is of a very singular kind. The end of a range of
rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some earthquake or washed
away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of twenty or thirty tall,
thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred feet in height; some like
gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar-loaves, and some like vast
stalagmites. These rocks surround a beautiful grassy plain, on three
sides of which there grow groups of detached trees, like those in an
English park. Some of the rocks shoot up quite clean and perpendicularly
from the smooth green grass; some are in clusters; some stand alone
like obelisks: nothing can be more strange and wonderful than this
romantic region, which is unlike anything I have ever seen either before
or since. In Switzerland, Saxony, the Tyrol, or any other mountainous
region where I have been, there is nothing at all to be compared to
these extraordinary peaks.

At the foot of many of the rocks which surround this beautiful grassy
amphitheatre, there are numerous caves and holes, some of which appear
to be natural, but most of them are artificial; for in the dark and wild
ages of monastic fanaticism whole flocks of hermits roosted in these
pigeon-holes. Some of these caves are so high up the rocks that one
wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever get up to them; whilst
others are below the surface; and the anchorites who burrowed in them,
like rabbits, frequently afforded excellent sport to parties of roving
Saracens; indeed, hermit-hunting seems to have been a fashionable
amusement previous to the twelfth century. In early Greek frescos, and
in small, stiff pictures with gold backgrounds, we see many frightful
representations of men on horseback in Roman armour, with long spears,
who are torturing and slaying Christian devotees. In these pictures the
monks and hermits are represented in gowns made of a kind of coarse
matting, and they have long beards, and some of them are covered with
hair; these I take it were the ones most to be admired, as in the Greek
church sanctity is always in the inverse ratio of beauty. All Greek
saints are painfully ugly, but the hermits are much uglier, dirtier, and
older than the rest; they must have been very fusty people besides,
eating roots, and living in holes like rats and mice. It is difficult to
understand by what process of reasoning they could have persuaded
themselves that, by living in this useless, inactive way, they were
leading holy