the door could be filled with stones, thus sealing up the entrance to the monastery; and in this way has the last glimmer of Christianity been kept alive in the Desert of Scetis.
The old man led the way towards a remarkable collection of buildings, shining with a blinding whiteness in the hard sunlight. Some were roofed with clusters of domes like white button mushrooms, and all were crowded together without plan or method. There was a central square, an overgrown garden where palm trees and a few orange trees in fruit rose from a mass of shrubs and plants. We passed several cells. The door of one was open. A monk sat cross-legged on a mat inside, busy with pen and parchment as he copied a liturgical book in Arabic. Like the old man, he wore a skull-cap and a black gallabia.
I was led towards the guest-house, a modern, half-French-looking house with a verandah on the upper storey and wooden slatted shutters to all the windows. A number of monks, some of great age, emerged like blackbeetles from their cells to look at me. There was no question about their poverty and it was also evident that, like the first Desert Fathers, they scorned soap and water as a pandering to the flesh.
Upstairs in the guest-house was a plainly furnished room where I was asked to sit down. Divans ran all round it. A photograph of the present patriarch, and of an equally bearded and ancient man who may have been his predecessor, hung framed on the walls. Curtains of some dark material were more or less attached to curtain poles, and it occurred to me how lifeless a room can become when it has never known a woman. It is probably natural for a man to live in a cave, but not in a room. As soon as he has a room, it demands a woman to choose a colour for it and to keep it clean, and to see that all the inanimate things, which obey women, such as rugs, carpets, chairs, tables, and fabrics, keep their proper place. The curtains of this room, hanging so reluctantly, seemed to me pathetic, perhaps a distant memory of some monk's home in Asyut; and I wondered if the Desert Fathers ever find themselves obliged to seek the advice of the youngest brother, as the one last in touch with the lost world of womankind, on the correct method of hanging curtains and the right way they should be looped back.
My reflections were interrupted by the entrance of a man not much more than five feet in height, who wore a round black turban, a black gown, and a pair of slippers. As he came forward and shook hands, I knew that he was the abbot. I suppose visitors to Der el-Baramus in the course of a year might be counted on the hands, yet the abbot greeted me as if he had been expecting me, and asked no questions; which is one of the most ancient rules of courtesy. I could tell that he wondered why I should have come, so I satisfied his curiosity to the full; and we were soon talking about the great ones of the past. A brother entered with little cups full of scalding hot tea.
When I visited the other monasteries in the days that followed, I was to discover that I had been fortunate in my first abbot. He was more alert and intellectual than most Coptic dignitaries. He told me that there are thirty-five monks now in the monastery and that 'the word Baramus is an Arabic corruption of Pa Romeos, the cell, or monastery, of the Romans. When I asked him who the Romans were, he told me an interesting story.
About the year 380 A.D., two holy young brothers, famed for the miracles they had worked, came from Palestine to live in the Desert of Scetis. The monasteries were not yet built, but the desert was full of anchorites living in caves and in huts of reed and matting. The young men were St. Maximus and St. Domatius.
The two brothers were known to their fellow hermits as the " Young Strangers." St. Maximus " achieved perfection," but St. Domatius, though an exceedingly holy young man, was not quite and here the abbot fluttered his hand up and down to indicate that the brother saint fell short of absolute perfection only by so much as a flutter.
Whether they were carried off by plague or by the severity of their austerities is unknown, but both young men died not long after their arrival, and " all the saints gathered to welcome them into heaven." Soon afterwards the her of Scetis, the great St. Macarius, passed that way, and he told the monks to build a church in memory of the " Young Strangers " and call it Pa Romeos.
At my request the abbot first took me up to the sentry walk that runs round the wall on the inside. Here, forty feet or so above the sand, we looked out over miles of desert, and over the vaults and domes of the monastery buildings within the walls. All the monasteries of the Wadi Natrun are essentially the same: fortified walls with one gate, and inside them churches, cells, a refectory, a bakehouse, a mill, various outbuildings, and, most prominent of all, a high square keep called a kasr, or fortress, standing by itself and provided with a wooden drawbridge. The monks would barricade themselves in these keeps if the monasteries were invaded, pulling up the drawbridge behind them.
