monk, opening the copy of the Gospels, found at the end a horrible
anathema and malediction written by the donor, a prince or king, he
said, against any one who should sell or part with this book. This was
very unlucky, and produced a great effect upon the monks; but as no
anathema was found in either of the two other volumes, I was allowed to
take them, and so went on my way rejoicing. They rang the bells at my
departure, and I heard them at intervals jingling in the air above me as
I scrambled down the rocky mountain. Except Dionisiou, this was the only
monastery where the agoumenos kissed the letter of the patriarch and
laid it upon his forehead: the sign of reverence and obedience which is,
or ought to be, observed with the firmans of the Sultan and other
oriental potentates.

[Illustration: From a Sketch by R. Curzon.

VIEW OF THE MONASTERY AND AQUEDUCT OF SIMOPETRA, ON MOUNT ATHOS, TAKEN
FROM THE SEA SHORE.]

The same evening I got back to my comfortable room at Xeropotamo, and
did ample justice to a good meagre dinner after the heat and fatigues of
the day. A monk had arrived from one of the outlying farms who could
speak a little Italian; he was deputed to do the honours of the
house, and accordingly dined with me. He was a magnificent-looking man
of thirty or thirty-five years of age, with large eyes and long black
hair and beard. As we sat together in the evening in the ancient room,
by the light of one dim brazen lamp, with deep shades thrown across his
face and figure, I thought he would have made an admirable study for
Titian or Sebastian del Piombo. In the course of conversation I found
that he had learnt Italian from another monk, having never been out of
the peninsula of Mount Athos. His parents and most of the other
inhabitants of the village where he was born, somewhere in Roumelia--but
its name or exact position he did not know--had been massacred during
some revolt or disturbance. So he had been told, but he remembered
nothing about it; he had been educated in a school in this or one of the
other monasteries, and his whole life had been passed upon the Holy
Mountain; and this, he said, was the case with very many other monks. He
did not remember his mother, and did not seem quite sure that he ever
had one; he had never seen a woman, nor had he any idea what sort of
things women were, or what they looked like. He asked me whether they
resembled the pictures of the Panagia, the Holy Virgin, which han