Near the ancient boundary of Brittany and Normandy,[292] rises a narrow rock surrounded on all sides by the waves, or by quicksands left uncovered by the sea when it falls at every tide. These sands, which extend to the firm land over a distance of nearly a couple of miles, are rendered very dangerous to cross by the mouths of several small streams.[293] On this rock, impressed with a savage grandeur, some monks had, in the eighth century,[294] constructed a monastery, where they lived isolated from the rest of the world, from which they were sometimes separated by vast plains of sand, and sometimes by the waters of the sea at regular but not far distant intervals. It was to this Abbey of Mount Saint-Michel, occupied by Benedictines, alternately devoting themselves to work and prayer, that the Grand Patriarch of the Armenians was conducted. The Prior of the abbey received orders to strictly guard the prisoner brought to him, “without allowing him to hold communication with any one, either by word of mouth or by writing,”[295] a very superfluous precaution in the case of an Armenian whose language nobody knew, who was ignorant of French, and who found himself in the midst of monks who from his arrival were taught to curse him. He was represented to them, indeed, as a detestable persecutor of Catholics[296]--this man who had been three times exiled and twice deposed by them, snatched violently from his country, at one time cast upon the coast of Syria and confined in a dungeon into which the water penetrated, at another carried into a strange land, thousands of miles from his native land, where for five years he was to drag out a miserable existence and then die. An object of horror to the monks, doubly exiled in this place of exile, like them separated from the world by obstacles almost as insuperable as those which parted them, separated from them also by the repulsion which he inspired, more unhappy still than in his first prison, where at least he breathed the air of his native land, Avedick could not even preserve the hope of being delivered. That consolatory prospect which his meeting with Spartaly at Genoa had permitted him to entertain, he was now obliged to renounce; since, even supposing that his letters had reached the Ottoman Porte,[297] no one would dream of coming to seek him on so distant and desert a coast. As far as his gaze extended he could expect to see no vessel of deliverance appear. Whether the sea covered the sands or whether it ebbed and left them dry, there was the same frightful solitude, the same mournful silence, broken at times by the roar of the waves beating against the rock, or by the peaceful and monotonous chants of the monks.