I asked if he had any swords or muskets from the days of the Arab raids, and he was astonished to think that monks should fight with arms. For something like fifteen centuries, it appears, they have repelled their enemies with boiling water and stones. The last time this monastery was attacked by the Bedouin was during the Eighteenth Century.
To look at these monasteries to-day, one naturally imagines them to have been organised Pakhomian monasteries from the start. But this was not so. In the Fourth Century Scetis was one of the most famous haunts of the cenobite, or individualistic, monk. Thousands of them lived alone, or grouped about a leader, in cells made of stone or of reeds, which were dotted all over the desert. Many are even said to have lived in caves, but they cannot have been really convincing caves in this flat desert.
Churches were built, which the monks attended on Sunday for Mass; after eating a common meal, they returned to their cells to work out their own plans of salvation. During raids by desert tribes in the Fifth Century, towers were built beside the churches—the predecessors of the modern kasr—to which the monks fled for safety in time of trouble. I wondered whether the mysterious Round Towers of Ireland are connected with the monks' towers of Egypt; for if the wagon-vault went from Egypt to Ireland, why not the tower ?
The next stage in the development of the desert monastery was the building of fortified walls round churches and towers, when the raids became continuous during the Ninth Century. At this period life was so dangerous for the monks that they retired inside the walls, and thus became enclosed communities by force of circumstance.
It took me some time to realise that the characteristics of the modern Coptic monk which offend the unsympathetic observer (the words " dirty," " lazy," and " useless " convey these characteristics) are really a direct survival of the cenobite attitude to life of eighteen centuries ago. The ideal of the modern Coptic monk, as of his predecessors of the Fourth Eentury, is still that of individual salvation. He is interested Only in the preservation of his own soul. This will seem to many people a deplorable creed.
The very squalor which repels and revolts so many Western Christians is in itself entirely in accord with the teaching of the first hermits. When the godly matron, Melania, saw a young deacon, who afterwards became Bishop of Askelon, washing his hands and feet in an attempt to keep cool during the height of summer, she rebuked him with these words: " Believe me, O my son, for I am this day a woman sixty years old, from the time when I first took upon myself this garb water hath never touched more of my body than the tips of the fingers of my hands, and I have never washed my feet, or my face, or any one of my members. And although I have fallen into many sicknesses, and have been urged by the physicians, I have never consented nor submitted myself to the habit of applying water to any part of my body; and • I have never lain upon a bed, and I have never gone on a journey to any place reclining on a cushioned litter."
The dirtier the body became, the cleaner, in the eyes of the hermits, became the soul. All the tortures endured by the hermits, Stylites on his pillar, Macarius bitten into an unrecognisable state by mosquitoes, and a hundred other self-inflicted pains and humiliations, were designed simply to degrade the body and elevate the soul. We in the West have long forgotten the ancient association between dirt and sanctity which can be dated to the age of the Desert Fathers, but it seems to me that the Coptic monasteries have still got this tradition of saintly dirt in the blood. Our maxim " cleanliness is next to godliness " would have sounded in the ears of St. Anthony with the ringing clarity of Satan's voice ! Until we understand this, I think we are always in danger of saying unjust and cruel things about these Eastern monks. In all my contacts with them I tried to remember that I had no right to judge them by any standards known to the modern world.
The abbot took me down to a cool, dark church like a colossal tomb, standing in a confused huddle of buildings. It is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and stands on the site of a church built in the Fourth Century. Some parts of the building probably date from that church, although most of it is, I imagine, of the Eighth Century and later.
The light filtered through small windows high up near the wagon-vaulted roof. Everything was covered with an indescribable veil of age* It was grey with antiquity as a tree grows grey with lichen, and the old men who wandered in drifted about like ghosts. A great mound of corn was heaped to a height of six feet in the nave. The monastery receives corn and oil from Cairo, the product of the monastery property at Tanta, in the Delta.
