ise a thousand, two thousand, four
thousand feet, and at last front the sea with the sublime peak of Athos,
the site of the most conspicuous beacon-fire of Agamemnon. The entire
promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic
ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty
great monasteries are many pious retreats. All the sects of the Greek
church are here represented; the communities pay a tribute to the
Sultan, but the government is in the hands of four presidents, chosen by
the synod, which holds weekly sessions and takes the presidents,
yearly, from the monasteries in rotation. Since their foundation these
religious houses have maintained against Christians and Saracens an
almost complete independence, and preserved in their primitive
simplicity the manners and usages of the earliest foundations.

Here, as nowhere else in Europe or Asia, can one behold the
architecture, the dress, the habits of the Middle Ages. The good
devotees have been able to keep themselves thus in the darkness and
simplicity of the past by a rigorous exclusion of the sex always
impatient of monotony, to which all the changes of the world are due. No
woman, from the beginning till now, has ever been permitted to set foot
on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female animal is suffered on the
holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose, tho I do not know, that the
monks have an inspector of eggs, whose inherited instincts of aversion
to the feminine gender enable him to detect and reject all those in
which lurk the dangerous sex. Few of the monks eat meat, half the days
of the year are fast days, they practise occasionally abstinence from
food for two or three days, reducing their pulses to the feeblest
beating, and subduing their bodies to a point that destroys their value
even as spiritual tabernacles. The united community is permitted to keep
a guard of fifty Christian soldiers, and the only Moslem on the island
is the solitary Turkish officer who represents the Sultan; his position
can not be one generally coveted by the Turks, since the society of
women is absolutely denied him. The libraries of Mt. Athos are full of
unarranged manuscripts, which are probably mainly filled with the
theologic rubbish of the controversial ages, and can scarcely be
expected to yield again anything so valuable as the Tishendorf
Scriptures.

At sunset we were close under Mt. Athos, and could distinguish the
buildings