From a very early period this horrible wilderness appears to have had an attraction for ascetics, who sought a retreat from the busy world of their fellow men, and who thought to please God by torturing the bodies which He had given them. Thus the Essenes, the Jewish sect whose habits and tenets resembled so closely those of the first Christians, retired into this wilderness and lived in caves. Christian hermits, from the earliest period, were also numerous in all the country between Jerusalem and Jericho, and the rocks are riddled with caves in inaccessible places where they lived. About 480 A.D., St. Saba and St. Euthymius followed the general custom, and established here, in the Fire Valley, the first nucleus of the present monastery.
The Mar Saba Laura clings to the side of a precipice some four hundred feet high, and is built against the cliff with huge flying buttresses to support the walls. The buildings are scarcely distinguishable in colour from the brown crags on which they stand. The deep crevice, which seems to have been rent in some great convulsion of nature, is bare and tawny like the rest of the country. The silence of the desert surrounds it, and only the shrill note of the golden grackle, or the howl of a jackal, breaks this solemn stillness. Not a tree or shrub is in sight, walls of white chalk and sharp ridges shut out the western breeze, and the sigh of the wind in the trees is a sound never heard in the solitude. The place seems dead. The convent and its valley have a fossilised appearance. Scarcely less dead and fossil are its wretched inmates, monks exiled for crimes or heresy, and placed in charge of a few poor lunatics.
Ladies are not admitted into the monastery, but we were provided with a letter to the Superior. A little iron door in a high yellow wall gives admission from the west, thence a long staircase leads down into a court before the chapel. The walls within are covered with frescoes, some old, some belonging to the time when the monastery was rebuilt, in 1840, by the Russian Government; Greek saints, hideous figures in black and grey dresses, with stoles on which the cross, and ladder and spear, are painted in white, stand out from gilded backgrounds. Against these ghosts of their predecessors the monks were ranged, in wooden stalls, or _miserere_ benches with high arms, which supported their weary figures under the armpits. The old men stood, or rather drooped in their places, with pale sad faces, which spoke of ignorance and of hopelessness, and sometimes of vice and brutality; for the Greek monk is perhaps the most degraded representative of Christianity, and these were the worst of their kind. Robed in long sweeping gowns, with the cylindrical black felt cap on their heads, they looked more like dead bodies than living men, propped up against the quaint Byzantine background. One could fancy one's self suddenly brought back to the dark ages of the fifth and sixth centuries, when art, and literature, and even human intellect seem to have sunk into a second childhood, and that these were the very men who had fought so obstinately for and against the Monophysite heresy, which St. Saba succeeded in putting down.