Some years after his return from Morocco de Foucauld embraced Christianity and became a devout Catholic, eventually resigning from the army in order to become a Trappist monk, a member of that sternly penitential missionary order which devotes itself to the salvation of the heathen. As a monk he lived for a time in Asia Minor, two days’ march from Alexandretta. After spending two years in the study of theology at Rome, he resolved, while in Nazareth, to become a hermit priest. For the field of his labors he chose the Moroccan Sahara, one of the most savage regions in all Africa, as it was one of the least known. His first post was at Beni Abbés, a desert town in the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental, four hundred miles to the southeast of Fez. Here he purchased a few acres of palm-sprinkled sand and built a mud-walled chapel in which he slept. He lived on coarse barley bread, a few dried dates, and “desert tea,” a beverage made from an herb. No European willingly ate twice at his board, and even the negroes whom he redeemed from slavery, though eager to work for him, found his fare too slim. He made no formal conversions, but both French soldiers and natives swarmed about him, knowing that he always stood ready to aid them with money or advice. On one occasion his little church was attended by General (afterward Marshal) Lyautey, who wrote: “A plank was the altar. The decorations were a calico sheet with the picture of Christ on it; two candlesticks on the altar. Very well. I never heard Mass as Father de Foucauld said it. I could have believed myself in the Thebaid. It is one of the things in my life which have moved me most.” In the spring of 1905 de Foucauld set out on a still more extended journey among the Touareg, eventually establishing himself at Tamanrasset, a village of twenty hearths in the very heart of the Sahara, midway between In Salah and Timbuktu. Here he was alone among the veiled Touareg, “the Forgotten of God,” hundreds of miles from the nearest white man. The place he chose for himself was perhaps the loneliest and most dangerous ever occupied for any length of time by a European. Though the Touareg are suspicious and savagely intolerant of others, the lone priest so completely won their confidence and friendship that in 1913 he took with him to Paris the son of their sheikh.