The church was divided by the wooden screens common to all Coptic churches, and one end was occupied by the customary three altars. In a recess on the left I was shown the bodies of St. Maximus and St. Domatius, sewn up in leather bolsters, and also the relics of a saint with the strange name of " Moses the Robber."
Passing through a door at the end of the church, I entered the most venerable-looking room imaginable: it was lighted by openings in the bays of the vaulted roof, and a stone table over fifty feet long and four feet wide occupied the centre. A stone bench ran the length of the table and there was a stone lectern at the end of the room. This was the refectory. Plaster was peeling from the walls, dust and dirt had collected everywhere, and the table was piled with lumps of rock salt and a mass of round brown objects as hard as brick, which might have been bread.
When I asked if it was bread, the abbot took up a handful of the brown stones and pressed them on me, telling me to soak them in water as the monks did. That is how St. Anthony ate his bread sixteen centuries ago, and St. Athanasius, in mentioning this, explains that it was the Egyptian custom to bake at one time enough bread for a whole year. That the monks of Egypt should still eat this hard bread, and flavour it with rock salt, precisely as the first hermits did, is surely an astonishing piece of conservatism.
We next entered the kasr, crossing the drawbridge and climbing a massive stone staircase. The two floors of the tower are occupied by a number of vaulted chambers, most of them empty, some in pitch darkness, and many of them badly in need of repair. The most interesting is a chapel dedicated to Michael the Archangel, which, I was told, is a feature of all monastery keeps. On the roof of the keep is a small cell built about twenty years ago for the last of the hermits, a monk called Serabamum, a grand survival of the Egyptian name Serap-amun. Like a true hermit, the monastery did not suit him and he lived in a cave about half-an-hour's walk away. He would arrive at the monastery for Easter Week or for Christmas, but his presence cannot have added to any gaiety which Coptic monks allow themselves at such times, for he refused to speak to anyone or to inhabit any of the numerous vacant cells. Instead, he insisted on living on top of the tower. During one of his infrequent appearances a small pumping engine, which had been procured in a rare moment of enterprise, went wrong, and, to the astonishment of the community, he was the only person who knew how to put it right! Some of those present no doubt regarded this as a miracle. Having exhibited this unsuspected knowledge of the Twentieth Century, the hermit gathered his rags about him and disappeared with every appearance of relief into the Fourth Century. Whether they ever sent messengers to his cave from time to time, as to an electrician or a plumber, begging him to come and look at the engine, I was unable to discover.
The whole community accompanied me to the gate and waved me along the track to Bishoi and Syriani.
§ 7
We went first to Syriani and pulled the bell-rope.
While we waited for a response I had plenty of time to remember that this was the monastery where, just a century ago, Robert Curzon persuaded the abbot to sell the collection of Coptic and Syriac manuscripts which now adorns the British Museum. Towards the end of the century A. J. Butler rode up to this gate wearing a belt full of gold, hoping that Curzon had left something behind. It proved a vain hope.
We were admitted to the same white glare of clustered buildings as at Baramus, the same dark shadows, the same unruly gardens, the same shabby, dusty figures emerging from their cells, some leaning on sticks and nearly all of them barefoot. I was taken to the guest-house, where the abbot arrived, a thin, tall man with, I thought, more than a touch of Abyssinian blood. Unlike the abbot of Baramus, he was almost totally ignorant of history and spoke only Arabic.
I sat on the verandah while a monk, whom I had seen crossing the courtyard with a kettle, prepared tea. With charming courtesy, an old monk came forward and, groping in his dusty garments, produced a packet of cigarettes. I think St. Anthony, while he might have censured his indulgence in tobacco, would have commended his generosity, for cigarettes were obviously a great luxury in this place.
There are twenty-five monks in the monastery at present, and they are obviously less prosperous than the neighbouring community in Baramus.
