Curzon, in his "Monasteries of the Levant," 1849, says "the scenery of Meteora (Mt. Pindus in Albania) is of a very singular kind. The end of a range of rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some earthquake, or washed away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of twenty or thirty tall, thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred feet in height; some like gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar- loaves, and some like vast stalagmites. These rocks are surrounded by a beautiful grassy plain, on three sides of which grow groups of detached trees, like those of an English park. Some of these rocks shoot up quite clean and perpendicularly from the smooth green grass, some are in clusters, some stand alone like obelisks. Nothing can be more strange and wonderful than this romantic region, which is unlike anything I have ever seen before or since. In Switzerland, Savoy, the Tyrol, is nothing at all to be compared to these extraordinary peaks. At the foot of many of these rocks there are numerous caves and holes, some of which appear to be natural, but most of them are artificial; for in the dark and wild ages of monastic fanaticism, whole flocks of hermits roosted in these pigeonholes. Some of these caves are so high up in the rocks that one wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever get up to them, whilst others are below the surface, and the anchorites who burrowed in them, like rabbits, frequently afforded rare sport to parties of roving Saracens; indeed, hermit-hunting scenes seem to have been a fashionable amusement previous to the twelfth century. In early Greek frescoes and in small stiff pictures with gold backgrounds, we see many frightful representations of men on horseback in Roman armour, with long spears, who are torturing and slaying Christian devotees. In these pictures the monks and hermits are represented in gowns made of a kind of coarse matting, and they have long beards, and some of them are covered with hair; these, I take it, were the ones most to be admired, as in the Greek Church sanctity is always in the inverse ratio to beauty. All Greek saints are painfully ugly, but the hermits are much uglier, dirtier, and older than the rest. They must have been very fusty people beside, eating roots and living in holes like rats and mice." On the summit of these needles of rock are monasteries. Of these there were twenty-four, but now seven alone remain tenanted by monks. The sole access to them is by nets let down by ropes and hauled up by a windlass, or as an alternative in the case of that of S. Barlaam, by a succession of ladders. As an example of a rock monastery and church in Egypt, I may quote the same author's description of that of Der el Adra, or of the Pully, situated on the top of Gebel el Ferr, where a precipice about 200 feet in height rises out of the waters of the Nile.