CHAPTER NINEI travel through the Wilderness of the Exodus and stay for a few days in the Greek Monastery of Mount Sinai. I see the Church of the Transfiguration, the relics of St. Catherine of Alexandria, and climb Mount Sinai.
§ I
THE Greek monks who live in the lonely fortress Monastery of Mount Sinai will not receive a traveller unless he brings with him a letter of introduction from the Archbishop of Sinai, who lives in Cairo. When I called at the Archbishop's house, I was taken to an upper room where a Greek monk told me that His Beatitude, Cyrillos III, would see me in person. The Archbishop's position is a notable one. He owns no superior, as Adrian Fortescue puts it, " but Christ and the seven councils," and, as head of the smallest of the autocephalus Greek churches, is the absolute ecclesiastical master of Sinai.
The Archbishop entered, a bearded Greek dignitary who wore his authority with grace and gentleness. He told me that as he was on the point of leaving for the lonely retreat, we should meet again, God willing, in the shadow of Mount Sinai. Until recently he was obliged to set out by camel caravan, and this slow journey usually took from seven to eight days. Nowadays, however, he hires a Ford car in Suez and always completes the journey within a day.
He gave me the necessary letter of introduction, and we wished each other God speed.
Most travellers who have explored the Peninsula of Sinai have been anxious to identify the sites mentioned in Exodus', but I was interested in the Christian history of the Peninsula, and there is less known about it. Like the deserts of Egypt, Sinai began to receive its first hermits and anchorites during the great monastic movement of the Third and Fourth Centuries. Instead, however, of Egyptian hermits, the mountains of Sinai attracted the Greeks. This, I think, was natural, because Sinai was at that time a portion of the Greek-speaking world. When Sir Leonard Woolley and the late T. E. Lawrence made a journey across Sinai before the war, they discovered that this now barren land contained the site of many a Byzantine city, church, and monastery, and that a trade route crossed it from the Red Sea northward through Beersheba to Gaza. Therefore the Greeks who sought solitude in Sinai fifteen centuries ago were turning to a portion of their own world, leaving the deserts of the Nile Valley to be inhabited by the Egyptians. A Greek hermit, who would have felt himself among foreigners in the Wadi Natrun, would have been at home in Sinai, although both Greeks and Egyptians belonged to the same church; and this underlines the deep national rift in the Alexandrian Church long before Monophysism brought about complete separation.
The first hermits settled on a romantic mountain called Serbal, which many people believe was the original Mountain of the Law, and also in a desolate gorge twenty-five miles away, where a bush was pointed out as the Burning Bush in which the Lord appeared to Moses. The Serbal settlement flourished and overflowed into a pleasant little valley called Pharan—now the Wadi Feiran—which was eventually made a bishopric. The Bishop of Pharan was the head of the monastic movement in Sinai, and had under his care several square miles of trackless mountain honeycombed with the caves and cells of his flock. When the government weakened and Arab frontier raids became frequent, the monks of Sinai were massacred with appalling frequency. Legend has it that St. Helena listened to the pleas of the hermits and built a church and a tower of refuge for them at the place of the Burning Bush, but the main monastery of Pharan was left to take care of itself as best it could. In the Sixth Century life became so dangerous in Sinai that the Emperor Justinian enclosed the little church of St. Helena and the tower with a massive fortress wall. In the meantime the unprotected settlement of Pharan broke up under repeated Arab attacks, and the bishop sought refuge within the walls of the Monastery of the Burning Bush. As his successors continued to live there, the title gradually died out, and after 630 A.D. the bishops called themselves Bishops of Sinai. It is possible that with the transference of the see, a good many traditions took flight from Mount Serbal and alighted on Mount Sinai; but of this it is difficult to speak with any certainty.
Justinian's monastery has stood on Sinai, through the dangers and ups and downs of fourteen centuries, the only Christian outpost in a waste of mountains. This monastery saw the first Moslem hordes go westward into Egypt, and in the course of time it saw the Empire which protected it pass away. It was already ancient, and was venerated all over Europe, when the Crusaders carved their names upon its walls. Napoleon repaired those walls and, as years went by, another campaigner in the East, the late Lord Allenby, accepted hospitality within them.
Through change of scene and fortune the Monastery of Mount Sinai has stood firm, with its roots not in Byzantine Constantinople, but in the Church of Alexandria, whose Greek sons first went out into the deserts of Sinai to live that life which Procopius called " a careful study of death."
§ 2
I motored to Suez one morning to make arrangements for my journey. I had a letter to a Greek garage proprietor named Michael Vallinis, who seemed to be the man I was looking for. He had been five times to the Monastery of Mount Sinai, and I had been shown, by way of encouragement and recommendation, some graphic photographs of him standing in his shirt sleeves energetically pushing enormous boulders from the path of a disheartened-looking limousine. There were also pictures of him standing with pick and shovel, with the words " en route a Sinai" written beneath them. He obviously knew the road.
Suez is a hot little town at the north end of the Gulf of as they crawl along, trying not to cause a wash that will damage the banks of the Canal. Sometimes they come through with their bands playing, while cheerful people dressed in white clothes wave down to the camels on the canal banks, thus adding to the air of improbability in which Suez lives its life.
I went to see Mr. Vallinis, who is just the kind of man I like. His energy was terrific. His knowledge of the country was profound, and his zest for adventure appeared to have no limit. He was forthright, stern, and quick.
He said that we should have to take a spare car in case of breakdowns, for that is the rule in the Egyptian desert, and we should also have to carry enough food and water for six days, the time I proposed to be away. We needed a cook, which Mr. Vallinis would provide.
I agreed to leave everything to him. This is not my usual practice, but I natter myself that I can tell a good man when I see one. Later in the afternoon, however, while I was killing time in Suez, I suddenly thought that perhaps it was rather rash not to tell Mr. Vallinis the kind of food I dislike.
" Food ? " he cried. " You wish to know what food I shall take ? You come and see."
We went to the back of the garage, where an American saloon car, fitted with desert tyres and big springs, was having a sandboard, two spades, a pick, and several such accessories of desert motoring strapped to it.
Mr. Vallinis opened a black fixture at the back of the car which I thought was an abnormal type of luggage boot. It was a chest made to take a slab of ice. The first object that came out was a turkey, plucked and trussed. Then came several chickens, pigeons, a large piece of veal, a leg of mutton, and several lamb cutlets.
He groped about angrily.
" What are you looking for ? " I asked.
" Oh, miserable, miserable! " he cried. " They have forgotten the guinea-fowls and the quails! You see what it is, unless you do everything yourself! "I told him not to worry about the guinea-fowls and the quails, because I thought we should have enough to eat. I did not dare to tell him that, earlier in the day, having no idea of his conception of a journey to Sinai, I had innocently bought two tins of bully beef and some baked beans, thinking that these would be luxurious additions to our pantry.
But Mr. Vallinis had not done. He dragged from the spare car a huge case, and, diving into it, produced artichokes, cabbages, potatoes, French beans, tins of petits pois, and new carrots.
" Is it good ? " cried Mr. Vallinis.
He gazed earnestly at me and, mistaking my expression of bewilderment for one of disappointment, he gazed with a deepening frown. Then a thought lit his face, and he gave a cry of inspiration:
" Ah! " he cried, " Maybe you like caviare! "
I went back to the little hotel near the station with the feeling that things were not working out properly. Here was I going to Mount Sinai contemplating every kind of hardship and privation and—Mr. Vallinis was worrying about the caviare!
§ 3
At five o'clock on the following morning my Ulysses arrived to take me to Sinai. Two cars were drawn up in the grey light, and soon we were on the way. The first car contained Mr. Vallinis, who drove it, myself, my luggage, and our huge sybaritic ice-chest. In the second car were blankets, a tank of fresh water, boxes, a young Greek driver, and a plump, cheerful individual in riding-breeches, who turned out to be Yusuf, the cook.
The sun rose as we approached the chain ferry across the Suez Canal. Although you could fling a stone from Egypt across the canal into Sinai, the country on the opposite bank seems already a different land. There is no nonsense about it: it is plainly and definitely the Sinai Desert.
The man at the ferry told us that we were the first to cross that morning. We bumped across to the Sinai shore, where a detachment of the camel corps were encamped on the edge of the desert, which creeps right up to the banks of the canal. The camels were tethered to stakes driven into the sand, fine, light-coloured trotting camels, as different from a transport camel as a racehorse from a dray horse.
Two or three Sudanese in smart khaki uniforms came to the tent-flaps to watch us go past, a foretaste of the curiosity which every traveller arouses in the desert.
Our road lay southward. But the word road is misleading, for, as I had discovered on the way to Siwa, there are no roads in the desert. There are only tracks in the sand and in dry torrent beds made by cars and desert lorries. When the Governor of Sinai announces that all roads are closed, it means that rain in Sinai has washed these tracks away and covered them with boulders swept down from the hills. Repair parties are sent to move the stones and to blaze a new trail. Then the roads are said to be open once again.
As the two cars bumped over the sandy track, I felt that we had said good-bye to civilisation for a while. We saw a signpost in the sand. One arm pointed to the north, the other to the east. The northern arm said " Jerusalem"; the other arm said " St. Catherine's Monastery." Soon afterwards we arrived at the Wells of Moses, where a few dense clumps of palm trees grow round pools of brackish water.
Some Bedouin were camped there with camels. I asked them where they had come from, and they replied that they had been travelling from the Wadi Feiran for six days, with charcoal for Suez. This is the only money-making pursuit open to the Sinai Bedouin, and what a pathetic job it is, in a treeless wilderness. But make charcoal they do, by burning any stray fragment of wood that is capable of carbonisation. Having gathered a few sacks full, they trek for days to earn a few shillings at Suez, where the charcoal is used for braziers and for the bowls of hookahs.
Tradition says that Moses and the Israelites journeyed this way into Sinai, but we shall probably never know the exact route of the Exodus. It is impossible to say where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, or what happened to them after they had crossed it. There is no reason, however, to doubt the tradition that localises the Exodus in some part of Sinai, and certainly no country more like one's Sunday school impression of the Wilderness could be imagined.
Hour after hour the track ran on over a plain which was not actually featureless, because there was always a gentle rise of ground ahead. A blue line of great mountains, which grew yellow as we approached it, lay to the south.
We had been travelling for two hours or so when we saw four swift desert lorries approaching. Who could these be? They were military lorries. They stopped. We stopped. All travellers stop in the desert, and they always ask the same questions: where are you going and what is the road like ?
A tall man in a tweed suit leaped out of the first lorry and came towards us. He was the Governor of Sinai. He had been patrolling his roads. They were not very good, he said, but we should get through. He had spent the night at the Government rest-house at Abu Zenima and had ordered it to be kept open for me. We shook hands and parted. The dust of our wheels met and mingled in the air and slowly settled down over the desert.
Shortly after mid-day we passed through a mountain range, and ran an erratic course along dry torrent beds. I have never in my life seen such colours on mountains. Some were rose-red, some pale blue, others dark blue. The coloured summits towered into the sunlight. After an hour we came suddenly to a sight of the Gulf of Suez, a broad strip of dark blue lying beyond golden sand, and we pulled up at a lonely little bungalow about twenty yards from the water. This was the Government rest-house. It contained a sitting-room and three bedrooms furnished with camp beds and chairs.
Yusuf produced an amazing meal. He set out on the bare little table a bowl of soup, sardines, a roast pigeon, cold ham, turkey and beef, a bottle of English pickles, a potato salad. Brie cheese, French bread, butter, and a bottle of beer. And this was the desert of Sinai!
I spent the afternoon walking along the lonely half-moon of sand, collecting the strange and beautiful shells for which this stretch of the Gulf is so famous. Some are conch shells of enormous size lined with pink mother-of-pearl, others arc delicate pink shells like flowers, and if you look carefully, you can find delightful little polished brown shells which you will probably keep until you reach home; but, as everyone knows, it is the sad fate of shells to be gathered with tremendous enthusiasm only at some time to be heartlessly thrown away.
About half a mile from the rest-house are the hutments and quay of a manganese mine, the only touch of modern life in Southern Sinai. The manganese is mined far away in the coloured mountains at the back, and carried to the quay in trucks on a mountain railway.
After the sun had set, the waters of the Gulf became a cold lemon colour, and the mountains turned black and seemed to grow taller. Three Arab fishermen were launching a boat. They and their craft, even to its smallest rope and to the ragged fringes of their garments, were etched sharply in black against the yellow water. One man drew off his clothes and stood ready to push out the boat. He leaned against it, moving it slowly, and, swinging a leg over the boat's side, sprang aboard and stood upright. I felt that I had seen something as old as the world; and it was strange that a poor Arab going off to fish at night should have deserved for an instant the attention of Phidias.
The stars came out one by one, and Yusuf carried in a paraffin lamp.
§ 4
The rest-house sufragi came in with a cup of tea. It was four o'clock. He said that breakfast would be ready in ten minutes and the " caravan " was getting ready to depart. I dressed and went into the sitting-room, where Yusuf had prepared the kind of breakfast which perhaps John Mytton might have eaten on a hunting morning. It was still dark and the stars were shining.
Yusuf had evidently had to do with military and official Englishmen, because from some corner of the rest-house he had unearthed an old copy of Punch, which he placed with proper reverence beside my plate. I dutifully read it by the light of the paraffin lamp, and had I not been conscious that it represented English Literature, in fact world literature, in Abu Zenima, I might have taken this happy glimpse of my native land onward to the Monastery of Mount Sinai.
We started into the cold morning, Mr. Vallinis radiating that Greek enterprise and dogged determination which plants grocery stores from Alexandria to the Sudan. No one, except, maybe, an Irishman, can be quite as theoretical as a Greek in his own country, or as practical when he steps out of it.
