The lectern had a nail on which to fix the candle. The communion cup was swathed in the oldest vestments of the monastery. In an ordinary cupboard with easy-swinging wooden door I was shown the mummies of the sixteen Patriarchs of the Coptic Church. Sixteen Patriarchs in a cupboard, each wrapped in his robes and tied up compactly! The Abbot unwrapped one a little and showed me the dried brown flesh. The seventeenth Patriarch, he from whom I had my letter, will find a place in this cupboard in his turn. In one of the churches I was shown the box with the sacred remains of Macarius, the primitive hermit in whose name the monastery had been founded. They showed me the books from which the service is read, all hand-copied volumes. I wondered especially at a copy of the New Testament, written ages ago in Coptic and now spattered on every page and every paragraph with new and ancient spots of candle grease. From the vault of one of the churches hang seven old dusty ostrich eggs by long strings. A monk explained to me that as the ostrich looks to its egg as the most precious thing in life, so they look to God in their prayers—at least, the egg is to remind them. We went into the fortress church, the only entrance to which is at a height of forty feet by a bridge from the outer rampart. They showed me how the bridge could be drawn in and the monks be secure from assault of arms. Up on the ramparts a novice had his duty beside a pile of bread and a stoup of water. When Bedouin beggars ring the monastery bell, he lowers them bread and water in a basket. “We give away twice as much as we eat ourselves,” said the Abbot, showing me the bakery. Here were hundreds of wheaten loaves in long stone receptacles, good bread, but made dirty so that the monks should not get to prize it. They showed me illuminated books a thousand years old, showed me the scrivener’s cell where among many quills a monk still copies the Scriptures day by day. They showed me one chapel the whole floor of which was covered with chillies drying, showed me the long room where every evening all the monks gather about the Abbot to read the gospel and discuss its meanings, showed me the massive doors, two feet thick, of wood and iron, meant to resist the Arab. In one room was a small cask, and the Abbot took a tin mug and drew me a little wine—communion wine. I drank half; he finished.