As the abbot led the way across the drawbridge into the keep, I remembered that it was in one of the rooms on the ground floor that Curzon made his great discovery. He found it covered to a depth of two feet with loose vellum pages and complete manuscript books, and so full of dust that the monks took turns to hold the candle near the door while he examined the treasure. There is nothing there now to interest even the most ravenous church mouse.
From the roof we had a wonderful view of the desert and the monastery of Bishoi, standing about half a mile away. We looked down into the crowded monkish village with its haphazard architecture; it was not a square enclosure like Baramus, but a narrow oblong, and even more congested with buildings.
The history of Syriani is different from that of the other Wadi Natrun monasteries. The site it now occupies was originally scattered with the cells of monks from Anba Bishoi. In the year 535 A.D. the peace of the desert was interrupted by what an early commentator calls " an impure heresy," which rose out of the " blasphemy of the impure imagination of the accursed and detestable Gaianites." These were the followers of a monk called Gaianas, who at this time had seized the Patriarchate of Alexandria, but was eventually sent into banishment. His followers in the desert monasteries were expelled by the other monks and proceeded to found rival monasteries near those they had left. The Gaianite monks from Bishoi founded their monastery within sight of the parent building. All these duplicate monasteries fell on evil days and became ruins, with the exception of this one, which was bought in the Eighth Century on behalf of the Syrian monks who were scattered about the desert. It is from these Syrians, who came to live in it over so many centuries ago, that it takes its name.
There is a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and also one to " Our Lady Mary," as well as several disused churches which are now in ruins. In the first church, a gaunt, dark building which contains some fragmentary early frescoes, I was shown the leather bolster containing the body of St. John Kame—John the Black—an Ethiopian saint who died in 859 A.D. He retired to the desert and gathered round him three hundred monks, who lived under his rule, and when their monastery fell into ruin in the Fifteenth Century, the saint's bones were brought to Syriani.
This monastery also contains a superb but uncared for refectory, with a stone table running the whole length of it. I have never seen anything like these tables. They were obviously built in the days when large numbers of monks visited the monasteries from their cells in the desert, and it would not surprise me if they are the most ancient relics in these monasteries. A small door leads from this refectory to a cell which the monks call the Cell of St. Bishoi, which they claim was there before the monastery was built. They say that, in order to keep himself awake, the saint was in the habit of tying his hair to a nail in the wall, so that if he began to sink into repose, a warning tug would bring him back to his devotions.
This was the cell in which St. Ephraem the Syrian visited St. Bishoi at some time in the Fourth Century. St. Ephraem left his stick outside the cell and when he had concluded his interview and went to take it, he found that it had sprouted leaves. While they were telling me about this, one of the monks standing on the fringe of the crowd became very excited and insisted on leading me to another part of the monastery, where he pointed to a colossal tamarind tree. That, he said, was the staff of St. Ephraem.
This tree was seen by travellers in the Sixteenth Century and was even then a venerable relic. I measured its girth as well as I could, and it is about seven feet round the base of the trunk. Saying good-bye to the monks, we were soon on our way to the next monastery.
The white walls of Bishoi were soon above us, and we entered another of these Christian strongholds. This monastery seemed even less prosperous than its companions, and the strange figures of the monks even more scarecrow.
The abbot, after the kindly inevitable tea, courteously took me everywhere. We entered dark churches, and a refectory containing two stone tables placed end to end, with a total length of over eighty feet, surely the longest table in the world. This one was so low that the monks must either have squatted on the ground or reclined in Roman fashion.
I wish someone would examine these wagon-vaults and explain their resemblance to the same feature in the early churches of Ireland. In every monastery of the Wadi Natrun I was reminded of ancient Celtic churches. I asked the abbot if he had ever heard of a country called Ireland, but he shook his head reluctantly, for he was instinctively polite and hated to disappoint me. It was no good telling him that in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris there is an ancient guide-book for the use of Irish pilgrims to these very monasteries, and that probably his remote predecessors of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries had given shelter to Irishmen. It is interesting to think of such pilgrims making the regular journey which pious pilgrims made in those days to the famous anchorites and the monasteries, and transferring, as I am sure they did, the fervid austerity of Scetis and the Thebaid to the mountains of Wicklow.
