The influence of Egypt went northward. As the gospel is read facing the north, and the belfries of Eastern Churches calling the people to worship are put northward of the holy building, so the whole Church looked northward. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern World. The embalmed bodies of the saints who had died in the desert were taken thither, the faces of the dead were painted into the fresco and the ikon. Hermits appeared in all the desolate mountains and rocks of Greece and Bulgaria and Asia Minor. Christianity crossed the Black Sea, and hermits appeared in the Caucasus, and stately cathedrals were built on the shores of the sea. Christianity sailed up the Russian rivers and hid in the Russian forests. Only in the year 988 was Russia officially converted to Christianity, but long before that the Christian hermits and missionaries had appeared. St. Andrew himself is said to have been the first to come to Russia. The religion that came in was the religion of the hermit, and the faces on the ikons were the faces of anchorites who had died in Egypt or Asia Minor. Christianity took various aspects, but its vital source was the spiritual life of the hermit in the wilderness. Anon, Egypt was overrun by the Turks. The jewels were plucked from the screens and ikon-frames, the monasteries and churches were pulled down, the monks and hermits put to the sword, and practically the whole material evidence of the existence of Christianity was swept away as if a storm of the dead sand itself had come over it. One year the desert was a-tinkle with Christian bells, choric with Christian psalms; the next year all was desolation, and when an ancient hermit missed by the Arabs came to Nitria he found not one human being there, and he lived amongst the ruins of monasteries and chapels as if the place were the remotest and most solitary in which a world-forsaker could dwell. In its turn, also, Constantinople fell, and the Hellespont and Bosphorus, the issue to Russia, became Mohammedan. Eastern Christianity receded to Greece, was shut away in Russia. And Greece and Russia, and especially Russia, have preserved the direct traditions of the early Church and what Christianity originally meant. With them has remained the spiritual fervour of the hermits. III IN THE DESERT