It was interesting to compare this tornado of Greek energy which was carrying me into the Sinai Peninsula with the temperament of the excellent Mikhail, whose activity, although it was of the best Syrian kind, was really underlaid with fatalism. Mr. Vallinis, if suddenly faced by a horned viper, would never wait for me to hand him a photographic tripod: he would jump on the viper, or pulling out a hitherto unsuspected revolver, shoot it accurately. He was that kind of man.
And now, as we journeyed towards the mountains, the sun jumped over the high ridges and the world was alive. The blue water sparkled. The glare from the rocks hurt the eyes, and we turned this way and that, now driving into the face of the sun and the next moment with the light behind us. In a little while we left the foothills and ran outward to the shores of the Gulf, with a great plain before us, about twelve miles long, a flat plain tufted with scrub and camel thorn. This has been identified by some with the Wilderness of Sin, the place where the Israelites, longing for the fleshpots of Egypt, began to murmur against the Lord and to blame Moses for having led them into the desert.
It is difficult not to imagine Israel moving through this country, where water lies hidden under the rocks; where great flights of quail come down exhausted and may sometimes be picked up by hand; where a substance believed to be manna is still pricked by insects from the tamarisk stems.
In addition to happy memories of bread, onions, and melons, the Israelites took with them out of Egypt the mummy of Joseph. That Joseph was mummified in accordance with Egyptian custom we know from Genesis 1. 26. " So Joseph died being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." That the departing Israelites took this mummy with them is proved by Exodus xiii. 19: "And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him."
There is a firm tradition that this mummy was eventually buried in the Cave of Macpelah at Hebron, beside that of Jacob; and the information that Jacob was also embalmed in the Egyptian fashion is to be found in Genesis 1. 2. This cave is to-day lying beneath the mosque at Hebron, and no one is allowed to enter it.
We crossed the plain and turned eastward into the entrance of a mountain gorge that rises gradually between towering heights. This was the beginning of the Wadi Feiran, which runs for about thirty miles into the mountains and drains the whole of the Serbal Range. Walls of rose-red and mauve granite rose up sheer into the sky, where they hung with bare and jagged peaks, shining against the blue ; and side by side with them were mountains of pale amber and sulphur-red, streaked with plum-coloured veins of porphyry and black bands of diorite. All the beauty which we normally associate with the colours of grass, heather, and flowers was here poured recklessly over a fantastic wealth of geological formations. Never for one moment did the eye become weary of this wilderness. There was some new beauty to be seen along every yard of the way. As if Nature were not content with the natural colours of the rocks, the light filled each hollow and cranny and the long, downward gashes of the mountains with blues so pale and delicate that I was reminded of the pale blue of the Gonnemara hills, and blues so deep and definite 'that I compared them to the darkness of the hills of Skye. How different is this Desert of Sinai from the terrible monotony of the Libyan Desert, with its meaningless contours and its stone-scattered plains, which take the very heart out of one.
We continued for four hours or so in this exquisite fantasy of rock, climbing all the time, picking our way between scattered boulders and rushing the soft, sandy portions of the track, so that we might avoid becoming stuck. Small birds with a curious swooping flight were the only living things we saw until, many miles up the wadi, we came on camel foals eating thorns, and we knew that, somewhere in a crook of the hills, or behind the giant boulders, was a Bedouin tent lying like a black bat spreadeagled on the ground.
At the climax of the gorge we came to the only oasis in the whole of Southern Sinai, the Oasis of Feiran, the " Pearl of Sinai "; but in any other part of the world it would pass as a pleasant, shady spot with a few trees, a bit of grass, and a stream. In this wilderness the Oasis is a paradise, and, after four or five hours of stark mountains, it was good to see green avenues beneath palm trees, and to hear the sound of goat-bells and the thin tinkle of water.
The only inhabitants are a few Bedouin and one Greek monk, Father Isaiah, who lives in the capacity of watch-dog and gardener in a house belonging to the Monastery of Mount Sinai. Mr. Vallinis had told me about the old man, who grows vegetables for the monastery. I thought it would be courteous to pass the time of day with him, and we pulled up at the mud wall surrounding his dwelling, and hammered on a door which had a small wooden cross nailed above it.
Through a crack in the door we saw a white-bearded Greek monk, half patriarch and half bandit, come in a crouching, defensive attitude down the garden path, wearing a dusty cassock over a pair of khaki trousers and grasping a gun. His long grey hair was pinned up in a tight bun at the back, and on top was the high black hat of a Greek priest.
" Who is it? " he called from the other side of the gate.
" Thieves and robbers," promptly replied Mr. Vallinis, who never lost an opportunity of chaffing another Greek.There was a long silence. Looking up, we saw the solemn face of the old monk gazing down at us from the top of the wall. He lowered his gun.
" You should not joke about such things," he said. " It is wickedness. Have you any tobacco? I have been smoking dry weeds for many months. Come inside . . ."
We went into a shady garden. A pergola led from the gate to a bare little house where the monk lives. He explained to me that his job is to keep order among the Bedouin and to see that they do not squat on the monastery land.
" Isn't it very lonely? " I asked.
" Why should it be lonelier than anywhere else ? " was his admirable reply.
" From what part of Greece do you come? " I asked.But I was never to know, for the old man gave a cry, grasped his gun, and ran off into a belt of sugar-cane, where he was lost to sight. We heard an alarming explosion. He came back in a bad temper. He had missed a hawk that was raiding his pigeon-loft.
" May I look at your gun? " I asked.
He handed me an old flint-lock muzzle-loader whose barrel was bound with bands of brass. It was an English gun with the word " Tower " and the date 1859 engraved on it. What a strange fate for an old English muzzle-loader made nearly eighty years ago. It was obviously an old army gun and I suppose the word " Tower " referred to the Tower of London, in which this now terrifying weapon had at some time been proofed.
The old man asked in a wheedling way, like a little boy asking for sweets, if we had any cartridges to give him. We had a gun with us and more cartridges than we could possibly require, and so we gave him a good big fistful; but I asked what use they could be to him, for they were obviously no good for the muzzle-loader. He gave a delighted cry and, biting through one of the cartridges, poured the powder into a little powder-flask. He explained that he can make his own bullets by melting lead and dropping it into a pan of water; but he cannot make powder. He has to rely on the generosity of passing sportsmen, whose cartridges he tears up. He showed me some of his home-made shot, and very nasty-looking shrapnel it was. He packs the charge with dead leaves and uses the old ram-rod which, despite all the adventures through which this gun has passed, still remains in position.
I asked the old man how much property he was guarding. He answered by pointing round to several square miles of mountains and to an adjacent ruin, which I recognised as an old church. I saw on nearly every summit piles of stones which looked like cairns, but, when I looked through glasses, I realised that they were the remains of cells. The old man was guarding the ruins of the hermit city of Pharan.
I should dearly like to go back to this oasis and spend a fortnight exploring those hills. They are honeycombed with the caves of the first hermits and with their graves. From this point, right up to the summit of Mount Serbal, the remains of the churches and dwellings of the anchorites are waiting to be investigated; and they have remained untouched since the Arab raiders destroyed them during the first six centuries of the Christian era.
The ruins of the church in the monk's garden are evidently the remains of the cathedral church of Pharan. His pergola is supported by broken Byzantine columns which once belonged to this church, a building that preceded Justinian's Church in the Monastery at Sinai. It was evidently in the ruins of this building that Palmer, when travelling with the Ordnance Survey Expedition to Sinai in 1869, found a curious little stone figure of a sitting man with uplifted arms, evidently intended to be Moses at the Battle of Rephidim.
No wonder the monks and hermits of Pharan eventually migrated to the Monastery at Sinai, for a more hopeless place to defend than Pharan cannot be imagined. It is ideal guerilla country. The Arabs could just sit behind rocks and shoot their arrows down into churches and hermitages. I was reminded of a vivid account of a massacre which was written about 380 A.D. by a travelling Egyptian monk named Ammonius. After making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he decided to ascend the holy mountain of Sinai. He arrived during one of the periodical raids. The aspect of the monks, he thought, " was that of angels, for they were pallid and, so to say, incorporeal, owing to their abstaining from wine, oil, bread, and other foods that tend to luxury, living on dates only, just enough to keep themselves alive."
A few days after his arrival Saracens suddenly attacked the hermits in their cells and slew them, " so that," says Ammonius, " I, together with the superior Doulas, and others, sought refuge in the tower while the barbarians slew all the hermits who were in Thrambe, Choreb, Kedar, and other places." It is interesting to note that the monks of Sinai had their towers of refuge just as the monks of Wadi Natrun had at the same period.
While Ammonius and the hermits were sheltering in the tower, the Saracens were frightened away and the hermits sallied out to view the damage. They found thirty-eight anchorites lying dead in their cells. A messenger arrived to say that a neighbouring settlement had also been raided, not by Saracens, but by a wild Nubian tribe, the Blemmyes, who were probably ancestors of the shock-haired Bisharin of Aswan. This had been a much fiercer affair than the raid of Pharan. The Blemmyes rushed to the refuge tower, and ran round it screaming while the hermits prayed inside. Paul of Petra, the father of this settlement, was a saintly man of courage :
" O athletes of God," he cried, " do not regret this good conflict; let not your souls be faint, and do nothing unworthy of your cowl, but be clothed with strength, with joy, and manliness, that you may endure with a pure heart, and may God receive you into His kingdom."
In the meantime the Blemmyes had piled tree-trunks outside the tower and burst in the door, which suggests that these towers, like the Round Towers of Ireland, had their doors high up in the masonry. They rushed in, calling for the Superior. Paul of Petra stepped out and declared himself. The raiders demanded his treasures and he replied, " Forsooth, children, I own nothing but this old hair-cloth garment that I am wearing." They stoned him and split his head in half with a sword. Then the man who was describing these events to Ammonius said, with a candour which rings so truly down the years:
" Then I, miserable sinner, seeing the slaughter and the blood and viscera on the ground, bethought me of a hiding-place. A heap of palm branches lay in the left-hand corner of the church. Unnoticed by the barbarians, I ran to it saying to myself, ' If they find me, they can but kill me, which they are sure to do if I do not hide.' "
From his hiding-place he watched all the hermits being murdered in the church and saw the barbarians searching everywhere for treasure, except, presumably, under the palm branches; finding none, they rushed wildly from the place.
Raids such as these filled the Coptic and Greek calendars with saints centuries before the birth of Mohammed. There was no religious hatred at the back of these raids: they were frank outbursts of savagery.
We said good-bye to Father Isaiah, who gave us an important message about beans to the oeconomos of the monastery, and continued our journey through the oasis. For a few minutes we travelled through green shade, a shade of palm-fronds pierced by shafts of light, and beyond the filigree of branches we could see the red rocks burning all around. When v/e left the last palm tree behind us, the heat of the desert leapt at us again like a tiger.
" Oh, I shall be the popular one tonight," sang Mr. Vallinis, " and the monks will say to me, ' Michael, you are a good man and a good Greek, for you do not forget your friends.' I have something good for them. . . ."
He crouched over the wheel in happy anticipation of forthcoming popularity, and lifting one hand, joined thumb and forefinger and lightly moved his hand to and fro in a way that is understood from Chios to Athens and from Athens to Salonica.
" Behind us on the ice is a great basket of sea-crabs from Suez," he explained. " I bought them yesterday morning before the market was open. The monks love sea-crabs. Such things are not found in the desert."
Then a worried look came into his face.
" Is it, maybe, a time of fasting? " he asked himself, then his natural optimism banished such a thought. " No matter, we shall see. . . ."
And the sun moved to the west. Mountains that had been in shadow now lay in gold light. Others, recently in sunlight, were now blue in shadow. The blue turned to black. Slowly the light moved upward over the stone walls, and the shadows pursued it, until only the highest crests and ridges were barred with light, so that we moved in a valley of twilight with the mountain-tops shining far above. There came a moment when the sun slid away from even the highest peak, and a star burned in the sky. It was suddenly cold; for the valley that leads up into Sinai is several thousand feet above the sea.
§ 5
Without warning the monastery came into view round the shoulder of a hill.
It lay in a valley enclosed by immense dark mountains, whose feet were in shadow, whose summits were in starlight. Towering ridges and peaks dwarfed the monastery, making it seem like a child's toy on the floor of a room. There were scores of cypress trees, pointing their dark fingers in the twilight, and there was a timid burst of green in the garden, lying against the thirsty wall of the mountains.
Mr. Vallinis switched on the headlights and shattered the silence of the valley with the hideous scream of a klaxon horn, to warn the monks of our arrival. Before the horrid noise had flung itself from side to side of the gorge, first one black figure, then another, then two or three, appeared on the battlements, all gazing down at us and pointing.
They wore black gowns and black stove-pipe hats. We could see their black beards as they turned excitedly to one another before disappearing to unbar the great door.
Darkness came down swiftly on the world, and the stars were burning above the monastery, snapping and winking in blue electric fire. The building, now that we were beneath its walls, was immense. A few more monks appeared on the wall.
" With God's help we have come to the Holy Mountain," called Mr. Vallinis in Greek towards the ramparts, " and we have brought you a basket of sea-crabs from Suez! "
We craned our necks and saw the black figures nodding and chattering above us like startled necromancers.
" It is Kyrios Vallinis," we heard one say, then another called down to us : " What is it you say you have brought from Suez? "
" Sea-crabs! " shouted Mr. Vallinis.There was a burst of slightly unmonkish merriment from the ramparts. How cold it was! The air was now icy. How long they took to unlock the gate! It is barred each night as if the Saracens might still come. I looked up at the stupendous walls and saw the pent-house standing out from the wall like the projecting loft-door of an English barn. Had we come here a century ago, we should have been hauled up into that pent-house in a boatswain's cradle. It is only in comparatively recent times that the monks have grown sufficiently confident to have a door.