The abbot was anxious for me to see the most precious possession of the monastery: the relics of the founder, Anba Bishoi, and of his companion hermit, Paul of Tamwah. He pulled aside a cloth from a wooden case and revealed the usual long leather reliquaries. He told me how Bishoi and Paul had lived together in the desert wrapt in contemplation, and how God had revealed to them that even in death they should not be separated.
After both had died, the Bishop of Antinoe was anxious that the relics of Bishoi should be taken to his city, and they were accordingly placed in a boat. The boat refused to move and lay becalmed on the Nile until an aged hermit came forward and told the bishop that it would remain stationary until the body of Paul of Tamwah was also taken aboard. This was done, and the saintly cargo was placed in a shrine at Antinoe. Centuries passed and at length the bodies of the two saints were taken up and carried to Scetis, where they have remained ever since.
I remembered that when the French engineer, Sonnini, was passing this monastery in 1778, he describes in his travels how the monks of Bishoi came out and asked him to enter and see a saint " as fresh and rosy as if alive "; but Sonnini, who had been robbed by the Bedouin and had quarrelled with the monks of Baramus, was in no mood to accept, and passed angrily on his way. I asked the abbot if he knew of such a saint. He was astonished that I should have heard of this and excitedly patted the leather bolster which contains Anba Bishoi, saying that the saint was not only fresh but unwrinkled. He was so curious to know how I had heard about Anba Bishoi's incorruptibility, and I am so bad at being mysterious, that I cast away my easily gained reputation for omniscience and told him about Sonnini's book. I should not have done this. I have a feeling that I forfeited his respect.
After we had wandered round the monastery, entering rooms that had collapsed from old age and others that were on the verge of collapse, I said good-bye, and recrossed the desert to the natron lakes. It was now too late to think of visiting Der Macarius, but I arranged to return in a day or so and go there.
While we ran along the excellent road towards Cairo, I thought that I could have borne with the dirt and the personal squalor of the monks if only their altars and their liturgical vessels and furniture had been clean. A dirty monk may be excused on the theory that he is punishing his body for the sake of his soul, but there can be no excuse for an altar spotted with candle-grease, a dusty altar-cloth, and a neglected church. But no matter what their failings may be, these monks have preserved Christianity in the desert for sixteen centuries, they have died for their faith century by century, and, if necessary, they would certainly do so at this moment.
They are ignorant. They are squalid. Their ways are not our ways. But in face of the fact that they have within them the making of martyrs, the sword of criticism is blunted before you draw it. One dirty but sincere saint may be more acceptable in heaven-than a well-washed, but nominal, Christian.
§ 8
St. Macarius, to whom the fourth monastery in the Wadi Natrun is dedicated, was the founder of the monkish settlements in Scetis. He was born about 300 A.D., and had been dead only a short while when Palladius arrived in the desert about 391 A.D. to visit the famous anchorites and write the lives of the Desert Fathers.
Like so many monks and hermits, Macarius was a peasant; he was by occupation a camel-driver, whose work took him to the Wadi Natrun for loads of salt. He married to please his parents, but, like many another early Christian, agreed with his wife that their union should be one in name only. After her death he decided to devote his life to God, but as few hermits except Anthony had at that time penetrated to the outer desert, he began by inhabiting a hut near a village. Here a village girl made a charge against him, whereupon the enraged villagers dragged him from his hut and tied pots and pans round his neck, covering him with abuse and with bruises. The saint meekly returned to his cell and set about weaving baskets to earn money for the support of the girl, but divine interference is said to have compelled her to tell the truth and confess that she had made a wicked and false charge against the saint. After this unpleasant interference with the contemplative life, Macarius moved into Scetis, the first hermit in the Wadi Natrun.
