About the year 420 Nilus decided to separate from his wife in order to visit the “Bush at the foot of the holy mountain on which God conferred with the people,” taking his youthful son with him. The barbarians, he tells us, dwelt from Arabia to Egypt, from the Red Sea to the Jordan, ever ready to draw the sword, hunting wild beasts, attacking travellers, and making use of their camel-dromedaries for sacrifices which they devoured with dog-like voracity. They had no regard for God, but adored the Morning Star (Lucifer, ἄστρον πρωϊνόν), to which they sacrificed the best product of the chase, or boys of comely appearance, on an altar of rough stones. Failing these, they took a fattened white camel without blemish which they made to kneel. They encircled it three times to the sound of chanting, whereupon the sheykh who acted as leader, made a thrust at the beast’s neck, and all of them hastily drank of the blood that gushed forth. The whole band then fell upon the victim, and each person hacked off and devoured a piece of the beast’s flesh and skin. It was the rule of the rite that the whole victim with body, bones, blood and entrails, was done away with before the rays of the sun appeared above the horizon (p. 613). In contrast to this life was that of the hermits who dwelt in huts and rock shelters within call of one another, removed from the claims of the tax-gatherer, and emulating Moses and Elijah in their fasting and humility, some cultivating corn for bread, while others lived on vegetables and green meat, coming together once a week on a Sunday. Nilus was among them, having come down from the holy mountain with his son on a visit to the hermits who dwelt near the Bush. They happened to be in church, when a barbarian horde swept down on them like a whirlwind, seized the food which they had stored in their cells against the winter, and then called to the hermits to come out of church, to strip and to stand according to age. They cut down the priest Theodulos, and slew the fathers Paulus and John, and then seized the young men, bidding the older ones be gone. Many rushed up the mountain, “which they generally avoid since God stood upon it and conferred with the people” (p. 631). Nilus stood irresolute, when his son Theodulos, whom the barbarians had seized, signed to him to be gone. “O why,” he exclaimed, “did not the ground open and swallow them like the sons of Korah? Why had the miracles of Sinai ceased, and no thunder rolled, no lightning flashed to scare them in their wickedness?”