At last we heard them at the locks and bars; at last the gate opened; and we were soon shaking hands with a number of pallid young men, for it was the younger monks who had rushed down to greet us. Their long hair was bunched beneath rimless birettas, and their pale cheeks were fringed with incipient beards like the down of black swans. The two cars were to be left under the walls, guarded by the monastery Bedouin. Mr. Vallinis shouldered his gun and we walked across a courtyard in the starlight, into a space crowded with whitewashed buildings.
We passed through a narrow alley from which cavernous archways led here and there. One side was in starlight, the other in deepest shadow. Above us white towers and roofs, all on different levels, and clustering together, rose into the serenity of the night. Standing behind a door was an old cannon on a wooden gun-carriage; a white cat sprang out of a shadow and crossed our path. The silence was unbroken except for the sound of our steps on the stones. I could smell incense and knew that we were passing the church, Justinian's church; then we ascended steps into an open space. Turning to the left, we ascended a long wooden staircase to an outside gallery which reminded me of the New Inn at Gloucester. The monk who was leading us tapped on a door, and I found myself in a small room full of yellow lamplight, in which the Archbishop of Sinai was sitting behind a knee-hole desk. .
Seated with him in the room were the four elders of the monastery, big, black-bearded men with brown, rugged faces like those of the peasants who live in the hills around Delphi. They all rose as we entered. The Archbishop bade me welcome and asked how we had found the road and how long our journey had taken. When I told him that we had spent a night at Abu Zenima, he ran a ringed hand down his soft beard and nodded indulgently, saying that he had come through in one day from Suez. I complimented him on his prowess as a motorist, and all the dark figures nodded and smiled in admiration and agreement. A lay brother entered with glasses of arak, which the monks make from dates, and with saucers of jam. After a little more polite conversation I was shown to my room, which was three doors away along the wooden gallery. Before going inside, I turned to look down on the clustered buildings below, a pattern of starlight and shadow. All around, wherever I looked, I saw gaunt mountains shouldering the stars.
My room was bare, yet crowded. An ancient iron four-poster, heavily encumbered by lace frills and a mosquito net, occupied most of the space not taken up by a couch, two chairs, a marble-topped table, and a washstand on which stood two tin jugs of cold water. The only picture was an ikon of the Madonna, which hung in a wooden shrine on the Wall, with a sprig of dry basil lying in front of it on a little shelf. The outer wall of the room was that of Justinian's fortress, and from a small window punched in its massive stones I looked down into the entrance courtyard, and over the cypress trees in the garden to the mountains of the gorge. The bedroom ceiling had been painted green somewhere about the year 1860, by a monk who had released his knowledge of contemporary decoration in a flowery and not unpleasing wreath.
Near the bed was a framed copy of the Monastery Regulations in Greek, Arabic, French, and English. I gathered from the following rules that the monks have been obliged to place things on a firm financial basis.
Each visitor desirous to pass the night in the monastery must pay for food and lodging one Egyptian pound daily, and without food half a pound only per day.
Passing the night outside the monastery (under a tent he should bring with him) he has to pay Piastres 25, for entrance fees to visit the monastery.
Any person wishing to visit the Mount of the Decalogue and the Mount of St. Catherine must be accompanied by a monk, and has to pay Piastres 25 for camel fares to the Mount of the Decalogue, Piastres 30 for camel fares to the Mount of St. Catherine, and, moreover, Piastres 50 to the monk who will accompany them.
Times, it seems, have changed since scholars invaded the library of the monastery and went off with ancient manuscripts under their arms. The monastery now demands a fee of two gold francs for every page of manuscript photographed, and persons who wish to work in the library must first pay a fee of five pounds.
I went along the gallery and discovered that Mr. Vallinis was living in a less ornate apartment at the end of it, while Yusuf had been given the freedom of the guest-house kitchen, an incredible place built against Justinian's wall. Like all good cooks, he was complaining bitterly of the uncouth, alien oven. He looked cut to the heart when I asked only for two boiled eggs. Soon after supper I retired to my four-poster and tried to sleep. I read for some time by the light of two candles, but more than once I got up and stole over to the door to make certain that I was not dreaming: there, sure enough, was the Monastery of Mount Sinai, lying hushed and white beneath the stars.
I was awakened by a dull, resonant sound. It was still dark. When I glanced at my watch, I saw that it was three o'clock. The sound went TAK-tak-tak-tak—one long note followed by three short—as if a gigantic woodpecker were at work in the night. I tiptoed over to the door and looked out. In the shadows below I could make out the figure of a monk hitting a wooden semantron. This is a large plank of wood which has been in use since the earliest times in the Greek Church, to call monks to prayer: it is hung up by chains, and is struck with a wooden mallet. By hitting different portions of the plank, varied sounds can be made.
This insistent staccato, unlike a gong and unlike a drum, a sound with a strange quality entirely of its own, carried into the remote recesses of the surrounding mountains an impression of astonishing venerability: it was the ancient, unchanged voice of the Monastery of Mount Sinai, calling the brothers to prayer as it used to do when Justinian was emperor.
I went to sleep, and was again awakened, this time by a cheerful riot of bell-music that went gambolling wildly through the air. It was broad day. I lay for a moment listening to the curious rhythm that the Greeks put into their bells;
I opened the door and saw a young monk standing in the bell-tower, which was almost level with my balcony; he grasped a rope in each hand. Two bells were flying this way and that, sending their urgent, triumphant call over the monastery, over the desolate plain of El Raha, and up the slopes of the great mountains which still lay in their own vast shadows, although the sun had risen. With the bell-ringing, monks hurried from their cells to the church. I could see them on the way, always ascending or descending steps, winding in and out of passages, each one coming in time to the place where Justinian's church lies below the level of the modern L pavement.Ling-tow, ling-tow, ling-ling-tow,
Ling-ling-tow, ling-tow
Ling-ling-tow, ling-tow.§ 6
In broad daylight the monastery looked more than ever like a fortress. Or perhaps one should compare it with a miniature town of the Middle Ages, with its crooked streets, its mass of buildings of different heights and styles, its delightfully haphazard plan, all telling of centuries of readjustment in a wailed space.
A breast high sentry-walk runs round the wall, in which embrasures have been made so that a few antiquated cannon, of the kind seen in the gardens of retired naval men, may peep down at the rocks. I believe these squat, dangerous-looking objects are still fired during feast days, when their brisk Eighteenth Century detonations add to the excitement of the chiming bells and the thudding semantra.
While I was having breakfast in a room on the gallery, five or six cats of various colours, no two of them alike, crept up and crouched expectantly round the door. They sprang on any scraps of food flung to them, but vanished instantly like so many witches when I invited them to come inside. If you could imagine a cat belonging to anything so plebeian as a herd, I would say that Mount Sinai has a herd of cats, for these animals are everywhere: cats that have never known the thrill of being chased by a dog, have certainly never tasted the joys of fish, and know nothing of the pleasures of milk or the abandoned ease of the fireside. The kittens are the only young things that ever enliven this place with their beauty, and the mother cats are the only representatives of their sex who dwell, or have ever dwelt, within the walls. The cats of Sinai share with those of London an abundant and never-ending roof-line. It should be possible for a cat of agility to make his way overhead from end to end of the monastery, while for those with a fondness for tiles, there are tiles without number. But the cat of Sinai has his work to do: he is there to keep down the rats and snakes.
A pale young monk, wearing powerful spectacles, arrived on the abbot's instructions to show me over the monastery. His name was Brother Gabriel. As we descended the gallery stairs, we saw twelve old monks seated at a trestle-table in the earliest patch of warmth which the sun casts over Mount Sinai.
They were engaged in the daily task of sorting grit from corn. They smiled as we came down, and some of them came forward and shook hands cordially. Most of them said " Kale mera," one said " Bonjour," and another said " Good day."
Their task is simple. Each monk sits with a pile of grain before him which he sifts by the obvious but time-wasting process of picking out the grains one by one and adding them to a separate pile, thus leaving behind all the grit.
We passed from the warmth of this golden corner into chill shadows as yet untouched by sun. I suppose when a monk has lived in the monastery for some time, he knows it as a place mapped out in patches of sun and shade, of warm places and cold ones, for, so high are the surrounding mountains, that the sun gives the monastery only a passing attention, and after two o'clock vanishes for the day behind the tall peaks of Mount Sinai.
I asked the brother to take me as far round the wall as we could go, and we went on, sometimes bending our heads in low stone tunnels and now coming out on the sentry walk with a grand view below us of the distant rocks. When the embrasures were first made in this wall, they were not for culverins or muskets, but for arrows. We came to a dark chamber in which stands a windlass of such gigantic size that it must require the combined strength of the monks to push it round.
This is the machine that was used to pull visitors up in a boatswain's cradle from the year 1600 until the British occupation of Egypt. It is still worked, said Brother Gabriel, when anything heavy has to be introduced into the monastery, or for anything too large to be carried round the narrow lanes. While we were looking at it, two lay brothers arrived with a sack of what appeared to be brown stones, but, having been in Coptic monasteries, I recognised it as that hard bread which must be soaked before it can be eaten. They opened the pent-house door and arranged a rope over a pulley. Looking down, I saw a number of Bedouin standing at the foot of the wall and gazing anxiously up at us.
" They have come for their bread," explained Brother Gabriel, " we give it to them every morning."
I was fascinated to see this ancient custom still being observed in Sinai. The Arabs below were all attached to the monastery, and are known as the Jebeliya. Their tribe has nothing to do but wait near the monastery and tackle any outdoor jobs that have to be done. It is said that these people are not Arabs by blood, but are descendants of a hundred Roman slaves from the Black Sea, and a hundred Egyptians, whom the Emperor Justinian transferred, with their wives and families, to protect and look after the monks when the monastery was first built. The monks have fed them for centuries and, as I was about to witness, still do so every morning at nine o'clock.
First, bundles of firewood were pulled up at the end of a rope, and in return bread was let down to the poor ragged creatures at the foot of the wall, who leapt up to receive it and frequently quarrelled over it. I was told that no Arab is supposed to receive the bread dole two days running.
It seems strange that the monks still hold all commercial relations with these Arabs by means of a rope and pulley, for surely all danger of an attack is now over. Though the Jebeliya are now Moslems, their ancestors were once Christian, and perhaps a relic of Christianity is an hereditary reverence for the monks, whom they believe to be magicians gifted with the power to bring rain or to withhold it. This belief is as strong to-day as it was when Burckhardt visited the monastery in 1816 and heard a good story about it. It seems that the Bedouin believe that the rain of Sinai is caused by the opening and the shutting of a book which the Lord gave to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, which book, they think, is in the possession of the monks. One day, says Burckhardt, a Bedouin, whose camel and sheep had been washed away in a torrent, rode up to the monastery and fired his gun at it, and wlien asked the reason, indignantly exclaimed: " You have opened the book so much that we are all drowned! "
The rules of the monastery allow only three of the Jebeliya to enter at one time, and no Bedouin is allowed to sleep inside the walls. They live mostly in the garden and the sheds outside. I had a good look at these people, wondering if any trace of their peculiar origin still remained in their faces, but I failed to see any: they looked to me much like other Bedouin, though one of them, the man who carries the mails to Tor, is the best-looking man I have seen in the desert. If ever a hero was lost to the films, he is the man who spends his life crossing the mountains on foot from Sinai to Tor twice a month.
The monastery is ruled by the Sinai Assembly, composed of the non-resident Archbishop and four archimandrites, all resident monks. There are generally from thirty to forty monks in residence, some of whom hope to end their days there;
others spend five years or so and leave for other monasteries. There is a mill where corn is ground, a wheelwright's shop^ like a dungeon in the Tower of London, and a vaulted bakery in whose windowless gloom stands a stalwart monk with a white apron tied round him, mixing the bread and despatching the loaves to the cavernous ovens. Shut in by granite walls is a pathetic little garden in which I was surprised to see a few rose trees."We grow flowers for Christmas," said Brother Gabriel; and, searching about this heroic patch of earth, I came on snapdragons, narcissi, and iris.
I asked Brother Gabriel to show me his cell. We ascended several steps to a group of wooden buildings rather like almshouses, built against the monastery wall. He pushed open a door and led the way into a clean little room where a few sacred pictures hung on the walls and a few Greek books stood on a shelf; there was a bed and a chair. As cells go, it was almost luxurious, and he said he was happy there.
Next to the church stands a whitewashed mosque whose square minaret rises beside the bell-tower. The monk told me that centuries ago a Turkish general was marching to destroy the monastery, and the abbot and a deputation of monks went out to meet him and so affected him by their eloquence that he promised to save the monastery if he could. Unfortunately, he said, the temper of his troops was up and they were thirsting for Christian blood, and, though he himself had no desire to harm the monks or their monastery, it would be difficult to control them. " Go back quickly," he said, " and build a mosque beside your church inside the walls, and when we come, say to us that in days gone by the Prophet himself visited the monastery, and the ground is therefore hallowed by his feet." The monks returned, and every pair of hands in the monastery was engaged in building a mosque against time, with the result that when the attacking army arrived, they saw a minaret standing above the walls side by side with the church.
§ 7
We now descended the steps to the Church of the Transfiguration, which is generally believed to date from the reign of Justinian and may therefore be about one thousand and four hundred years old. It is remarkable not only as one of the great pilgrimage churches of Christendom, but also as a Byzantine church in the desert which has never fallen into ruins.
I have mentioned the legend that the first church was built to enshrine the Burning Bush, which in the earliest Christian period was the most sacred object in the valley. St. Helena is also believed to have built near this church a tower of refuge in which the monks might gather during attacks by the Saracens. No date is given for these foundations, but, if the legend is true, it must have been in 327 A.D., when she was in Jerusalem seeking for the relics of the True Cross. If she travelled to Egypt at that time, as the Copts believe she did, and founded the Red and the White monasteries near Sohag, there is, perhaps, nothing improbable in the thought that she should have built a church and a tower in Sinai. Even if a personal visit to Sinai were too exhausting for a woman then in her eightieth year, St. Helena would readily have provided the necessary money. Indeed it is difficult to believe that the hard-pressed hermits of Sinai, learning that the generous Christian Empress was within a few days' journey, did not approach her with the tale of their woes and beg her patronage.
