Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/322

308 ascents and descents, climbing the heights and going down into the depths, as we rose to the summit of one of these barren hills, we looked down into a deep gorge, in which stood a Convent, whose position and appearance at once reminded us of that at Mount Sinai, having quite as much the look of a fortress as of a Convent. It is built on the edge of a precipice. The brook Kedron, that flows under the walls of Jerusalem, forcing a passage, not westward to the Mediterranean, but east to the Dead Sea, has in the lapse of ages worn a channel hundreds of feet in depth, like a cañon of the Rocky Mountains. Although the chasm is not so wide, yet the cliffs are not unlike those one may see along the brink of the Niagara River. Here has been built with infinite labor a huge structure spreading over perhaps an acre of ground, which in its day was a famous monastery. It is fourteen hundred years old, having been founded in the fifth century. Saint Saba, who gives it its name, must have belonged to the Church militant, if what tradition says be true, that on this very spot he attacked a lion in his den, like another Samson, and after slaying the beast, took possession of his den as a cell. Another version of the story is, that instead of killing the lion, he subdued him by his saintly life and his prayers, so that man and beast occupied the same cell, and lived in perfect harmony. The reader can take his choice of these two stories; no doubt one is as true as the other. Here in this lair of a wild beast the old fighting anchorite gathered round him a large community of monks. In modern times it has sadly dwindled, numbering now only some three-score, who are cloistered or imprisoned here. We were told afterwards in Jerusalem that it was a sort of ecclesiastical penitentiary to which rebellious priests or monks were exiled to do penance for their sins — or perhaps for their virtues, for they would be quite as likely to