in this convent built by the
Emperor Justinian fourteen centuries ago. Our bare, whitewashed bedrooms
are like the humblest of Turkish dwellings, save for the modest icon
above the divan, with a night-light burning before it. The little
chamber is covered with the names of pilgrims gathered from the ends of
the earth; Russian, Arabian, and Greek inscriptions predominate.

Aroused by a jet of clear sunlight, and surprised by the strangeness of
the place, I ran to the balcony; there I still marvelled to find the
fantastic things seen by glimpses last night, standing real and
curiously distinct in the implacable white light, but arranged in an
unreal way, as if inset into each other without perspective, so pure is
the atmosphere--and all silent, silent as if they were dead of their
extreme old age. A Byzantine church, a mosque, cots, cloisters, an
entanglement of stairways, galleries, and arches falling to the
precipices below: all this in miniature; built up in a tiny space; all
this encompassed with formidable ramparts, and hooked on to the flanks
of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know
that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom
of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they
mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite
without stain or shadow, are so vertical and so high that they dizzy and
appal. Only a fragment of the sky is visible, but its blueness is of a
profound transparency, and the sun is magnificent. And still the same
eerie silence envelops the phantom-like monastery, whose antiquity is
accentuated under the cold, dazzling sunlight and the sparkling snow.
One feels that it is verily "the habitation of solitude," encompassed by
the great wildernesses.

Its situation has preserved it from the revolutions, the wars, and the
changing fashions of the world. Almost everything remains just as it was
built in 550 by Justinian. And when one of the long-haired monks shows
us the marvellous treasures of the basilica--a dim, richly barbaric
structure, filled with priceless offerings from the ancient kings of the
earth--we no longer wonder at the enormous height and thickness of the
ramparts which protect the convent from the Bedouins.

Behind the tabernacle of the basilica is the holy place of Sinai--the
crypt of the "Burning Bush." It is a sombre cavern lined with antique
tiles of a dim blue-green, which are