CHAPTER XI.

The White Monastery--Abou Shenood--Devastations of the Mamelukes--Description of the Monastery--Different styles of its exterior and interior Architecture--Its ruinous condition--Description of the Church--The Baptistery--Ancient Rites of Baptism--The Library--Modern Architecture--The Church of San Francesco at Rimini--The Red Monastery--Alarming rencontre with an armed party--Feuds between the native Tribes--Faction fights--Eastern Story Tellers--Legends of the Desert--Abraham and Sarah--Legendary Life of Moses--Arabian Story-tellers--Attention of their Audience.

Mounting our noble Egyptian steeds, or in other words having engaged a sufficient number of little braying donkeys, which the peasants brought down to the river side, and put our saddles on them, we cantered in an hour and a half from the village of Souhag to the White Monastery, which is known to the Arabs by the name of Derr abou Shenood. Who the great Abou Shenood had the honour to be, and what he had done to be canonized, I could meet with no one to tell me. He was, I believe, a Mahomedan saint, and this Coptic monastery had been in some sort placed under the shadow of his protection, in the hopes of saving it from the persecutions of the faithful. Abou Shenood, however, does not appear to have done his duty, for the White Monastery has been ruined and sacked over and over again. The last outrage upon the unfortunate monastery occurred about 1812, when the Mamelukes who had encamped upon the plains of Itfou, having no better occupation, amused themselves by burning all the houses, and killing all the people in the neighbourhood. Since that time the monks having returned one by one, and finding that no one took the trouble to molest them, began to repair the convent, the interior of which had been gutted by the Mamelukes; but the immense strength of the outer walls had resisted all their efforts to destroy them.

The peculiarity of this monastery is, that the interior was once a magnificent basilica, while the exterior was built by the Empress Helena, in the ancient Egyptian style. The walls slope inwards towards the summit, where they are crowned with a deep overhanging cornice. The building is of an oblong shape, about two hundred feet in length by ninety wide, very well built, of fine blocks of stone; it has no windows outside larger than loopholes, and these are at a great height from the ground. Of these there are twenty on the south side and nine at the east end. The monastery stands at the foot of the hill, on the edge of the Libyan desert, where the sand encroaches on the plain. It looks like the sanctuary, or cella, of an ancient temple, and is not unlike the bastion of an old-fashioned fortification; except one solitary doom tree, it stands quite alone, and has a most desolate aspect, backed, as it is, by the sandy desert, and without any appearance of a garden, either within or outside its walls. The ancient doorway of red granite, on the south side, has been partially closed up, leaving an opening just large enough to admit one person at a time.

The door was closed, and we shouted in vain for admittance. We then tried the effect of a double knock in the Grosvenor Square style with a large stone, but that was of no use; so I got one still larger, and banged away at the door with all my might, shouting at the same time that we were friends and Christians. After some minutes a small voice was heard inside, and several questions being satisfactorily answered, we were let in by a monk; and passing through the narrow door, I found myself surrounded by piles of ruined buildings of various ages, among which the tall granite columns of the ancient church reared themselves like an avenue on either side of the desecrated nave, which is now open to the sky, and is used as a promenade for a host of chickens. Some goats also were perched upon fragments of ruined walls, and looked cunningly at us as we invaded their domain. I saw some Coptic women peeping at me from the windows of some wretched hovels of mud and brick, which they had built up in corners among the ancient ruins like swallows' nests.

