The floor of the church was unoccupied, and paved with marble; the transept was closed by the great screen, blazing with gold, and covered with dragons and arabesques, and gaudy pictures of saints and angels on wood. A smell of incense filled the church, and the nasal drawl of the officiating priest soon drove us away to the outer air. We next visited the dark cave covered with pictures, which, after the Greek fashion, were cased in silver, and gleamed in the darkness, and where, behind a grating, are the skulls of the martyrs of a former massacre. Next we went up and down, by winding stairs in the rock, on to the roof of the church to see the _nawâkîs_, or wooden beams, which are struck instead of bells, though bells are also hung in the belfry. The convent pets came about us, the beautiful black birds with orange wings, which live only in the Jordan Valley, and have been named "Tristram's grackle,â after that well-known explorer. They have a beautifully clear note, the only pleasant sound ever heard in the solitude, and the monks have tamed them, so that they flock round them to catch raisins, which they pounce upon in mid air. In the valley below, the foxes and jackals also come for alms, the monks throwing down loaves for them.
There is a tall solitary palm, said to have been planted by St. Saba, and to have sprung up bearing dates without stones, which he ate the same day on which it was planted. There is also a cavern in the rock reached by a few steps, where he lived, and in the side of it, a little cupboard about three feet square, where his lion slept. The whole cave belonged to the lion, but the saint seems to have had little regard to the rights of property, and considerable obstinacy of character. Three times he was ejected by the beast, but each time he returned to his meditations undaunted, and the lion finally relinquished to the invader the greater part of his cave.
The monks scattered a little rosewater over our hands, and we left this gloomy abode of the dead-alive in the desert. Scarcely half the monks can read the valuable manuscripts in their library, yet they hide them carefully from the eyes of heretics. Within the walls they may neither smoke nor eat meat, yet raw spirits find their way past the porter, as we were able to prove. A more hopeless, purposeless, degraded life can scarcely be imagined than that of such hermits.