Page:Domestic Life in Palestine.pdf/149

142 watch their circular sailing and heavenward wanderings I nearly reeled from my horse. They rose higher and higher, spirally, till they were quite indiscernible to the naked eye.

We alighted on the summit of the hill, at a quarter to three, on a smooth plateau surrounded by large masses of hewn stone and the foundations of strong walls. On one side there is an archway called "Babel How-a," Gate of the Winds. On the other side we saw part of a ruined chapel and an altar in an apse, a limestone cave and a cistern hewn in the rock, and two or three patches of ground cultivated by a Russian hermit, named Erinna of Bucharest, who had lived on this mountain for fourteen years.

Once when I spent a long day here, with Colonel and the Honorable Mrs. Fred. Walpole, I took his portrait, and he told me the story of his life. His father, he said, was an extensive land proprietor in the Crimea, where he was born, but he went afterward to Bucharest. One night Erinna dreamed that an angel appeared to him and said, "Arise and go into the land which I will show you." This disturbed him very much, and all day the words were ringing in his ears. The next night the angel, in shining raiment, appeared again in a dream and repeated the words, led him through the air and showed him a mountain with a little cavern on its summit. On the third night the angel led him again to the mountain and told him that he was to dwell in the cavern. Erinna was so impressed by these dreams, or visions as he called them, that he took leave of his family, and for twenty years traveled in Russia, Greece, Egypt, and Syria, to seek for the mountain of his dream. At last he recognized the cave on Mount Tabor, and immediately took up his abode there, for he was convinced that it was the place indicated by the angel. He was then eighty-four years of age, and he said, "I thought I should soon die, but I am now heartier than ever, and yet I am nearly one hundred years