The original church of the Burning Bush had been standing for two centuries when Justinian built the fortress walls around it in 530 A.D. At this time, or shortly afterwards, the Church of the Burning Bush was enlarged into the present church, which was then called the Church of the Transfiguration, from the exquisite Byzantine mosaic which still decorates the dome above the high altar. . The apse of the older Church of the Burning Bush was retained and still stands beyond the present east end of the Church of the Transfiguration, obviously part of an older, smaller building, and on a lower level.
Until the Middle Ages, pilgrims continued to visit the Church of the Transfiguration, to pray beside the Burning Bush, but the translation there of the relics of St. Catherine of Alexandria created a new chapter in the history of Sinai's church. The church now not only changed its name for the third time, but the whole monastery became known popularly as the Monastery of St. Catherine, by which name it is still called to-day, although the church is not dedicated to this saint, but merely preserves her bones.
The association of St. Catherine with Sinai is a remarkable story, and from this remote mountain fastness the fame of the saint went out over all Europe, particularly to Belgium. St. Catherine was a virgin of Alexandria who died for her faith during the reign of Maximianus. Among the tortures devised for her was that of being strapped to four spiked wheels, which, we are told, revolved without tearing her flesh. Her executioners then carried her to a headsman who struck off her head. Five centuries after her martyrdom, it was revealed to a monk of Sinai that St. Catherine's body had been transported by angels to the summit of Jebel Katherin, the companion peak to Mount Sinai. The monks ascended the mountain and discovered her bones, which they interred in a church on the summit of Mount Sinai. The saint's bones exuded oil, which was periodically gathered in glass phials by the monks, who took turns for the privilege of performing this task. One day, about the year 1026, a monk called Simeon was drawing off the oil on the top of Mount Sinai when three saintly finger-bones became detached, which he took with him when he descended to the monastery. Now it had been the custom of the monks of Sinai to make journeys to the courts of Europe to request alms from kings and princes. Among the generous benefactors to Sinai were the Dukes of Normandy. Monks journeyed every year from Sinai to Rouen, never failing to return loaded with gifts of gold and silver.
In the year 1026, or thereabouts, it fell to the lot of the monk Simeon to make this journey, and he took with him the three finger-bones of St. Catherine, which, after many adventures by land and sea, he presented to Duke Robert of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror. As Simeon arrived at Rouen just after Robert's accession, the future conqueror of England was at that time probably an infant of twelve months.
The relics of St. Catherine were deposited in the Abbey of the Trinity, which was being built near Rouen, and, as the Abbot Isambert himself testified, they had the power to cure pain. Their fame grew until the abbey near Rouen, like the Church of the Transfiguration in Sinai, lost its more sacred associations in the minds of ordinary people and became known as the Abbey of St. Catherine. In an amazing way the cult of this saint swept through Europe. Returning crusaders brought it back with them from the East; Latin versions other life began to appear; a new flood of pilgrimage was directed towards Sinai, where the monks were obliged to bring down the relics from the top of Mount Sinai and inter them in a chest in the church, where they remain to this day.
The Normans carried her fame to London, where Queen Matilda founded the hospital and church of St. Catherine-by-the-Tower in 1148. The church was pulled down years ago, but was erected again in Regent's Park. About sixty-two ancient churches in England are dedicated to this saint; but, not content with ecclesiastical dedication, St. Catherine has gone forth into England imprinting her name on hill and headland. There are hills called after her near Winchester, Christchurch, and Guildford; there is St. Catherine's Point in the Isle of Wight, and St. Catherine's Down in the same island; there is St. Catherine's Harbour in Jersey, and the old village of St. Catherine, in Somerset, a few miles north of Bath. And every woman in the world who bears the beautiful name of Catherine owes something ' to this remote monastery of Mount Sinai, which sent the name of St. Catherine of Alexandria spinning like a fire-wheel over the Christian world.
Fifteen steps lead down to the Church of the Transfiguration. As you pass through the narthex, you can see nothing for a few moments but the blaze of the gold and crystal chandeliers which hang the length of the building. The church is loaded with the accumulated piety of centuries. Although the great caravans, which for so many years found their way to this lonely place, have vanished like a mirage, a token of the faith and the love they brought with them remains in the gilded gifts and the glowing ikons which shine everywhere in the dim half-light.
My first impression, as I remembered the desolation lying all round the monastery, was one of amazement that such a building can exist, and has existed for fourteen centuries, in the desert of Sinai. Outside the monastery it is never possible to forget your surroundings for a moment, but when you stand in this church you might be in any fine Greek cathedral in Europe. It is, perhaps, the most spectacular of all the gifts which the Greek Church has offered to God; a gift held up to heaven for fourteen centuries by men whose lives have often been in danger and have always been lives of hardship and privation. It may be that heaven does not »need so much gold paint, but it is man's poor way of showing love, and perhaps the spirit that placed it there finds its way to the Throne of God.
The twelve pillars that divide the nave into two side aisles are tall Byzantine columns of granite, covered with stucco and painted an unhappy shade of green. Some day, when the church is redecorated, the stone may be allowed to remain in its own simplicity. It is difficult to imagine why some writers have described these columns as " lotus capitals," for there is not one lotus capital in the church. They are all typically Byzantine capitals, and each one is different. Brother Gabriel explained to me that each of the twelve pillars contains the relics of a martyr, one for each month of the year.
An ikonostasis loaded with a wealth of ikons conceals a beautifully rounded apse, in which stands the high altar. In the dome above is the famous Justinian mosaic of the Transfiguration. There is probably no early mosaic that is less known than this. It belongs to the same period, certainly to the same style, as the mosaics in the Church of the Holy Wisdom (St. Sophia), at Istanbul, and those at Ravenna and at Salonica, all of which are among the earliest in the world. On the flat wall space above the inward curve of the dome are mosaics which show Moses beside the Burning Bush and receiving the Tablets of the Law, but these are obviously by a later hand and have not the exquisite quality- of the mosaics on the dome itself.
The beautiful group of the Transfiguration is framed by a series of thirty-two circular medallions with silver backgrounds, against which glow the heads and shoulders of saints and prophets. There is a Greek inscription running along the inner curve of the dome: " In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, the whole of this work was executed for the salvation of those who have contributed to it by their donations, under Longinus, the most holy priest and prior, by Theodore, the priest." The mosaic itself shows five figures grouped round the central figure of Jesus, who stands in a mandoria, or almond-shaped space, formed of several blending shades of blue. Our Lord is clothed in a cream-coloured mantle of Byzantine pattern which falls in graceful folds to His feet, and the clavus, or band of colour on His garments, is shown in gold. The nimbus is of silver, and at the back glows a cross. He stands with a scroll of writing in His hand, while from His body issue five rays of faint silver light towards each of the five figures, who stand or kneel in attitudes of fear and amazement. Underneath the mandoria St. Peter lies prostrate, covering his face from the glory of God; on either side kneel St. John and St. James, and above them stand the figures of Elias and Moses. The mosaic is an exquisite blend of dark blues, greens, and browns, against a background of dull gold glass mosaic. The Saviour's hair and beard are of a deep, rich brown, and He is the Christ familiar to the art of the West.
The light is so faint in the apse that it is never easy to see the details of this work, and after about ten o'clock in the morning the sun moves away from the two small windows overhead, the only source of light.
To the right, as you face the altar, 'is a marble shrine upheld by four slender Byzantine columns of marble. From its domed roof nine hanging lamps are suspended above the small decorated sarcophagus of marble in which lie the relics of St. Catherine. One of the senior monks came in with a bunch of keys and offered to display the relics. Candles were first lighted upon the altar, and all the monks who were present reverently removed their birettas as the archi-mandrate unlocked the coffin. The space inside was crowded with objects, but I was shown only two, both of them in caskets of gold. As the first was opened, the monks crossed themselves and I looked at a skeleton hand covered in rings. Emeralds, rubies, and diamonds sparkled on the finger-bones. The wrist had been padded with cotton-wool to enable it to take a sparkling gold bracelet.
The next casket contained a skull whose smooth brown dome was alone visible. Various precious gifts were attached to it, notably a Victorian gold sovereign. There were other relics of St. Catherine in the chest which I was told are never shown. As the relics were replaced, the candles were extinguished.
I was then asked to remove my shoes before entering the Chapel of the Burning Bush, which lies behind the church. I was tremendously interested in this tiny dark apse, for there can surely be no doubt that it is the last relic of the church which stood there before the Church of the Transfiguration was built. It is on a slightly lower level than the later church, and the masonry of the walls is hidden everywhere by glazed tiles. In the centre is a windowless domed recess in which a small altar stands, upheld by four thin marble columns. Three lamps hang beneath the altar, above a small silver plate which is said to mark the site of the Burning Bush.
The monks told me that on a certain day once a year, a ray of sunlight finds its way into this dark little church. The surrounding mountains are so high that except on this particular day, the Chapel of the Burning Bush is in almost complete darkness.
§ 8
Possibly the most tactless thing an Englishman could do in Sinai would be to inform the monks that he had subscribed to the purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus, which is now in the British Museum. I am thankful to say that no one mentioned this subject to me, for I understand that the monks have strong feelings about it. They say that Tischendorf took away the Codex in 1859 to copy it, and that the Tsar retained possession of it by unfair means. Apparently they think it wrong of us to have bought at great cost what they regard as stolen property.
Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this question, the subsequent fame and financial value of the Codex have caused the monks to guard their Library with the eyes of a lynx. The books are no longer neglected. They are stored in a stone room rather like a bank vault, and the more precious volumes are kept behind a locked grille. The books repose on shelves, and most of them bear paper labels on the spine, on which titles are written in Greek and Arabic. I was shown the famous Codex Aureus with its illuminated pages, and many other ancient and valuable manuscripts, now rightly kept under lock and key.
Not far from the Library is the ancient refectory. This is a stone vaulted room with a small altar in a domed recess at the east end. The walls are covered with modern frescoes showing saints in medallions. The most remarkable decoration is the fresco over the altar, which was executed by a monk of Sinai. With a wealth of detail worthy of Brueghel, it pictures the confusion of the Last Judgment, and, whatever its defects may be, lack of action and realism are not among them. At the top, God is seen enthroned in the heavens in the central seat of a curved tribunal; on either side of Him sit the Apostles and Saints, waiting to pronounce judgment on the souls of men. On the right of the picture Hell is ready to receive the wicked, some of whom have already arrived and may be seen writhing in great distress, while serpents, horrible beasts, and devils chase them here and there. On the earth below, the tombs are opening and the dead are coming forth. A black St. Michael clothed in full Roman armour is slaying the dragon; a group of jet-black devils are escorting Anti-Christ; and, most remarkable of all, an army of saints has opened the door of the Holy Sepulchre, from which our Lord walks, bearing His Cross. It is an extraordinarily sincere and decorative piece of work, and I was sorry that I could not discover the artist's name.
The walls of the refectory are covered with many coats of arms, scratched on the stone by Crusaders and pilgrims of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately many more, which were painted on the stone, liave been recently obliterated by a coat of distemper.
Brother Gabriel told me that it is the custom for the abbot to sit with his back to the east wall, while the monks occupy each side of the tables. During meals, which usually consist of black beans, oil, and bread, a monk reads selections from the lives of the saints, his words regulated by a hand bell which the abbot rings to tell him when to stop or when to resume his reading.
The monks used to wash the feet of pilgrims in the refectory, but now that Russian pilgrims no longer come to Sinai, this ceremony is seldom observed. When Pococke was at the monastery in 1739, he said that it was usual for pilgrims, soon after they arrived, to have their feet washed by the monks. Pococke's feet were washed by the abbot. " One of the monks, after this ceremony is over," he said, " holds a basin and urn to wash the hands, and then sprinkles the pilgrims with rose-water; if it is a lay person, one of the lay monks performs these ceremonies, the whole society sitting in the hall and chanting hymns."
I think the beauty of the monastery garden has been exaggerated by some visitors, but it is not possible to exaggerate its rather touching character. It is an arboreal counterpart of the monastery: a group of exiled European trees and shrubs sheltering behind a wall in an alien land.
When you open the little wicket gate, you enter a garden where cypresses, a few olive and almond trees, and many other fruit trees cast their shade on the yellow rocks.
To me, it was a curiosity, but to the monks it was a piece of their native land. No matter whether a monk comes from Salonica, Crete, or Cyprus, he can see in this garden a reminder of his home, and it may be that the ability to look at it without emotion is a sure test that a man has made his peace with God.
I should not say that the monks are great gardeners: they seem to leave all the work to the Bedouin. Among their most prized products is an exceedingly hard kind of pear that will keep from one harvest to another. Though it is so hard, it is not woody, and the flavour is curiously scented, unlike any pear I have tasted in Europe.
I was walking round the garden one morning when I happened to meet Brother Gabriel and another young monk. As we were passing a white building among the trees, which I knew was the bone-house of the monastery, one of them asked whether I should care to see inside. He unlocked the door and we walked into a vaulted room which was piled almost to the ceiling with human bones. To the left, as I went in, was a pile of skulls, and opposite were thousands of arm-bones; in other parts of the vault were similar neat stacks from which skeleton hands and feet protruded.
I was so occupied by this gruesome sight that I did not notice what my companions were doing until the smell of incense caused me to turn round. They stood together, one holding a lighted candle, while the other swung a censer towards the hideous figure of a skeleton clothed in the dusty garments of a monk. It was strapped to a kitchen chair, from which it leaned in a ghastly parody of life, a wooden cross and a rosary dangling from its bony fingers.
