Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/263

Rh accident were the original frescoes in wonderful purple and crimson, pictures of the choric saints, their faces and bodies all of that unearthly and mystical shape and colour by which the early Christians loved to represent citizenship of heaven and denial of the world.

The lectern had a nail on which to fix the candle. The communion cup was swathed in the oldest vestments of the monastery. In an ordinary cupboard with easy-swinging wooden door I was shown the mummies of the sixteen Patriarchs of the Coptic Church. Sixteen Patriarchs in a cupboard, each wrapped in his robes and tied up compactly! The Abbot unwrapped one a little and showed me the dried brown flesh. The seventeenth Patriarch, he from whom I had my letter, will find a place in this cupboard in his turn.

In one of the churches I was shown the box with the sacred remains of Macarius, the primitive hermit in whose name the monastery had been founded.

They showed me the books from which the service is read, all hand-copied volumes. I wondered especially at a copy of the New Testament, written ages ago in Coptic and now spattered on every page and every paragraph with new and ancient spots of candle grease.

From the vault of one of the churches hang seven old dusty ostrich eggs by long strings. A monk explained to me that as the ostrich looks to its egg as the most precious thing in life, so they look to