Edessa, an eloquent man) captured those who had been guilty of this outrage, and put them to death. Yet even then the Emperor did not bestow any attention or care upon the fortification; but in our own time the Emperor Justinian, although he has for the most part converted the Samaritans to a better religion, and rendered them Christians, yet, leaving the old wall round the church upon Gerizim in its former condition of loose stones, as I described before, he enclosed it within a second wall, and rendered it altogether impregnable. In this place he also rebuilt five Christian churches which had been burned by the Samaritans. These were his works in this country. VIII. In the country which was formerly called Arabia, but which now is known as the Third Province of Palestine, a desert tract extends for a great distance, entirely barren of fruits, of water, and of all good things. A precipitous and savagely wild mountain, named Sina, stands close to the Red Sea. It is not necessary at this point in my narrative for me to give a description of these regions, since in my ‘History of the Wars’ I have given an exact account of the whole of the country near the Red Sea and the so-called Arabian Gulf, and of the tribes of the Auxomite Ethiopians, and the Homerite Saracens. There also I have described how the Emperor Justinian added the palm-grove[100] to the Roman Empire. I therefore omit to speak of this, that I may not incur the charge of want of taste. In this Mount Sina[101] dwell monks, whose life is but a careful study of death, and who therefore enjoy without fear the solitude which is dear to them. Since these monks have no desires, but are superior to all human passions, and as they possess nothing and spend no care upon their persons, nor seek for pleasure from anything else whatever, the Emperor Justinian built a church for them, which he dedicated to the Virgin, that they might therein spend their life in continual prayer and service of God. He did not build this church on the summit of the mountain, but a long way below it; for it is not possible for a man to pass the night upon the peak, because at night continuous thunderings and other yet more terrible divine manifestations take place, which overpower men’s strength and reason. Here it was that Moses is said to have received the Law from God, and to have brought it away. At the foot of the mountain our Emperor also built a very strong fort, and placed in it a very considerable garrison of soldiers, in order that the barbarian Saracens might not from that point, the country being, as I have said, a desert, secretly invade Palestine. This is what he did here; but what he did in the monasteries, both here and in the remainder of the East, I will now briefly enumerate.