There were but three poor priests. The principal one led us to the upper part of the church, which had lately been repaired and walled off from the open nave; and enclosed the apsis and transepts, which had been restored in some measure, and fitted for the performance of divine service. The half domes of the apsis and two transepts, which were of well-built masonry, were still entire, and the original frescos remain upon them. Those in the transepts are stiff figures of saints; and in the one over the altar is the great figure of the Redeemer, such as is usually met with in the mosaics of the Italian basilicas. These apsides are above fifty feet from the ground, which gives them a dignity of appearance, and leaves greater cause to regret the destruction of the nave, which, with its clerestory, must have been still higher. There appear to have been fifteen columns on each side of the centre aisle, and two at the end opposite the altar, which in this instance I believe is at the west end. The roof over the part of the east end, which has been fitted up as a church, is supported by four square modern piers of plastered brick or rubble work. On the side walls, above the altar, there are some circular compartments containing paintings of the saints; and near these are two tablets with inscriptions in black on a white ground. That on the left appeared to be in Abyssinian: the one on the other side was either Coptic or uncial Greek; but it was too dark, and the tablet was too high, to enable me to make it out There is also a long Greek inscription in red letters on one of the modern square piers, which looks as if it was of considerable antiquity; and the whole interior of the building bears traces of having been repaired and altered, more than once, in ancient times. The richly ornamented recesses of the three apsides have been smeared over with plaster, on which some tremendously grim saints have been portrayed, whose present threadbare appearance shows that they have disfigured the walls for several centuries. Some comparatively modern capitals, of bad design, have been placed upon two or three of the granite columns of the nave; and others, which were broken, have been patched with brick, plastered and painted to look like granite. The principal entrance was formerly at the west end; where there is a small vestibule, immediately within the door of which, on the left hand, is a small chapel, perhaps the baptistery, about twenty-five feet long, and still in tolerable preservation. It is a splendid specimen of the richest Roman architecture of the latter empire, and is truly an imperial little room. The arched ceiling is of stone; and there are three beautifully ornamented niches on each side. The upper end is semicircular, and has been entirely covered with a profusion of sculpture in panels, cornices, and every kind of architectural enrichment When it was entire, and covered with gilding, painting, or mosaic, it must have been most gorgeous. The altar on such a chapel as this was probably of gold, set full of gems; or if it was the baptistery, as I suppose, it most likely contained a bath, of the most precious jasper, or of some of the more rare kinds of marble, for the immersion of the converted heathen, whose entrance into the church was not permitted until they had been purified with the waters of baptism in a building without the door of the house of God; an appropriate custom, which was not broken in upon for ages; and even then the infant was only brought just inside the door, where the font was placed on the left hand of the entrance; a judicious practice, which is completely set at nought in England, where the squalling imp often distracts the attention of the congregation; and is finally sprinkled, instead of being immersed, the whole ceremony having been so much altered and pared down from its original symbolic form, that were a Christian of the early ages to return upon the earth, he would be unable to recognise its meaning.

The conventual library consisted of only half-a-dozen well-waxed and well-thumbed liturgies; but one of the priests told me that they boasted formerly of above a hundred volumes written on leather (gild razali), gazelle skins, probably vellum, which were destroyed by the Mamelukes during their last pillage of the convent.

The habitations of the monks, according to the original design of this very curious building, were contained in a long slip on the south side of the church, where their cells were lit by the small loopholes seen from the outside. Of these cells none now remain: they must have been famously hot, exposed as they were all day long to the rays of the southern sun; but probably the massive thickness of the walls and arched ceilings reduced the temperature. There was no court or open space within the convent; the only place where its inhabitants could have walked for exercise in the open air was upon the flat terrace of the roof, the deck of this ship of St Peter; for the White Monastery in some respects resembled a dismasted man-of-war, anchored in a sea of burning sand.

In modern times we are not surprised on finding a building erected at an immense expense, in which the architecture of the interior is totally different from that of the exterior. A Brummagem Gothic house is frequently furnished and ornamented within in what is called "_a chaste Greek style_," and _vice versâ_. A Grecian house--that is to say, a square white block, with square holes in it for windows, and a portico in front--is sometimes inhabited by an antiquarian, who fits it up with Gothic furniture, and a Gothic paper designed by a crafty paper-hanger in the newest style. But in ancient days it was very rare to see such a mixture. I am surprised that the architect of the enthusiastic empress did not go on with the interior of this building as he had begun the exterior. The great hall of Carnac would have afforded him a grand example of an aisle with a clerestory, and side windows, with stone mullions, which would have answered his purpose, in the Egyptian style. The only other instance of this kind, where two distinct styles of architecture were employed in the middle ages on the inside and outside of the same building, is in the church of St. Francesco, at Rimini, which was built by Sigismond Malatesta as a last resting-place for himself and his friends. He lies in a Gothic shrine within; and the bodies of the great men of his day repose in sarcophagi of classic forms outside; each of which stands in the recess of a Roman arch, in which style of architecture the exterior of the building is erected.

