Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/257



the Nile and the Red Sea lay the desert of the Thebaid, and the remote monastery of St. Anthony is now reached after two days' camel ride from the station Beni Suef. The desert of Scete where Arsenius lived—the desert where Philammon the hero of "Hypatia" learned to be a monk—is on the Upper Nile. What was Nitria is now Wadi el Natrun, and is reached by three days' camel ride from the Pyramids, or via Khatadba, one of the stations on a loop of the Cairo-Alexandria railway. The shrines of the hermits are in the hands of the Copts, a simple Christian people, said to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The Coptic Church is an Eastern one, and it is the lineal descendant of the Church of Egypt that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity. Only whereas the Church of Egypt was a brightly living church, the Coptic Church is going on in a tradition. What is valuable in the Coptic Church to-day is that it has slept through many centuries unchanging, that it has never been rich and pompous, never erudite,