This is the skeleton of a monk called Stephen, who died in 580 A.D. He was a hermit on the slopes of Mount Sinai, and they say of him that he caught a panther cub and taught it to protect his cell from hyaenas. When he died, his body was carried down to the monastery to mount guard as porter of the bone-house; and so for thirteen hundred years Stephen has presided, still dressed in a hermit's robes, over Sinai's dead.
It has always been the custom of the monks to exhume their dead after an interval of time and stack their bones in one part of the crypt and their skulls in another. Only bishops and archbishops are allowed to have boxes, which lie round the vault with tickets on them, giving the name and titles of the skeletons within. It is obvious that in the plain of El Raha, with rock everywhere around, this rather grisly custom has been forced on the monks. If every monk who is represented by a skull in the bone-house had been interred in a rock-hewn sepulchre, the mountain would by this time have been honeycombed with tombs.
Among the curiosities is an iron belt which had been taken from the body of a dead hermit. There is also a hair shirt and, strangest sight of all, two skeletons linked together by iron fetters. Romantic and inaccurate stories are told about these skeletons, which are obviously those of two penitents who died, still fettered, while fulfilling a pilgrimage. Many such penitents must have come to Sinai in the course of its history, and we know at least of two brothers called Fromont, of Rennes, who committed murder in the Ninth Century and were sentenced to go fettered on pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem, and Sinai. They were received by Pope Benedict III, who gave them his blessing. After spending some years in Jerusalem, they went to the Thebaid and lived with the Egyptian monks, coming at last, and still in fetters, to the end of their pilgrimage at Sinai. They returned to Rennes by way of Rome, where, after all the hardship they had endured, death struck the fetters from one brother: but the other continued to wear them until at length, his penance over, they were taken from him. It was a common thing for such fetters to be made from the weapon with which the murder had been committed.
The monks were willing to show me more of this bone-house, but I was only too ready to make an excuse and go out into the warm garden.
§ 9
Brother Gabriel and I, accompanied by a lean and tattered Bedouin, set off early one morning to climb Mount Sinai.
The enormous wall of apparently perpendicular mountain at the back of the monastery was lying in cool shadow. The head of Mount Sinai remains remote and hidden by the heights leading to it. It is eight thousand feet above sea level—or almost twice the height of Ben Nevis—but this gives an exaggerated idea of the climb, which, although exhausting, is neither dangerous nor difficult. The monastery itself is nearly four thousand feet above the sea, therefore you have to climb not much more than three thousand five hundred feet, a task made theoretically easier by some three thousand steps cut in the mountain-side in the time of the great Sinaidc pilgrimages.
After we had been climbing for about three-quarters of an hour, I found the granite steps more tiring to my leg muscles than an ordinary straight climb would have been, for some of them are as steep as a ladder set against a house, and you rarely find two together of the same depth. It is this lack of uniformity in the steps which makes them so wearying; in fact I regard the stairway up Sinai to be more of a penance than a help.
We climbed slowly from the cool shadow of the lower slopes into sunlight; then, as the shape of some mighty height obscured the sun, we plodded upward again in welcome shade. Every now and then we would look back to admire a view which became grander with every step.
We stopped to rest beside a small rock spring where, say the Arabs, Moses once tended the flocks of Jethro. Although Brother Gabriel was thin, with a face the colour of candlegrease, he was as tough as a mountain goat, and I believe he could have run all the way up Sinai and down again without fatigue. He was an outstanding example of the virtues of a spare diet. 1 asked him to give me an hour by hour account of his day.
" Take yesterday," he said. " I rose at three-thirty, and was in church until six-thirty. I had a cup of coffee at seven o'clock, but nothing to eat, because it was a fast day. From eight o'clock until one we were looking at the monastery. When I left you at one o'clock I had something to eat—black beans, bread, and oil. I then went to sleep for half an hour. At two o'clock I called for you and we were out on the mountain until five. After this I had a plate of vegetable soup and went to bed. I was in church again at three-thirty this morning."
That is typical of life at Sinai. The food is of the most frugal kind, and the duties of the monks consist chiefly of attending long services in church.
As we talked, the tattered Arab brought from the folds of his rags an object which had once been a briar pipe, and it was now almost entirely bound with bands of brass. Into the bowl of this precious pipe he crammed a mixture of the chopped green herbs which Sinai Bedouin smoke instead of tobacco.
He then produced a flint, which he held in his left hand with a piece of soft rag placed against it. He took a piece of iron, gave the flint a quick slanting blow and blew down on the rag, which at once began to smoulder. His pipe was soon alight, and the process of lighting it had been as neat and quick as if he had used the most modern kind of petrol lighter.
" Would you like a cigarette? " I asked.
His eyes widened. Swiftly he knocked out the green herbs and took two cigarettes, which he packed into the bowl.
We plodded onward and upward like characters in The Pilgrim's Progress, until we entered a gorge where the stairway ascends through a crack in the mountain. There is a small stone chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which is locked except on a certain day in the year.
" There is a story about this," said Brother Gabriel. " In ancient times food caravans once failed to come from Egypt, and the monks suffered not only from lack of food but from a plague of fleas. Itwas decided to forsake the monastery and find somewhere else to live. Sad at heart, the monks paid a last pilgrimage to the holy mountain. When they reached this place they saw the Holy Virgin, the Mother of God, sitting with the Child in her arms. ' Go back,' she said, ' and your troubles will be ended.' Wondering and amazed, they descended to find camels loaded with food standing under the walls, and—all the fleas had vanished! "
As the stairway climbs the ravine, it passes under an arch. At this gate Stephen used to sit, the monk whose skeleton guards the charnel house at Sinai. His task was to examine pilgrims to see whether they were spiritually worthy to ascend the mountain. If he passed them, they went on to another gate where a friar waited to hear their confessions and to give them absolution.
The steps then led to a curious little plain, the only stretch of level ground on the way up Mount Sinai, where a tall, solitary cypress stands like a sentinel. They say that this tree is five hundred years old, and the engraving of it in Laborde's book, which was published in 1838, shows it looking just the same a century ago as it does to-day.
There are two buildings on the plain: an old stone chapel dedicated to Elijah and a little Grimm's fairy-tale house which stands near an abandoned garden. These buildings, the tangle of garden, and the lonely cypress tree, were living, like all deserted places, in an atmosphere of conspiracy. I felt that had we arrived just a minute before, we might have seen something—or someone—but now tree, buildings, and garden were pretending to be asleep and waiting for us to go away.
It was here, in front of the Chapel of Elijah, that we encountered a mild disaster. Brother Gabriel groped in his robes for the key and discovered that we had left it far below in the monastery. He told me that the chapel is built over a cavern in which, it is said, Elijah concealed himself when he was flying from the wrath of Jezebel, as described in I Kings xix. 9. While he was living in this cave, the Lord appeared to him and told him to return and elect Elisha as his successor; and from this cave he returned and sought out Elisha " and cast his mantle upon him."
The chapel is opened only once or twice a year, when a few monks climb up into the solitude and celebrate Mass there, spending the night in the little fairy-tale house and returning to the monastery on the following day.
From this point the climb, although steeper than ever, is easier because the air is like iced wine. It blows over the roof of the world, driving the ache from one's knees and the heat from one's face. And as I went on, I kept turning every hundred feet or so to look back at the mountains, which an hour ago were gigantic and now lay below me; and over their brown heads I saw more mountains lying behind them. Even these, as I climbed higher, lowered their craggy crests and offered a view beyond them of a world as dead as the mountains that cover the face of the moon.
Like many other great heights. Mount Sinai remained withdrawn and invisible until I was within the last few yards of the summit. Looking upward, I saw at last, at the top of a rock-cut stair, a little stone chapel lying against the sky. The cross on its gate was outlined upon an immense blueness of space, and when I had climbed the last few yards, I looked down upon the distant earth.
I have climbed many a high mountain in my life, but never before have I seen a view like that from Mount Sinai. Everywhere I looked, I saw range upon range of mountains lying far below, like the waters of a frozen sea. Only to the south-west did the dark shoulder of Jebel Katherin close the view. A storm at sea turned into stone is perhaps the only imagery that may convey some idea of the stupendous spectacle. Crests of mountains, sharply pointed; long ridges, like waves about to break; blunted masses of rock, like waves that have collapsed; enormous, sweeping, scooped-out valleys, like a backwash of water arrested in the moment of gathering itself to re-mount the heights; all these lay spread below, hungry, savage, and desolate. On this cloudless day, and in the clear air, I could see great distances. To the east, the golden sands on the Sinai side of the Gulf of Akaba were plainly visible, edged with blue water which stretched eastward to the country of Ibn Saud. Northwards, I surveyed the terrifying barrier of mountains that runs into the heart of Sinai, and to the north-west these giants lowered their flanks and descended gently towards the Gulf of Suez. In the Wadi below, the Wadi Seba'iyeh, I could see camel-tracks lying like grey threads. As I was looking at the blue mass of Jebel Katherin, whose twin peaks are slightly higher than Mount Sinai, I saw a bird fly from a rocky ledge several hundred feet down and come slowly across the space between the two mountains. He was joined in a few moments by his mate, and those two great birds, slowly moving above the distant earth, were the only signs of life. I am almost sure they were golden eagles.
Lifted above the world, on the highest point of the mountain's summit, is the small Chapel of Mount Sinai; within a few yards of it, and separated from it by a low stone wall and a rail of barbed wire, is a single-roomed mosque which the Arabs visit once a year to sacrifice a sheep to Moses. Both chapel and mosque are built of massive blocks of granite. The chapel, which is modern, replaces one whose history goes back perhaps even further than that of the monastery in the valley. The ground round about is strewn with finely hewn stones, bits of marble, and traces of Byzantine carving, the remains of the first chapel. Many sculptured stones from this early building have been built into the walls of the present chapel.
I was asked to sign a vellum visitors' book which is kept in the little vestibule of the chapel. The last visitor, I noticed, was here about two months before, and nearly everyone who has signed this book boasts about the time he took in ascending the mountain. Two hours is supposed to be good going.
The chapel is adorned by a series of vividly coloured Old Testament scenes which are not yet finished. We saw the monk's paint-pots and brushes in a corner of the church. To the right side of the altar a portion of the bare rock has been left exposed, as in the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and this rock is the place sanctified by tradition as that on which the Commandments were given to Moses. The first chapel on Mount Sinai was built over this rock centuries ago, and the bones of St. Catherine were brought to it from the neighbouring mountain and kept for many years.
The monk lighted a taper on the altar, and it remained burning while we were on the mountain. On the other side of the chapel is a low cavern in the open air, large enough to take a human body; it is said to be the place where Moses covered his face from the glory of God.
I do not know whether monks have ever lived up on the summit of Mount Sinai, or whether they used to climb up with the pilgrims and unlock the church as they do to-day. There was a tradition that if anyone slept on the mountain he would be disturbed and driven down by unearthly rumblings. One of the earliest references to the holy sites of Sinai is the travel journal of a woman who made a pilgrimage there nearly a hundred years before the monastery was built. She was a pious Spanish nun named Etheria, and she is believed to have set out about the year 460 A.D. to identify the places she had read about in the Bible. Her description of climbing Mount Sinai throws a flood of light, as indeed her whole diary does, on the conditions of Eastern Christendom at a time when pilgrims were still uncommon. She says of the mountains of Sinai that " you do not go up them slowly and slowly like a snail, but straight up you go, as if it were a wall, and you are obliged to descend each of these mountains till you get down to the very root of that middle mountain, which is specially Sinai. And there, with the help of Christ, our Lord, aided by the prayers of the monks who accompanied us, I accomplished the ascent, and with great labour, for I was obliged to ascend on foot, as I could not go up in the saddle; nevertheless this labour was not felt, because the desires I had I saw fulfilled with the help of God."
In four hours time Etheria reached the summit of Sinai. " And in that spot there is now a little church, because the said place, which is the summit of the mountain, is not very large. But nevertheless the church has of itself great grace. When, then, with the help of God we ascended to that summit, and arrived at the door of that church, behold the presbyter met us, coming from his monastery, which is considered to belong to the church, a healthy old man—a monk of what is called the ascetic life here, one moreover who is worthy to be in this place. . . . But no one dwells on the summit of the mountain, for there is nothing else there save only the church and the cave where St. Moses was> Having read in the very place all from the Book of Moses, and having made an offering in due order, and we having partaken of the communion, just as we were going out of the church the presbyters of the same place gave us thank-offerings, that is, gifts of apples which grow in the mountain itself."
Looking down on the mountain tops of Sinai fourteen centuries ago, Etheria wrote: " This I would have you know, ladies, venerable sisters, that the mountains which we had at first ascended without difficulty, were as hillocks compared with the central one on which we were standing. And yet they are so enormous that I thought I had never seen higher, did not this central one overtop them by so much."
Fully a century was to elapse between the time of Etheria's pilgrimage and the birth of Mohammed, therefore the mosque was not then built. I went over to the building, which is a cell whose stones are stained with the blood of sheep sacrificed there by the Bedouin. Sitting on the wall which divides the mountain-top between Christianity and Islam, I ate the sandwiches I had brought with me; and, as I sat there, very still and quiet, I saw an enchanting mouse come out of the mosque and sit up, holding his little feet close to his stomach, and look around. I was almost afraid to move, but he was as tame as a wild mouse can be. He was not as big as the Micky Mouse of Qzirna, but he was twice the size of an English mouse, and an air of extreme corpulence was given to him by a coat so thick and so bushy that he looked like an Eskimo of the mouse world.
