There are occasional towers in the wall, and remains of arches supporting a passage of sufficient altitude for the defenders to look over the battlements. The old church in the centre of the court has had a narthex or nave added in Gothic style by the Benedictines, and here again are battlements, from which the monks could send down stones or boiling liquid upon assailants who penetrated the outer walls. Three sides of the court are surrounded by buildings; beneath, there are massive arcades of stone for the kitchen, store-rooms, and refectory; above, wooden galleries which supplied the monks with their cells. Most of this is now in ruins, occupied in part by peasants and their sheep. But the church, both in its external simplicity and its internal grandeur, is remarkable for the splendid decoration of its walls with mosaics, which, alas! have been allowed to decay as much from the indolence of the Greeks as the intolerance of the Turks. In fact, while some care and regard for classical remains have gradually been instilled into the minds of the inhabitants—of course, money value is an easily understood test—the respect for their splendid mediæval remains has only gained Western intellects within the last two or three years, so that we may expect another generation to elapse before this new kind of interest will be disseminated among the possessors of so great a bequest from the Middle Ages. The interior of the church at Daphne is a melancholy example. From the effects of damp the mortar has loosened, and great patches of the precious mosaic have fallen to the ground. You can pick up handfulls of glazed and gilded fragments, of which the rich surfaces were composed. Here and there a Turkish bullet has defaced a solemn Saint, while the fires lit by soldiers in days of war, and by shepherds in time of peace, have, in many places, blackened the roof beyond recognition. Within the central cupola a gigantic head of Christ on gold ground is still visible, or was so when I saw the place in 1889; but the whole roof was in danger of falling, and the Greek Government, at the instigation of Dr. Dörpfeld, had undertaken to stay the progress of decay, and so the building was filled with scaffolding. This, however, enabled us to mount close to the figures, which in the short and high building are seen with difficulty from the ground, and so we distinguished clearly round the base of the cupola the twelve Apostles, in the bay arches the prophets, in the transepts the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, and the Transfiguration of Christ—all according to the strict models laid down for such ornaments by the Greek Church. The drawings are indeed stiff and grotesque, but the gloom and mystery of the building hide all imperfections, and give to these imposing figures in black and gold a certain majesty, which must have been felt tenfold by simple worshippers not trained in habits of æsthetic criticism.