The Scapegoat was led out on the Sabbath, and in order to evade the law of the Sabbath-day’s journey, a tabernacle was erected at every term of two thousand cubits, and became the domicile of the messenger, who, after eating bread and drinking water, was legally able to travel another stage. Ten such tabernacles were constructed between Sook and Jerusalem, and the distance was thus about six and a half English miles. The district was called Hidoodim, and the high mountain Sook. The first means “sharp,” the second “narrow,” both applying well to the knife-edged ridges of the desert. The distance brings us to the great hill of El Muntâr, and here, beside the ancient road from Jerusalem, is a well called Sûk, while in the name Hadeidûn, applied to part of the ridge, we recognise the Hebrew Hidoodim. Here then, I think, we may fairly conclude is the Mountain of the Scapegoat. From this high ridge the unhappy victim was yearly rolled down into the narrow valley beneath, at the entrance of the great desert, which first unfolded itself before the eyes of the messenger as he gained the summit half a mile beyond the well of Sûk. Beside this well stood probably the tenth booth to which he returned after the deed, and where he sat until sundown, when he was permitted to return to Jerusalem. From a very early period this horrible wilderness appears to have had an attraction for ascetics, who sought a retreat from the busy world of their fellow men, and who thought to please God by torturing the bodies which He had given them. Thus the Essenes, the Jewish sect whose habits and tenets resembled so closely those of the first Christians, retired into this wilderness and lived in caves. Christian hermits, from the earliest period, were also numerous in all the country between Jerusalem and Jericho, and the rocks are riddled with caves in inaccessible places where they lived. About 480 A.D., St. Saba and St. Euthymius followed the general custom, and established here, in the Fire Valley, the first nucleus of the present monastery. The Mar Saba Laura clings to the side of a precipice some four hundred feet high, and is built against the cliff with huge flying buttresses to support the walls. The buildings are scarcely distinguishable in colour from the brown crags on which they stand. The deep crevice, which seems to have been rent in some great convulsion of nature, is bare and tawny like the rest of the country. The silence of the desert surrounds it, and only the shrill note of the golden grackle, or the howl of a jackal, breaks this solemn stillness. Not a tree or shrub is in sight, walls of white chalk and sharp ridges shut out the western breeze, and the sigh of the wind in the trees is a sound never heard in the solitude. The place seems dead. The convent and its valley have a fossilised appearance. Scarcely less dead and fossil are its wretched inmates, monks exiled for crimes or heresy, and placed in charge of a few poor lunatics.