It is not difficult to guess what Philæ must have been like in the days of Abbot Theodore and his flock. The little basilica, we may be sure, had a cluster of mud domes upon the roof; and I fancy, somehow, that the abbot and his monks installed themselves in that row of cells on the east side of the great colonnade, where the priests of Isis dwelled before them. As for the village, it must have been just like Luxor--swarming with dusky life; noisy with the babble of children, the cackling of poultry and the barking of dogs; sending up thin pillars of blue smoke at noon; echoing to the measured chimes of the prayer-bell at morn and even; and sleeping at night as soundly as if no ghostlike, mutilated gods were looking on mournfully in the moonlight. The gods are avenged now. The creed which dethroned them is dethroned. Abbot Theodore and his successors, and the religion they taught, and the simple folk that listened to their teaching, are gone and forgotten. For the Church of Christ, which still languishes in Egypt, is extinct in Nubia. It lingered long; though doubtless in some such degraded and barbaric form as it wears in Abyssinia to this day. But it was absorbed by Islamism at last; and only a ruined convent perched here and there upon some solitary height, or a few crosses rudely carved on the walls of a Ptolemaic temple, remain to show that Christianity once passed that way. The mediæval history of Philæ is almost a blank. The Arabs, having invaded Egypt toward the middle of the seventh century, were long in the land before they began to cultivate literature; and for more than three hundred years history is silent. It is not till the tenth century that we once again catch a fleeting glimpse of Philæ. The frontier is now removed to the head of the cataract. The Holy Island has ceased to be Christian; ceased to be Nubian; contains a mosque and garrison, and is the last fortified outpost of the Moslems. It still retains, and apparently will continue to retain for some centuries longer, its ancient Egyptian name. That is to say (P being as usual converted into B) the Pilak of the hieroglyphic inscriptions becomes in Arabic Belak;[61] which is much more like the original than the Philæ of the Greeks.