never pleasure-loving. It has withstood the Arabs through dwelling in the wilderness and fortifying its churches and monastery walls and being hard. It has never had the opportunity to thrive. So it has preserved the traditions and something of the spirit of early Christianity, and in the half-ruined temples of the desert you may see the stigmata of Christ.
I had some difficulty finding out about the
monasteries: no one goes to Egypt to visit Christian
shrines, so my desire to know where the ancient
hermits had lived sounded strange and unwonted
in the ears of most people. But at length, through
the Bishop of Jerusalem and Marcus Bey Simaika,
the leader of the Coptic community in Cairo, I got
a letter from the Patriarch and full directions as to
how to reach the desert shrines. I chose to go to
Nitria.
Out of sight of the grey triangles of the Pyramids,
out of sight of everything, and over the even, empty
desert, white, yellow, burning, rose-lined on the
horizon, glaring . . . heat and light beat upward
from the sand on which and into which the terrible
and splendid sun drives its armies all day. The
air is so dry and light that one seems to have
lost weight. There is a feeling of unusual exhilaration.
I came on horseback to an oasis, not a bountiful