About two miles to the north of the White Monastery, in a small village sheltered by a grove of palms, stands another ancient building called the Red Monastery.

On our return to Souhag we met a party of men on foot, who were armed with spears, shields, and daggers, and one or two with guns. They were led by a man on horseback, who was completely armed with all sorts of warlike implements. They stopped us, and began to talk to our followers, who were exceedingly civil in their behaviour, for the appearance of the party was of a doubtful character; and we felt relieved when we found that we were not to be robbed, but that our friends were on an expedition against the men of Tahta, who some time ago had killed a man belonging to their village, and they were going to avenge his death. This was only one detachment of many that had assembled in the neighbouring villages, each headed by its sheick, or the sheick's son, if the father was an old man. The numbers engaged in this feud amounted, they told us, to between two and three hundred men on each side. Every now and then, it seems, when they have got in their harvest, they assemble to have a fight. Several are wounded, and sometimes a few are killed; in which case, if the numbers of the slain are not equal, the feud continues; and so it goes on from generation to generation, like a faction fight in Ireland, or the feudal wars of the barons of the middle ages,--a style of things which appears to belong to the nature of the human race, and not to any particular country, age, or faith.

Parting from this warlike band with mutual compliments and good wishes, and our guides each seizing the tail of one of our donkeys to increase his onward speed, we trotted away back to the boat, which was waiting for us at Souhag. There we found our boatmen and a crowd of villagers, listening to one of those long stories with which the inhabitants of Egypt are wont to enliven their hours of inactivity. This is an amusement peculiar to the East, and it is one in which I took great delight during many a long journey through the deserts on the way to Mount Sinai, Syria, and other places. The Arabs are great tellers of stories; and some of them have a peculiar knack in rendering them interesting and exciting the curiosity of their audience. Many of these stories were interesting from their reference to persons and occurrences of Holy Writ, particularly of the Old Testament. There are many legends of the patriarch Abraham and his beautiful wife Sarah, who, excepting Eve, is said to have been the fairest of all the daughters of the earth. King Solomon is the hero of numerous strange legends; and his adventures with the gnomes and genii who were subjected to his sway are endless. The poem of Yousef and Zuleica is well known in Europe. And the traditions relating to the prophet Moses are so numerous, that, with the help of a very curious manuscript of an apocryphal book ascribed to the great leader of the Jews, I have been enabled to compile a connected biography, in which many curious circumstances are detailed that are said to have taken place during his eventful life, and which concludes with a highly poetical legend of his death. Many of the stories told by the Arabs resemble those of the _Arabian Nights_; and a large proportion of these are not very refined.

I have often been greatly amused with watching the faces of an audience who were listening to a well-told story, some eagerly leaning forward, others smoking their pipes with quicker puffs, when something extraordinary was related, or when the hero of the story had got into some apparently inextricable dilemma. These story-telling parties are usually to be seen seated in a circle on the ground in a shady place. The donkey-boy will stop and gape open-mouthed on overhearing a few words of the marvellous adventures of some enchanted prince, and will look back at his four-footed companion, fearing lest he should resume his original form of a merchant from the island of Serendib. The greatest tact is required on the part of the narrator to prevent the dispersion of his audience, who are sometimes apt to melt away on his stopping at what he considers a peculiarly interesting point, and taking that opportunity of sending round his boy with a little brass basin to collect paras. I know of few subjects better suited for a painter than one of these story-tellers and his group of listeners.

THE ISLAND OF PHILŒ, &c.