I threw bread to him, which he took away into the mosque, and, throwing it nearer and nearer, I had him within a few feet of me; and I am sure that could I come here often, I would have him eating out of my hand in a week. My delight with him was increased when he produced his wife and family, all corpulent and thick-coated. At the same time two Christian mice approached from the direction of the chapel, so that soon I had six or seven of these little creatures running here, there, and everywhere. But where did they come from? Are they ordinary house-mice which have found their way to the summit of a mountain eight thousand feet high? Are they the result of some mousey exodus from the claws of the monastery cats ? Or are they a special species of Sinaitic mouse? I remember hearing that house-mice marooned on a sandy island somewhere near Dublin have changed colour, and I was once told by a cold-storage man in the London Docks that the mice grow specially thick coats there. It may therefore be possible that these mice have grown their thick coats in order to exist during the winter on the summit of Sinai.
Both the Greek monk and the Bedouin assured me that mice had been there since they remembered the mountain. If the last visitor, who presumably left some crumbs, was here two months ago, how did these creatures find food on this bare rock in the meantime?
As the sun was sinking towards the Arabian Desert, we extinguished the taper and locked the chapel. Turning our backs upon the holy mountain, we descended, leaving it to the sky and to the little creatures who live among the nooks and crannies of the hallowed rock.
§ I0
We descended rapidly, in places almost at a run, resting now and then not because we were tired, but in order to watch the glory of the sunset. Brother Gabriel talked to me of the saints and hermits whose names are still associated with the caves of Sinai, and I was interested to discover among them many a saint well known in the history of early Christianity.
St. Cosmos and St. Damianus are commemorated in a cave in the Wadi el-Lejah. They were Egyptian doctors of a class known as the " silverless martyrs," because they were professional men who took no fees from those they served, but asked in payment that their clients should turn from paganism to Christianity. They must have been among the earliest of the Sinai hermits, for it is said that they suffered death in the Third Century, during the persecution of Diocletian.
Then another saint, whose name is still given to a grotto in the mountains, is St. Onofrius. He was an Egyptian hermit who, like St. Anthony, sought a solitude deeper than the Thebaid and penetrated to the wildness of Sinai at the end of the Third Century. His life was written by a monk who knew him, an Egyptian called Paphnutius, a disciple of St. Anthony, and the manuscript is in the British Museum. Paphnutius set forth some time at the beginning of the Fourth Century to visit the most renowned saints and solitaries of the desert. One day, when he was climbing the mountains of Sinai, he saw a man who was clothed only with a girdle of leaves and whose body was covered with hair. At the sight of him Paphnutius hid himself, under the impression that the man was mad. But it was the hermit St. Onofrius. Taking Paphnutius to his cave, the hermit told him that seventy years ago he had belonged to a monastery in Egypt, but, wishing to emulate St. John the Baptist, he had been consumed by a desire to live in the uttermost recesses of the wilderness. He found his way to Sinai, where gradually his habit fell into rags until there was nothing to cover his nakedness. Even while he was describing his life a pallor grew in his face, and it was obvious to the visitor that the saint was dying. He died blessing Paphnutius, who tore off a portion of his own cloak and, wrapping the body in it, left it in a cleft of the mountain.
Another name mentioned by Brother Gabriel was that of the holy Nilus. The monks claim to have his skeleton in the bone-house, although I am sure I have read somewhere that these relics were taken to the Church of the Apostles in Constantinople at some remote time. However, Nilus was one of the great literary hermits, and his writings serve to illuminate the darkness of the distant days in which he lived. A man of wealth and position in Constantinople in the time of the Emperor Theodosius II, he burned with desire to seek God in the lonely places of the world. Leaving his wife, he took his young son, Theo-dulos, with him, and went on a long journey, possibly about 390 A.D. He tells us that the desert was full of savage Saracens who worshipped the Morning Star and sacrificed comely young boys on altars of rough stone. If they could not sacrifice boys, they forced a young white camel to kneel, a beast without blemish, which the sheik despatched with a sword-thrust in the neck. The Saracens would then fall upon the victim and devour it, and it was their rule that every portion of the sacrifice had to be consumed before the first rays of the sun appeared on the horizon.
While Nilus and his son were living in a hermit community, a band of these Saracens descended on the church and seized the food which the hermits had stored in their cells for the winter. They then ordered the hermits to strip off their clothes and line up according to age. Some of the older hermits were killed, and the young boys, among them Theodulos, the son of Nilus, were seized and taken away.
" O why had the miracles of Sinai ceased? " cries Nilus, " and no thunder rolled, no lightning flashed to scare them in their wickedness! "
After the dead had been buried, the hermits met together and decided to make a complaint to the king of the local barbarians, who apparently was responsible to the Roman Government for the safety of the mountain passes, just as the local sheiks in Sinai were responsible until the establishment of the Frontiers Department. The king told the hermits that he would follow up the Saracens and exact vengeance for the raid, and Nilus, anxious to recover his son, asked if he might go with them. The king agreed, and Nilus travelled with the pursuing force for twelve days across Sinai. He then met a man who said that he had encountered the Saracens and that the boys had not been killed. Nilus was overjoyed to hear that Theodulus was still alive. He had, however, been sold into slavery in the Greek town of Elusa, , which Sir Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence have identified with the ruins of a place called Khalasa, some fifteen miles south of Beersheba.
Nilus went to this town and searched for his boy. He discovered that the Bishop of Elusa had made him doorkeeper to the church there. Theodulus told his father how he and the other captives had lain all night on the ground, bound with thongs, beside an altar on which was a sword, a basin, a phial and incense. But the Saracens had over-drunk and over-slept, so that in the morning, and for days afterwards, the captives were hurried along, until it occurred to their captors to turn them into ready money. The Bishop of Elusa was so struck by the piety of father and son that he ordained them.
Nilus and Theodulos then returned to Sinai to make their lives with the hermits there. They distinguished themselves by their austerities, but Nilus was not an extremist, and found time to criticise what he considered to be the evils of the ascetic life of his time. His writings, and especially his letters advising and correcting fellow-Christians, are among the most intimate and instructive which have come down from that remote day.
Discussing these great ones of the past, we came down |, from Mount Sinai by the camel road into the Wadi Shu'aib, where we saw the monastery lying before us in the shadow of the hills.
" Look," I said, " who is that? "
Far off on the opposite gorge a black figure was descending the mountain-side. He was so far away that it was difficult to see him unless you kept your eyes on him all the time. Brother Gabriel, whose eyes were riot strong, was unable to see him at all, but the Bedouin picked him out at once and mentioned a name to the monk.
" Ah," said Brother Gabriel, " he is an old monk who spends all his time climbing the mountains to fix crosses on the high places. You have seen the crosses everywhere around. He puts them there in memory of the glorious martyrs and hermits who once lived and died here."
§ II
It was my last night in Sinai. As I sat alone after supper, in the little room next to my bedroom, a monk brought in the visitors' book for me to sign. As I turned its pages, famous and interesting names revealed themselves in the light of the lamp. It is strange that many a bad hotel in much frequented portions of the earth has a visitors' book bound in precious vellum, while the monks of Sinai, whose visitors are as unnumbered as the sands and include pilgrims of all ages and of all countries, content themselves with an exercise book.
This visitors' book is a modern touch in Sinai, for it begins only in the year 1860. Burckhardt has told us that when he visited the monastery in 1816 he found the walls covered with scraps of paper on which visitors had written their names, so that the present book is evidently what is termed " a long-felt want."
The first entry is that of Johan Thomas Olaf Neergaard of Copenhagen, who stayed there from March 19-21, 1860. The first English entries in that year are those of C. M. Nickels, S. H. Moore, and William Howard Doughty, who left sixty francs for the benefit of the monastery.
There is an entry in French dated March, 1868, by a large party from the Suez Canal Company, in which appears the signature of a Marie Voisin. Written on the same page, but on September 30, 1935, arc the words "The son of Marie Voisin, wife of Jean Micard, has the happiness to visit this holy spot sixty-eight years after the pilgrimage of his mother and his grandfather. Gaston Micard."
On April 5, 1871, was this item:
We beg to acknowledge with many thanks the kindness and courtesy received from the monks during four days' visit to the convent.CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM,
Scotland.At an unspecified date in 1875 the book was signed:
" Charles M. Doughty."There is a delightful letter dated October 7, 1888, which reads as follows:
I am the under-signed Staff Officer, Headquarter's Office, Egyptian Army, in charge of the eastern part of the country. Have come to this convent after inspecting El Tor accompanied with Ismail Agha Ahmed Baluh, Bashi of El Akaba. I beg to inform the reader that the way of El Akaba, Wadi Musa and El Khalil, is quite safe. Sometimes the sheiks of the Arabs say a falsehood on a special purpose of their own benefit, that the said way is unsafe. I wish if any lady hears such falsehood will kindly inform the Government, that we may do the needful about the lying man. We left this convent after a stay of three days with very many thanks to the monks for the respect, kindness and attention we received from them. They provided us with food, forage and all that we wanted. I am very sorry I had no time to visit Jebel Musa and Katerina but I hope I could visit them next year. I have seen everything in this convent and found it quite correct. I am going to live at Suez.
Staff Capt. IBRAHIM EFFENDI
ZOHNI, H.Q..E.A.
BALUH, Bashi of Akaba.
On March I, 1894, the book was signed " Pierre Loti."
On May 10, 1903, the following entry appears:
We were the first Franciscans to come here to this holy spot after many centuries, and were delighted with everything we saw. We had the happiness to venerate all the sacred places and the holy relics, and we do not know how to express our thanks to the good fathers of this monastery for their kindness and charitable reception. We shall never forget to remember the delightful days we spent here, and write these few words in thanksgiving for all the kindness. we received here. May God bless this holy house and all who dwell therein.F. GODFREY, O.F.M.
W. MOWBRAY.
FRA FiDELIS DA BOSTON.On November 16, 1922, the late Lord Allenby visited Mount Sinai and wrote these words:
On leaving the Convent of Santa Katerina, where I have had the honour of being the guest of His Beatitude, the Archbishop of Mount Sinai, I must express my deep sense of appreciation of the hospitality and generosity that I and my staff have received. I was profoundly touched by the thought of the Archbishop to celebrate a solemn mass for the repose of the soul of my beloved mother; at which ceremony it was my privilege to be present. We carry away with us reverent and happy impressions of our stay at this centre of sacred memories.ALLENBY, FIELD-MARSHAL.
16-18th November, 1922.Although I have copied only a few of the entries which interested me, there is hardly a nation in the world that will not find its language represented in this book.
§ I2
The bells were rung as usual at three-thirty in the morning. It was still dark and the stars were brilliant. I descended four stairways and crossed white-washed courts, all so silent, so hushed, and so cold, and before I entered the church I could hear, in the stillness of the morning air, a deep rumble of voices coming from it. I stopped to listen.
" Agios-agios-agios-agios-agios-agios-agios . . ."
Then a higher voice would break in with:
" Kyrie eleison ..."And a third, deep as a bassoon:
" Kyrie elei-soon . . ."The last syllable would be carried fathoms deep into the ultimate pits and caverns of the voice.
I entered by a side door into a mist of incense. At first I could see nothing but pin-points of candlelight and two green sparks and one ruby-red, hanging in the darkness; but soon my eyes could make out the forms, darker shadows in a world of shadows, of the great candelabra hanging from the roof of the nave. It was like wandering in some vast cave hung with stalactites.
I tip-toed to a choir-stall and stood there unseen. Near the east end of the church was a faint glow of light in which the top of the lectern was visible. Bearded faces would appear out of the darkness and shine for a moment in the glow, to disappear again smoothly into the dark. Only a rustle indicated that a face would appear in this glow, just a faint scraping on the floor, as an invisible body approached, then suddenly a new face, pale and bearded as all the others, would be shining like the ghost of Banquo.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, dawn began to steal like a grey veil into the church, but it seemed impossible that light could ever invade that solid darkness. Then across the nave, in the stalls opposite, I saw monks standing; I saw the nave pillars going up like grey shadows, and the high outline of the ikonostasis with its rampart of saints. A door in the ikonostasis opened. A priest in a vestment, which I could now see was red, came out with a large book in his hand; a monk in black stood beside him holding a candle near the book. His voice sounded for a long time in the cold church. The light grew. I could see the faces of saints gazing long-bearded from the gold of ikons. The priest and his attendant moved through the door; there was a bright sound of curtain-rings running along a brass rod, and a sheet of red brocade filled the doorway. The service, which had been in progress since half-past three, had ended with the dawn.
On the steps outside a few monks were standing in the grey light before sunrise. The Archbishop of Sinai invited me to his room to see the ceremony of the first day of the month. Sinai still uses the Julian Calendar, which is thirteen days behind our Gregorian Calendar. We went together to the room on the wooden gallery, followed by the priest whom I had seen in the church, still wearing his red vestments. He held a brass bowl of holy water, a sprig of basil, and a silver hand-cross. When we came to the Archbishop's room, the priest offered the basil and the hand-cross to his superior. Holding them together, the Archbishop dipped them into the holy water, held them against his forehead for a moment, while he uttered a silent prayer, and then shook the water over the room, using the basil as an aspergillum. This ceremony over, the priest took the bowl, the basil, and the cross, and went throughout the monastery sprinkling every room and every monk's cell with the holy water.
And as he was bringing that message of peace and grace to his brothers, the sun came up over the mountains and the monastery was bathed in light.
An hour later I said good-bye to His Beatitude and to the monks who had been so kind and helpful. Brother Gabriel came down to the gate to see me off, and when I asked him what I could send him from England, he thought seriously for some time and asked for pictures of London and some stamps of King George VI.
The cars roared, and the Jebeliya came running with their children, so that it was through a crowd of wondering faces that we lurched off over the rough road. Turning before we lost sight of the monastery, I saw it embattled in the mountain pass, and upon its ramparts a few dark figures stood gazing like magicians from the towers.
§ I3
We reached Suez before dark that night, and at five o'clock on the following morning I set off again with Vallinis, Yusuf, and the two cars, to travel along the western shore of the Gulf to a monastery which is as little known as Sinai is well known. This is the Coptic monastery of St. Anthony—Der Anba Antonius—which claims to be older than Sinai.
