Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/99

 of Goshen." Egypt indeed had been an empire for we know not how many centuries or millenniums. But it had no history. Its record, preserved to us in monuments and inscriptions, is a mere chronology — a catalogue of successive dynasties, as utterly dry and dead as the mummies of its buried kings. That is not history. But the Exodus was the beginning of a series of events, unfolding through centuries, which marked a steady movement of the nations. When Moses fought with Amalek, he carried in his right hand the destiny of millions yet unborn. If he had perished on that fatal day, there would have been no Commonwealth of England, and no Commonwealths in New England; the dial of human progress would have been set back a thousand years.

This oasis has been made famous also in a history more recent than that of Moses. In the early centuries it was a great resort for monks. A Convent stood on a hill which is but a few hundred yards from our camp, where its ruins are yet to be seen; while all round the valley the sides of the hill are pierced with cells, in which the monks passed their lives. They were not, strictly speaking, hermits, for hermits live in solitude; but Cenobites, who live in communities. There must have been a large community here, to judge from the number of cells by which the mountains are honeycombed. We climbed up to some of them, and found them hewn in the solid rock, and but a few feet square. Yet these were the only homes of the monks, in which they passed their lives in prayer and meditation. Here they ate and slept and prayed and died — in little stone cells, hardly high enough for a man to stand upright in, though long enough for him to lie down; which indeed had more of the shape and dimensions of a sarcophagus than of a place of human habitation. Nor is one surprised to learn that the monks were buried at