Reference has been made to certain Abyssinian saints, to whose exploits Major Harris alluded. But these are neither the most notable nor the most venerated in the ecclesiastical chronicles. Tekla Haimanot—_facile princeps_—“is said to have converted the devil, and induced him to become a monk for forty days, though what became of him afterwards we are at a loss to know. The same holy man, wishing to ascend a steep mountain with perpendicular sides was accommodated in answer to prayer with a boa-constrictor, which took him up on its back.”[135] Before the birth of this saint, “a glorious light rested for several days over the parental house. At the baptism of the child the priest was so dazzled by its supernatural beauty that, lost in admiration, he dropped the babe, and might have killed it, had not an invisible hand kept it suspended above the hard floor.” In due course Tekla Haimanot became a monk, and “the mortifications, self-imposed penances and incredibly long fasts which followed his initiation into the monastic brotherhood are faithfully recorded in the annals of the Church for the edification of the faithful.” Later, he visited the Holy Sepulchre, after marvellous adventures among the Moslems, and was subsequently ordained priest by the Copt Patriarch in Egypt. He then proceeded to the Galla country, where his mother had been kept prisoner, and converted the heathen by hundreds of thousands. On one occasion he repaired to the monastery of Debra Damo, but here “the brotherhood did not much sympathize in the general jubilee that greeted the austere monk. The monastery stands on the summit of a perpendicular rock, and, being quite inaccessible, no visitor can reach it unless drawn up by a rope. The Evil One did not like the ascetic to tamper with the merry fellows on the rock, and, to effect his wicked purpose, he maliciously cut the frail support when Tekla Haimanot was in mid-air, and probably he would have been dashed to pieces in a ravine below, had not immediately six wings unfurled themselves under his garb and borne him aloft. In commemoration of this miraculous volant power, the saint is represented, in most of the churches dedicated to him, as nearly smothered in a profusion of gorgeous plumage.”