I know of only two brief descriptions of it, for the great explorers of the Nineteenth Century, diverted, perhaps, by nearer sites, never penetrated to the remote desert in which it lies. Unlike Sinai, the Monastery of St. Anthony has no history of pilgrimage and no European associations. Its claim to fame rests on its connection with St. Anthony and on its extraordinary antiquity; for it was founded by his followers near the cave in which the saint suffered his celebrated temptations.
The road along the west shore of the Gulf is rough and difficult, and the road to Sinai is safe and easy in comparison. This western road presents continual obstacles in the form of wadi beds full of enormous boulders carried down by mountain torrents. Every fall of rain alters the track by redistributing the boulders and adding new ones. The optimist who thinks he can discover an easy way round by making a detour, will inevitably find trouble and be obliged to retrace his steps. The lesser evil is to move the boulders from the path of the car, which we did in several places. I have never seen a road which offered greater peril to the back axle.
As we continued our journey, I noticed a peculiarity of the west bank of the Gulf which may have been due to wind or tide, or some such temporary cause, or may be a permanent peculiarity. It is that all the bamboo baskets, chicken crates, oranges, spars of wood, and such-like things cast overboard from ships in the Gulf, drift to the west bank, which was strewn with them every inch of the way. The path to Abyssinia seems to be marked by empty Chianti bottles, for I was told that these had been flung over by Italian transports passing through into the Red Sea. What bad luck it is for the Bedouin of the east bank if nothing of this treasure ever finds its way over to his shores!
When the mountains recede, there are long stretches of soft, deceptive sand, especially between Abu Derega and Ras Zafarana, in which it is almost impossible not to become embedded. Both our cars stuck in this sand within a mile ,of Ras Zafarana, and nothing we could do prevented them from sinking to the back axles. Even the dodge of putting out stretches of canvas with struts of wood nailed along them failed to give the tyres a grip, and we were forced to appeal to that noble force, the Frontiers Department, which has a small white police post at Ras Zafarana. This post, by the way, gazes across the waters of the Gulf of Suez to Abu Zenima.
Six lusty privates in charge of a Sudanese sergeant arrived quickly in a police car. These Sudanese non-commissioned officers do everything at the double. This sergeant lined up his men, called them to attention, and came running over;
he saluted like a guardsman, and asked permission for the troops to advance. In half an hour they had lifted the cars out of the sand by sheer man power, and when, in the most tactful way possible, I attempted to give the sergeant a slight token of gratitude, he again came to attention and asked to be excused as a servant of the Government who was merely doing his duty. I well understand why men who have served in Egypt and the Sudan admire and respect the Sudanese. They seem to be natural born soldiers and are a tribute to the men who trained them.We struck inland behind Ras Zafarana, and after several hours' hard going through rising desert, came within sight of the bare range of mountains at whose foot the monastery is situated. Inexpressibly wild and remote, this lonely place lifts its fortified white wall amid miles of stony desert, and when we drew nearer, I saw how precipitous are the mountains which rise immediately behind it.
We drew up before a great white wall and pulled the bell rope beside the gate.
The Coptic Patriarch in Cairo had been kind enough to give me a letter of introduction to the kummus or abbot. The monks opened the door and told us to drive the cars into the enclosure. We entered a walled space that looked to me like any Egyptian village, except that there were no women or children. The ground fell away steeply to the left and was full of bushes and palm trees. In front of us ran a regular street of square mud houses, some of them six storeys high, with the ends of palm-trunks protruding from their walls; and above each door was the sign of the Cross. This street ended at a central square where two modern bell-towers were standing. Behind the square, another narrow street of mud houses ran to a white building with a draw-bridge, which I recognised as the customary kasr, or keep, of a Coptic monastery. In the background were a cluster of flat mud roofs and low white domes, which I knew indicated a church.
The Monastery of St. Anthony is larger than any of those in the Wadi Natrun, and although there is ample space within the walls, all the buildings are grouped closely together. Unlike the stone and limewash buildings of the Natrun monasteries, most of the houses and outbuildings are primitive constructions of brown mud brick.
A young lay brother conducted me up a flight of steps, and across a paved courtyard where several immense pans of bees-wax were cooling, to a building of some size which looked like a prosperous shopkeeper's house in a small French country town. I entered a dark cool hall furnished with divans. It was obviously the guest-house and was beautifully clean and swept.
I had been sitting there for a few moments when two men entered. One was extremely handsome, with European features, a fine forehead, a straight nose, and a brown beard; he wore a black turban and a maroon-coloured gown. His companion was a short, dark man with a black beard, and was dressed in black; he was just as quick and animated as the other was slow and reserved. The first man was the kummus, who spoke only Arabic, and the other was a visiting priest who had been secretary to the Metropolitan of Abyssinia, and had recently come from Addis Ababa. He spoke some French.
They were interested to hear that I had come straight to their monastery from Sinai. On clear days, said the kummus, when you climbed the hills at the back of the monastery, you could see right across the Gulf of Suez to the mountains of Sinai, and southward towards the Red Sea.
Turning to the lively priest, I asked him one or two questions about Abyssinia. We were soon discussing the history of this church, which has remained a dependency of the Coptic Church since the Fourth Century, when the great Athanasius, then Patriarch of Alexandria, consecrated St. Frumentius as the first Bishop of Ethiopia. It has always been the custom for the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria to appoint the head of the Ethiopian Church, but the Italian conquest of Abyssinia has now created difficulties about it.
A lay brother came in with coffee, and after the formalities had been observed, the kummus himself showed me to my room. It contained a high, hard bed, a chair, a table, and a wash-stand; and the barred window gave me an admirable view of the circular mounds of cooling bees-wax waiting to be made into candles. The door opened and a lay brother came in with a basin and a jug of water. I held out my hands and he poured a thin stream of water on them. I used soap, and he poured again in the ancient way which is common all over the East, where our habit of washing in still water is considered inexpressibly dirty. Clothed in his dusty black gown, and with a pair of heelless slippers on his bare feet, he would have passed without notice in any Egyptian village in the Nile Valley, but his eyes had an unusual earnestness and there was nothing dull or stupid about his expression. I was astonished when he suddenly addressed me in English.
" I take first-class English certificate in Coptic school," he said. " Ah, English, I like much, very much. It is a language of courage. I ask the kummus to let me serve you because you come from England."
' How long have you been here? " I asked.
' Now, one year," he replied.
' And are you happy ?"
' Oh yes, I am happy."
' Did you always wish to become a monk ? "
' No; not always. I did want to enter Government employ, but . . ."And here, at the most interesting part, he stopped and looked confused; and I saw that the cheerful little priest was standing at the door. I determined to resume the conversation as soon as possible.
" We have," began the little priest with a lifted forefinger and an incredibly waggish expression, " we have killed a chicken for you." He broke into a ripple of merriment. " It is our custom that the guest eats with us the first night." He then became carried away with the humour of his thoughts. " But it is not possible for us to eat with you, because we are fasting! " He then grew serious. " Your servants down below do not understand. They wish to give you dinner. But it is our custom that you eat with us."
I ran downstairs to the place where the cars were parked, knowing well what I should see. Yusuf, whose baseless conception of me was still of one who traverses the desert in a condition of Gargantuan and epicurean repletion, was kneeling in the glare of a headlight, selecting from the ice chest, pigeons, eggs, a tin of caviare, a bunch of carrots, some onions, and a box of Camembert cheese. A group of astounded monks stood by, gazing down on this floodlit exhibition of man's greed. When I told Yusuf that dinner was cancelled, he gave me the mournful look of an unjustly chastised dog.
" Sir, you eat nothing," he cried with his arms outstretched, an egg in one hand and a bunch of carrots in the other. " You not like my cooking! "
" I love it, Yusuf," I told him, " and to-morrow you shall do what you like."
" As you say," he replied with gloomy fatalism.It was then too dark to see the monastery. I returned to sit in the guest-house and wait for dinner. The odour of a boiling fowl began to find its way about the place, and I could hear close by the confused sound of many cooks tripping over each other in a confined space. An hour passed and nothing happened. I began to feel ravenously hungry. I ventured to tip-toe to the room opposite and look inside. Beyond a bedroom was a kitchen in which at least seven or eight persons were moving about in the combined light of a paraffin lamp and two brown church candles of unbleached wax (as ordained, I thought unhappily, for the burial of the dead). Mr. Vallinis, in his shirt sleeves, sat on a stone bench cheerfully bandying words with the monks; Yusuf sat in a corner gazing cynically at five black figures who stirred a cauldron in turn and ran about the place in search of things. It was a strange scene. I tip-toed away without' being seen, M realising that to have shown myself would have flung whatever organisation existed into an ecstasy of speedless haste.
At last the lay-brother came to say that dinner was ready. He took me to a bare, white-washed room lit by one brown candle in a sconce. A small table bore a steaming hash of chicken and rice. The little priest entered and sat down with me, and I told him that I would not eat unless he joined me. He shook with laughter, and his eyes shone like two illuminated sloes.
" I tell you what I will do," he said. " I notice that your man has brought oranges with you. I will eat one orange, because this is a special occasion."
So while I ate the excellent hash, Father Anthony, for that was his appropriate name, slowly peeled an orange and ate it with many a merry laugh.
About twelve miles over the mountains to the south-east, and a few miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, is another monastery, Der Anba Bulos—the Monastery of St. Paul— which contests St. Anthony's claim to be the oldest Christian monastery in the world. Father Anthony told me that in his opinion St. Anthony's is the older monastery, and is regarded as the premier monastery of Egypt because of its association with the founder of monasticism. It was once the privilege of St. Anthony's to provide the head of the Coptic Church, a monk chosen for his simple and pious qualities. The more simple and pious he was, the less he desired to become Patriarch, with the result that it was the custom to take the elected dignitary bound in chains to Alexandria, weeping and bewailing his fate.
St. Anthony left the Nile Valley and sought the greater solitude of the mountains about the year 312 A.D. He found a cave, which is still to be seen, in the cliffs that rise steeply behind the monastery. When he arrived on this mountain, he discovered that he was not the only inhabitant. St. Paul (Anba Bulos) was already living in a cave twelve miles away, near the monastery which is now named after him. The two hermits met, but Paul, unlike Anthony, never laid down any rules of conduct for his fellow-hermits: he lived in complete isolation. When he died at a great age, about 340 A.D., he bequeathed his tunic of stitched palm leaves to St. Anthony. Sixteen years after Paul's death, St. Anthony, then one hundred and five years old, died in the company of two faithful disciples, Macarius and Amatas. It was Amatas who provided St. Athanasius with the material for his Life of St. Anthony, written about 356-7 A.D., and addressed to the " monks abroad " in Italy and Gaul.
St. Anthony, it seems, was not only the founder of monasticism but also of psycho-analysis, for he believed in keeping a diary in which the most secret thoughts of the mind should be entered, on the principle, well known to modern exponents of this art, that it is better to expose them to the light of day. He was not a bookman, though he entered fully into the church disputes of his time and corresponded freely with those who sought his advice, among whom were the Emperor Constantine and his sons. He was not outwardly a morbid hermit; in fact, he seems to have greeted those who came to see him with courtesy and cheerfulness. It was difficult to arrange an interview with him unless it were on behalf of some suffering human being. Rich people tried vainly to lure him from his cell, and he always replied: " As a fish dies out of water, so a monk out of his cell."
His food was dry bread and water, and he fasted sometimes for four days together. He never ate until sunset, even on days when he was not fasting, and he never washed. He was not a tall, commanding figure, as he is generally pictured by artists: he was a small man, yet there was something about him which made men turn to look at him in a crowd. When he went to Alexandria at the request of St. Athanasius, to preach against the Arians, crowds followed him through the streets shouting " the man of God! "
He was visited by periods of ecstasy which lasted sometimes for an hour. At such moments his disciples used to wait for him to come back to earth, and he himself believed that, to be perfect, prayer should be ecstatic. When he died, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this book, he charged his disciples to bury him secretly, and his tomb has never been discovered.
The monks believe that their monastery is dated from the death of St. Anthony in 356 A.D. There is even a legend that the Church of St. Anthony, the chief church in the monastery, was originally an oratory erected by the saint at the foot of the mountain.
I said good-night to Father Anthony and walked on the. terrace before going to bed. An almost full moon hung over the desert. The monastery lay like a ship becalmed at sea, its white walls shining in an emptiness of earth and sky. I stayed some moments listening to a silence so deep that my ears invented sounds which were not there.
The lay-brother had placed at my bedside a brown ecclesiastical candle three feet in height. It burned with a great guttering of soft wax. No sooner had I snuffed it, than my eyes seemed to open again to the daylight.
§ I2
The monastery contains two chief churches, each one roofed with twelve low white domes. These domes are all the same size and they lie in four rows, three domes to each row. One of these churches is dedicated to St. Anthony and the other to St. Marcus, who seems to have been a monk of the monastery long ago.
The Church of St. Anthony lies at the back of the main group of houses near the kasr, and is on the highest part of the ground. It is a large, square, limewashed building with a bell-tower at the west end. This slender campanile ends in a squat dome, and there is an open arch near the top in which you can see the bell hanging.
When Father Anthony and I approached the church door, I saw a row of slippers standing outside as if it were a mosque, and therefore I removed my shoes. I found that this was expected of me whenever I entered this church. We passed into a narthex which led into one of the strangest and most primitive churches I have seen, even in Coptic Egypt. It would not surprise me to learn that it is the oldest church in the country.
It is a small building about forty feet long and a little more than half that in width, and anyone unacquainted with ancient Coptic churches might imagine at first that he had entered some venerable stone farm-building which had been badly white-washed and filled with a large assortment of objects: wooden screens, ikons, rugs and carpets. There is no artificial lighting in the church and few candles. Several ostrich eggs hung from the roof in the choir.
