The site of the western monasteries is generally on a precipitous rock at the mouth of one of the ravines, and commands a view up the glen to the great summit of the mountain. To pass from any one of these monasteries to the next, you must either clamber down a precipice to the sea, and pass round in a boat commanded by a skipper-monk, or you must mount the mules provided, and ride round the folds and seams of the precipices, on paths incredibly dangerous of aspect, and yet incredibly free from any real disasters. When you come to a torrent you must descend by zigzag winding till you reach a practicable ford near the sea-level, and cross it at the foot of some sounding fall. But the next projecting shoulder stands straight out of the sea, and you must climb again a similar break-neck ascent, till you reach a path along the edge of the dizzy cliff, where you pass with one foot in the air, over the sea one thousand feet beneath, while the other is nudged now and then by the wall of the rock within, so that the cautious mule chooses the outer ledge of the road, since a loss of balance means strictly a loss of life. It was a constant regret to us that none of the party could sketch the beautiful scenes which were perpetually before us, or even photograph them. But the efforts of photographers hitherto have been very disappointing. There are indeed pictures of most of the monasteries, taken at the instigation of the Russians, but all so wretchedly inadequate, so carefully taken from the wrong point, that we deliberately avoided accepting them, or carrying them home. Mr. Riley too, a man of taste and feeling, had essayed the thing with leisure and experience in his art, and yet the cuts taken from the photographs, which are published in his book, are also hopelessly inadequate. When, for example, approaching from the north, we suddenly came in view of Simópetra—standing close to us, across a yawning chasm, with the sea roaring one thousand feet beneath, high in the air on its huge, lonely crag, holding on to the land by a mere viaduct, and behind it the great rocks and gorges and forests framed by the snowy dome of Athos in the far background—we felt that the world can produce no finer scene, and that the most riotous artistic imagination, such as Gustave Doré’s, would be tamed in its presence by the inability of human pencil to exceed it.(187) The plan of this monastery and its smaller brothers (I was going to call them sisters!) is that of a strong, square keep, rising straight from the sheer cliffs, with but a single bridge of rock leading landward, and when the wall has been carried to a height far more than sufficient against any attack save modern artillery, they begin to throw round it stories of balconies, stayed out from the wall by very light wooden beams, each balcony sheltered by that above, till a deep-pitched roof overhangs the whole. The topmost and outermost corner of these balconies is always