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314 round, with a dome. Over the door is sculptured their crowned lion. Within there is a broad passage around the central choir and sanctuary. This has a wall all round it up to the roof, and beyond, for it rises above the outer wall and becomes the drum of the dome. The central space is divided by a straight screen across it into choir and sanctuary. The arrangement of the altar, vessels, and so on, is sufficiently Coptic to justify a reference in general to that use (pp. 267-270). They have, of course, no statues, but numbers of paintings of our Lord and of saints. All the Abyssinian paintings I have seen are exceedingly rude, without artistic merit of any kind, but very curious and interesting.

The ark (tābōt) on every Ethiopic altar has puzzled many people. The Abyssinians say that the Queen of Sheba brought the ark of the Covenant back with her to Aksum, where it is kept in the Metropolitan church. Every other church has a tābōt, a copy of the one at Aksum. They pay enormous reverence to the tābōt. Their liturgy contains a special prayer for blessing it; they carry it in processions, bless with it, bow down before it. What then, exactly, is this ark? It is tempting to suppose that it must be a vessel containing the Holy Eucharist, as Neale thinks. It seems, however, that it is not so. The Abyssinians have, at least now, no reservation of the Holy Eucharist (cf. p. 286). The real explanation is a simple one. The tābōt is the Coptic pitote, a box, otherwise empty, in which the chalice stands