He became so famous, and was besieged by so many visitors, that he was frequently obliged to fly from his cell and seek refuge in a cave half a mile away. He was evidently pursued above ground, for we are told that in time he dug a tunnel from cell to cave and would go to earth when he did not wish to be disturbed, travelling underground to the cave so that no one could see him. '' As he was going from his cell to his cave he used to recite four and twenty antiphons, and, as he was coming back, four and twenty also."
Every sympathy will be felt for the saint's occasional flight if many of his visitors were as distracting as the man who arrived one day leading a saddled mare, which he said was his wife. He explained that another man, who was in love with her and had despaired of receiving any response from the lady, had consulted a sorcerer. He had asked that the wife should be made unpleasing in the eyes other husband. The magician, evidently using the recipe known to Lucian, did his work so well that when the husband went home he was surprised to see a woeful-looking mare lying on the bed.
" Then he lifted up his voice in a sorrowful cry, and he wept tears, and heaved sighs; and he spake with her, but she made no reply unto him, and she answered him not a word."
He took his trouble to the sheik of the village, and after they had tried the wife with dried grass and a little bread, both of which she sorrowfully declined, it was suggested that perhaps the saint should be consulted. The man saddled her and took her off to the desert. Macarius made short work of it with holy water and some Korban bread, and sent man and wife away with an injunction to attend church more regularly.
A study of Palladius suggests that the hermits were besieged by the sick and the ailing until the desert resembled a vast free Harley Street. The greater a saint's reputation for sanctity, the greater became the number of his visitors; and no doubt the more difficult he was to find, the more determined became the searchers.
Palladius is interested only in the miracles attributed to the Desert Fathers, but if you read him carefully, you come to the conclusion that many of the visitors were the ordinary consulting-room characters known to any modern doctor.
So great became the fame and sanctity of Macarius that the Desert of Scetis, which had been empty when he went there, was covered with the cells and the caves of hermits by the time he died at the age of ninety. Its fame had spread far beyond the Nile Delta. Pious and curious travellers arrived in Egypt simply to tour the hermit country and to see the new way of life that was going on there. All of those who came had heard of Macarius, and many visited the church founded in his memory, which has grown into Der Macarius.
The monastery of St. Macarius lies at the southern extremity of the natron lakes. The glare of its white walls was blinding as we drove up early one morning.
An old monk answered the bell and led me to the guest-house down dusty paths between white buildings. I sat on a divan under a window which gave me a view of the clustered mushroom domes, the wilted green of the poorest of all the monastery gardens—I learned afterwards that here there is salt in the earth—and on the groups of monks who stood in the sunlight like black crows, gazing up at the guest-house windows. The silence was broken by the discreet explosions of a petrol-engine which was pumping water. The sound contained a surprising energy. It was the beat of the modern world and was quite out of place in these surroundings. I remembered that I had seen electric-light bulbs in the other monasteries, but I had never heard an engine running or seen a light switched on. I imagine that all the plants are out of action except at Macarius.
The abbot came in, followed by several of his monks. He could speak only Arabic and seemed more of a countryman than some of his companions. While we were talking after the tea had been brought in, a monk, whose cheeks were covered with silky hairs like those of a black spaniel, came up and whispered to me. Would I take him back to Cairo? I wondered whether he was trying to escape. I felt as a visitor might feel at a school if a preposterous pupil suggested running away. The young monk was earnest and insistent. I said we should have to ask the abbot. Oh, that was all right, he said. He explained that he was in priest's orders and could leave the monastery with special permission, as long as he went back there to die. He particularly wanted to go to Cairo and take a train to Zagazig, where his father was ill. I asked him what he would have done had I not happened to come along. He replied that he would have walked across the desert to the main road and have waited for a lift on a lorry.
We went out through the pitiless sunlight into the welcome darkness of the churches. There was a church dedicated to the Forty Martyrs, called by the monks the Forty Sheiks. These were forty monks who refused to flee during a raid on the monastery in 444 A.D., and, indeed, went out of their way to encounter death. They are buried under a raised platform in the church.
