[Illustration: MAR SABA.] Ladies are not admitted into the monastery, but we were provided with a letter to the Superior. A little iron door in a high yellow wall gives admission from the west, thence a long staircase leads down into a court before the chapel. The walls within are covered with frescoes, some old, some belonging to the time when the monastery was rebuilt, in 1840, by the Russian Government; Greek saints, hideous figures in black and grey dresses, with stoles on which the cross, and ladder and spear, are painted in white, stand out from gilded backgrounds. Against these ghosts of their predecessors the monks were ranged, in wooden stalls, or _miserere_ benches with high arms, which supported their weary figures under the armpits. The old men stood, or rather drooped in their places, with pale sad faces, which spoke of ignorance and of hopelessness, and sometimes of vice and brutality; for the Greek monk is perhaps the most degraded representative of Christianity, and these were the worst of their kind. Robed in long sweeping gowns, with the cylindrical black felt cap on their heads, they looked more like dead bodies than living men, propped up against the quaint Byzantine background. One could fancy one’s self suddenly brought back to the dark ages of the fifth and sixth centuries, when art, and literature, and even human intellect seem to have sunk into a second childhood, and that these were the very men who had fought so obstinately for and against the Monophysite heresy, which St. Saba succeeded in putting down. The floor of the church was unoccupied, and paved with marble; the transept was closed by the great screen, blazing with gold, and covered with dragons and arabesques, and gaudy pictures of saints and angels on wood. A smell of incense filled the church, and the nasal drawl of the officiating priest soon drove us away to the outer air. We next visited the dark cave covered with pictures, which, after the Greek fashion, were cased in silver, and gleamed in the darkness, and where, behind a grating, are the skulls of the martyrs of a former massacre. Next we went up and down, by winding stairs in the rock, on to the roof of the church to see the _nawâkîs_, or wooden beams, which are struck instead of bells, though bells are also hung in the belfry. The convent pets came about us, the beautiful black birds with orange wings, which live only in the Jordan Valley, and have been named “Tristram’s grackle,” after that well-known explorer. They have a beautifully clear note, the only pleasant sound ever heard in the solitude, and the monks have tamed them, so that they flock round them to catch raisins, which they pounce upon in mid air. In the valley below, the foxes and jackals also come for alms, the monks throwing down loaves for them.