The nave is a single massive room of irregular shape, with a vaulted roof. It is divided from the tiny choir by a wall four feet high, with a gateless opening in the centre.
The choir stands under one of the domes, and the two pillars which divide the nave from the choir are primitive and rough, and may be mud with centuries of white-wash on them, or stone pillars embedded in plaster. Both nave and choir were covered to the steps of the haikal with carpets and camel rugs put down over reed matting, as the Moslems lay rugs in their mosques.
Two pieces of wood nailed across the length of the choir carried five crude and decayed ikons. The central ikon depicted the Blessed Virgin with the Infant Christ; the ikons on either side were of winged angels, and the two others showed mounted saints, one of whom was Mari Girgis—St. George. The sanctuary itself was an almost completely dark space under another dome, and was separated from the choir by doors formed of a number of wooden spindles rather like Jacobean chair-legs.
The whole church had once been covered with frescoes. The dome bore blackened traces of painting all over it and the south wall still carried a series of scratched and almost invisible saints, standing stiffly under a continuous arcade. But the most interesting features of the church were the ancient painted crosses visible in those places where the plaster had fallen away. These are obviously old, and are very beautiful. Each cross is about twelve inches high, Greek in shape, and is surrounded by a conventional wreath. Above the arms of the cross are the Greek letters I.C. X.C., and beneath the arms, NIKA, the well-known Greek monogram meaning "Jesus Christ the Conqueror." Each cross is painted a deep shade of red, on a cream ground, and the wreath is green. The paint of these crosses is hard and glossy, and some of them lie at least a quarter of an inch beneath the repeated coats of whitewash and plaster.
I was anxious to pick away a small piece of plaster to see the lower letters more clearly, but no sooner had I touched it with my nail than a monk came up and said politely that the last time someone had attempted to do such a thing, a thunderbolt had killed him. These crosses are probably dedication crosses and prove how venerable the Church is, for many a century has gone past since Greek influence was felt, or Greek spoken, in this desert.
An archway in the south wall leads to a windowless chapel called the Chapel of the Revelation. Its dome is decorated with frescoes showing the symbols of the Four Evangelists: the Lion for St. Mark, the Ox for St. Luke, the Eagle for St. John, and Man for St. Matthew. These creatures of the Apocalypse are shown holding out a crown. Father Anthony did not apparently connect them with the Evangelists.
" The Ox asks mercy of God for all animals," he said, " the Eagle asks mercy for all birds, the Lion asks mercy for all wild creatures, and Man for Mankind. So all creation begs mercy from God."
Near this church, and connected to it by a narrow dark passage, is a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. There was a huge pile of olives drying in the nave; an extraordinary sight, for wherever you see olives in Egypt you can be sure that they are a relic of Hellenistic agriculture.
We climbed steps and crossed a drawbridge to the kasr, where we entered the Chapel of St. Michael. Father Anthony produced a key, and, with one of his waggish laughs and a lifted forefinger, whispered that he was going to show me the Library. He seemed to imply that I might be another Curzon and that I must be good and not go off with the precious treasures. After wrestling for some time with a difficult lock, he opened the door of a room where hundreds of volumes stood entombed in wooden book-cases. What a depressingly uninviting sight a library can be when it belongs to people who rarely read books and take no interest in them.
The volumes were packed tightly together as if by the relentless hand of a charwoman, and books for which no place could be found on shelves were harshly tucked away on top and wedged in anywhere. They looked, indeed, as forbidding as a lawyer's library, and the air of the room was stuffy with paper and parchment which have been locked away for months on end. I should like to have had enough knowledge to have examined this collection for rare manuscripts.
With Father Anthony leading, I made a tour of the monastery. We went to a vaulted bake-house where two lay-brothers were kneading dough and stoking a great furnace. I saw a corn mill worked by the monastery horse, a docile creature on whose muzzle the lively father implanted an affectionate kiss. An interesting feature of St. Anthony's is a large roofed cistern full of clear water that wells up from springs at the foot of the mountain. This endless supply of good water explains the luxuriant plantation of date palms, olives, and vines; probably the only vines in Egypt which have survived the Arab ban against them in the Eleventh Century.
A few Trappists from Mount Melleray in Ireland would transform the monastery garden in the course of a year, but that is not the Coptic attitude to life. Here, as in the Wadi Natrun, I detected that loose organisation as of a number of hermits gathered together rather than of a community inspired by one ideal. I like to think that this is not due to slackness and laziness, but that it may be the individualism which has always inspired Egyptian monasticism. While it would drive me, or any man from the West, mad to live in such an atmosphere, it is natural for these monks to give all their energies to long and exhausting vigils in church, and to live so sparely that they literally have no energy left for manual labour.
The monks get their supplies from a town called Bush, on the Nile. Camel caravans deliver them every two or three months, and the journey takes four or five days.
The monks are inspired by the lives of the remote hermits and monks of the Fourth Century, and they do npt realise, or wish to realise, that any better way of life could be devised than that laid down in ancient times. All monks who enter the monastery swear to renounce every possession, never to marry, and to forget all ties of relationship. They swear to eat no meat and drink no wine, to live a life of fasting and prayer and wear only their monkish habits, never changing them. They must also say the canonical hours and make a stated number of prostrations every day, falling flat upon the earth and making the sign of the Cross as they rise.
I asked Father Anthony how many of them wore the askim, and he appeared astonished that I should have heard of this. Many, he replied, wore it. He said, as I had already heard at Der Anba Macarius, that monks of the askim. are vowed to longer fasts and more exhausting prostrations.
Huddled against the eastern wall of the monastery is the twelve domed Church of St. Marcus, whose bones rest there. It is a large white building and contains his tomb.
§ I3
I found it impossible to sleep, and at half-past two I decided to get up. Moonlight was pouring through the bars of the window. I rose furtively, for the monastery was lying dark and silent, and went out. It was a wonderful night. I could see every house, every palm tree, standing in clear light. I walked up the street towards the Church of St. Anthony and was astonished to see rows of slippers outside the door. The monks were inside at this unearthly hour! How easy it is to misjudge these Coptic monks as you see them strolling about in the day-time. I tip-toed inside and saw a sight I shall never forget.
The church was lit only by a few pricks of light in the choir, where wicks floated in olive oil. The building was full of dark, murmuring figures. Some leaned against the wall, their eyes shut, their lips moving in prayer; others stood in the nave, leaning on the T-shaped staves which they carry to their interminable offices; a few knelt on the ground, bending forward in prostration. Most of them had covered their shoulders with a wrap, because the night was chilly. They did not notice me. They were all lost in prayer, and here again I noticed that it was all individual prayer: they were not praying together like monks of the West: they were so many individual hermits addressing their own prayers, in their own way, to God.
Curious pallid men, lost to the world, dreaming only of finding their own paths to heaven, denying themselves in this world in order to reap the reward of a life to come: and as I watched them, I knew that I was seeing the devotions described by Palladius and Pachomius so many centuries ago. No matter what we may think of such an ideal, so different from the vigorous missionary ideal of the West, we cannot withhold from these Egyptians the credit which must be accorded to a triumph of individual conscience. Who, travelling across this desert by the light of the moon and seeing the walls of this retreat at the foot of the mountain, could imagine this scene going on behind them at half-past two in the morning? Who, having blundered by chance upon this silent nightly gathering in the desert church, could ever find it in his heart to scoff at these fellow-Christians ?
A dark figure rose in the choir and prayed aloud. Responses came from the shadows. The voice went on and I heard the language of ancient Egypt. He was praying in Coptic, the tongue of St. Anthony, the tongue of Ptolemy, the tongue of Pharaoh himself.
§ I4
I received permission from the hummus to climb up to the cave of St. Anthony with the young lay-brother who spoke English.
We left the monastery and struck off over rough foot-hills strewn with boulders, and followed a path which wound its way to a cave a thousand feet up on the steep face of the mountain. When we began to climb, the path degenerated into a mere goat track and we had to scramble up the rocks as best we could. We looked back over the desert lying eastward to the Gulf of Suez.
" You were telling me the other night," I began, " that you wanted to be a Government official, but something happened and so you entered this monastery."
" Oh yes," he said, " you remember! My father is a rich man. He is fond of England. He wish to send me to London to finish my education, and then afterwards I am to come back and enter his business. My father is good man, you understand, and he is very fond of me. But when I think of this life, which he offers me so generously, I know I cannot do it."
He paused, still near enough to events to feel emotion, and not yet monk enough to be dead to it.
" I tell him I must go away to this monastery! My whole desire is to pray. I think of nothing—nothing—but someday to enter Paradise. Do you understand? Have I used the right word?"
It was extraordinary that he should have used the Greek Paradeisos, which the Early Fathers used for the abode of the saints; he was unconscious that he had chosen the very word that St. Anthony would have spoken could he have come down from his cave to meet us.
" And now," he continued, " I pray, I work, I eat, I sleep, and then I pray. It is a life without sin. I love this place. I will grow an old man here and still I shall love it. . . ."
We continued to climb the steep mountain.
" And what does your father say? " I asked.He looked solemnly at me for a second and then replied in copy-book English:
" He weeps bitterly."We had now climbed far up the face of the mountain and were groping our way round enormous boulders and protruding shoulders of rock. Looking up, we saw above us a small triangular cleft in the face of the cliff, a hole just big enough for a man to walk through: that was the cave of St. Anthony.
We came out on a small ledge before the cave, with a natural wall of rock around it. On fine days St. Anthony would sit here and, if his eyes were dwelling on the earth, gaze over a rust-red plain of gravel shelving gently towards a distant line of blue water. All about him, a plentiful foothold for devils, were jagged edges of rock and little shelves just large enough for imps to stand on. The cave itself is a natural fissure in the mountain, and so low that you have to bend down to enter it, and so narrow that only hermits, or lean people, can go in without turning sideways. At first you can see nothing because the fissure extends about thirty feet into the mountain. It is a rocky tunnel, black as ink. Then, at the end of it, you take a step down, and by the light of a match you find yourself in a cavern big enough to hold at least twenty people.
There is a little altar at one end of the cave, with candlesticks on it, and also a painted wooden box to hold the chalice during the celebration of the Korban. The young lay-brother lit the candles and dropped down in prayer before the altar. After a few minutes he rose.
" He was a holy man," he said, " and he is in Paradise. I ask that I may approach him in goodness through prayer, for it is by prayer that a soul enters Paradise."
He sighed and returned to the world. Pointing out a roughly shaped boulder in a corner of the cave, the young monk said it was the pillow of St. Anthony. He told me that once a year all the monks from the monastery climb the mountain in solemn procession, with tapers lighted and swinging thurible, and celebrate the Korban in the place where the saint lived and died.
I asked if he had ever read of the temptations of St. Anthony. He had done so, and I thought that probably in twenty years' time it might be possible to discuss them with him. He knew, exactly as we know it in the West, the story of St. Anthony's meeting with St. Paul: how one day when the saint was thinking that surely no man had ever served God for so long, and in such solitude, he heard a voice say:
" There is one holier than thou, for Paul the hermit has served God in solitude and penance for ninety years." St. Anthony took his T-shaped staff and set off to find St. Paul. He discovered him in a cave in the mountains and the two saints embraced. They became friends and were together when St. Paul felt death approaching. Wishing to spare St. Anthony the pain of watching his death, he sent him on an errand, and when St. Anthony returned to his friend, he saw the soul of St. Paul ascending through the high air, white as driven snow, and round about him a great company of saints and angels rising with him into Paradise. St. Anthony then wrapped the body of his friend in a cloak and buried him. He returned to his own cave and lived there until he too was called to join the company of God's elect.
We descended the mountain and returned to the monastery. "
Are you sure," I said, " that you will never regret entering this place? "And no sooner had I said it than I felt how strangely like an utterance of Satan it was. It was just the sort of sly thing the devil would have said.
The young man looked at me with the uncompromising fixity of a small child.
" Never," he replied. " I am even now longing for the time when I shall go to my cell and pray."
I thought that Sinai was like a clear page of illuminated Byzantine manuscript which a man could read and understand, but this queer place in the desert was shrouded in an impalpable mist, almost like the mist of legend, and out of it gazed no emperors and no pilgrims and no kings, but pale, bearded men of long ago, kneeling to God upon the mountains of the world.
§ I5
We were away early in the morning. The grave, courteous kummus, the lively Father Anthony, and the young lay-brother, came down to the gate to see the cars go out into the desert. They waved to us for a time, then a rise of ground hid the monastery from sight.
We crossed the Arabian Desert to the Nile at El Wasta, a journey of eighty miles. Here we struck the high embankments and the flying black dust of Egypt, and went on through a ribbon of land over-populated with donkeys, water-buffaloes, and camels, until the lights of Cairo dawned on us. Except that the desert track was as good as desert tracks can ever be, I remember only one thing about that journey. We were in the middle of the desert, plodding along hour after hour and seeing nothing but the burning ridge ahead, when suddenly about thirty camels crossed the horizon, and eventually our ways met.
It was a caravan with Bedouin walking beside it with sticks. We thought that it must be the monastery caravan moving eastward from Bush, and it occurred to us that it would be amusing to send back something to Father Anthony, some message or some little gift, that would make him go into one of his peals of laughter. We drove the cars up and spoke to the Bedouin.
" Are you going to the monastery? " asked Mr. Vallinis in Arabic.
The leader of the caravan, a long, lean man, with brown feet in toe-thong sandals similar to those found in the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun, came up and looked at us, then looked away.
" No," he replied, addressing the desert, " we are taking nothing to the Christians. We are for the Bedouin."
He shouted to the camels and ran on waving his stick.
I said good-bye that night to Mr. Vallinis and Yusuf, two good companions, one an Ulysses, the other an artist whose dream it is to make the desert blossom like the Ritz. And in the morning I said farewell to Egypt and caught a boat to Europe.