I inspected the reliquary which contains the body of St. Macarius, and in a church so dark that it was impossible to see anything clearly, the place was pointed out where many patriarchs of Alexandria lie together in death.
We climbed to the platform running round the wall of the monastery. On the opposite side, some distance off, were the roofs of a cluster of cells, bare flat roofs like those of any Egyptian house in the Nile valley. I noticed a movement on the roof and observed a gaunt-looking monk kneeling there, making prostration after prostration. I was told that he has not spoken to anyone for seven years. Isolated in an uninhabited corner of the monastery, he lives there, a hermit in the desert. He leaves his cell only to attend church and to collect a few scraps of the hard bread on which he lives. He is thirty years of age.
I was told that he wears a variation of the hair-shirt, called an askim. This is a cross-belt made of untanned leather cut into the shape of crosses. It is worn next to the skin, and those who wear it are vowed to severe mortification of the flesh. They must make three hundred prostrations each day, keep silence, and fast all the time, taking just enough bread to keep themselves alive.
I asked if any other monks in this monastery wore the askim, and was told that, in addition to the hermit, three others wear it. Now here is evidence, as direct as one can have it without living for a long time with these monks, that, despite all appearances to the contrary, spiritual fervour does exist in these monasteries, and it is of the same kind which caused the first saints and hermits to perform those exercises in hardship which justified their proud title to be the " athletes of God."
We climbed the stone stairs of the tor to the finest of all the monastery keeps. It is higher, larger, and contains even more cavernous vaulted chambers than the others. There is a large disused church with three altars, and walls showing traces of frescoes.
The monks said that it had been built with money sent by " King Zenoun ofAthenia." They told me an admirable story, hideously confused in the telling, but by going over it point by point and word by word, I managed to sort it out. King Zenoun of Athenia had a daughter who wished to become a " monk." She was named Hilaria. Leaving Athenia disguised as a man, she arrived in the Desert of Scetis and was given a cell where she lived, wearing an askim and practising the most severe austerities. She became known as Hilarion the Eunuch, and she was eventually admitted as a monk into the monastery of St. Macarius.
Now King Zenoun had a second daughter, who became mad and was sent to the monastery of St. Macarius in the hope that one of the holy men of the desert might be able to drive the devils out of her. Hilaria recognised her sister at once. Going to her one night in the guise of the monk Hilarion, she took her in her arms and kissed her, whereupon the madness left her. The princess did not know that she had been kissed by her sister, and returning home, she described the cure to King Zenoun, who became furiously angry. He wrote to the abbot demanding that the young monk who had shown such familiarity to his daughter should be sent to him in Athenia. Hilaria was therefore sent home, where she received her father's rebuke with meekness until, stung, I suppose, by his insinuations, she cast back her cowl and revealed herself. The astonished king tried to persuade her to remain with him, but she told him that only in the desert could she find peace. She returned to St. Macarius with " a great caravan of presents," including much fine wheat and oil. Hilaria—or Hilarion as the monks knew her—died in the monastery, and it was in memory of her that the king built the kasr. He continued to send wheat and oil every year.
That is the story told by the monks of St. Macarius. Although history does not record any daughters, I discovered later that " King Zenoun of Athenia " was the Emperor Zeno, and that he did endow the monastery of St. Macarius with an annual grant of wheat and oil.
As I was saying good-bye to the abbot, a stately figure carrying a small attache case was seen advancing between the mud walls. The monk in priest's orders, who had previously worn an old gallabia and a pair of down-at-heel slippers, now appeared robed in glistening marocain, a pair of elastic-sided boots, and a shining black turban on his head. I was taken aback at the thought of arriving in Cairo with such a spectacular dignitary.
He sat next to Mikhail, and apart from a pardonable flinching when we passed another car at the usual Egyptian rate of progress, there was nothing to indicate that a hermit was re-entering the world.