From this scene, on one side of the mountain, we had but to turn round our eyes, and it was as if nature herself had become suddenly extinct;—a wide waste of sands, bleak and interminable, wearying out the sun with its sameness of desolation;—black, burnt‐up rocks, that stood as barriers, at which life stopped;—while the only signs of animation, past or present, were the foot‐prints, here and there, of an antelope or ostrich, or the bones of dead camels, as they lay whitening at a distance, marking out the track of the caravans over the waste. After listening, while he contrasted, in a few eloquent words, the two regions of life and death on whose confines we stood, I again descended with my guide to the garden we had left. From thence, turning into a path along the mountain‐side, he conducted me to another row of grottos, facing the desert, which had once, he said, been the abode of those brethren in Christ, who had fled with him to this solitude from the crowded world,—but which death had, within a few months, rendered tenantless. A cross of red stone, and a few faded trees, were the only traces these solitaries had left behind. A silence of some minutes succeeded, while we descended to the edge of the canal; and I saw opposite, among the rocks, that solitary cave, which had so chilled me with its aspect on the preceding night. By the bank we found one of those rustic boats, which the Egyptians construct of planks of wild thorn, bound rudely together with bands of papyrus. Placing ourselves in this boat, and rather impelling than rowing it across, we made our way through the foul and shallow flood, and landed directly under the site of the cave. This dwelling, as I have already mentioned, was situated upon a ledge of the rock; and, being provided with a sort of window or aperture to admit the light of heaven, was accounted, I found, more cheerful than the grottos on the other side of the ravine. But there was a dreariness in the whole region around, to which light only lent more horror. The dead whiteness of the rocks, as they stood, like ghosts, in the sunshine;—that melancholy pool, half lost in the sands;—all gave me the idea of a wasting world. To dwell in such a place seemed to me like a living death; and when the Christian, as we entered the cave, said, “Here is to be thy home,” prepared as I was for the worst, my resolution gave way;—every feeling of disappointed passion and humbled pride, which had been gathering round my heart for the last few hours, found a vent at once, and I burst into tears!