ent styles of its
exterior and interior Architecture--Its ruinous
condition--Description of the Church--The Baptistery--Ancient Rites
of Baptism--The Library--Modern Architecture--The Church of San
Francesco at Rimini--The Red Monastery--Alarming rencontre with an
armed party--Feuds between the native Tribes--Faction
fights--Eastern Story Tellers--Legends of the Desert--Abraham and
Sarah--Legendary Life of Moses--Arabian Story-tellers--Attention of
their Audience.

Mounting our noble Egyptian steeds, or in other words having engaged a
sufficient number of little braying donkeys, which the peasants brought
down to the river side, and put our saddles on them, we cantered in an
hour and a half from the village of Souhag to the White Monastery, which
is known to the Arabs by the name of Derr abou Shenood. Who the great
Abou Shenood had the honour to be, and what he had done to be canonized,
I could meet with no one to tell me. He was, I believe, a Mahomedan
saint, and this Coptic monastery had been in some sort placed under the
shadow of his protection, in the hopes of saving it from the
persecutions of the faithful. Abou Shenood, however, does not appear to
have done his duty, for the White Monastery has been ruined and sacked
over and over again. The last outrage upon the unfortunate monastery
occurred about 1812, when the Mamelukes who had encamped upon the plains
of Itfou, having no better occupation, amused themselves by burning all
the houses, and killing all the people in the neighbourhood. Since that
time the monks having returned one by one, and finding that no one took
the trouble to molest them, began to repair the convent, the interior of
which had been gutted by the Mamelukes; but the immense strength of the
outer walls had resisted all their efforts to destroy them.

The peculiarity of this monastery is, that the interior was once a
magnificent basilica, while the exterior was built by the Empress
Helena, in the ancient Egyptian style. The walls slope inwards towards
the summit, where they are crowned with a deep overhanging cornice. The
building is of an oblong shape, about two hundred feet in length by
ninety wide, very well built, of fine blocks of stone; it has no windows
outside larger than loopholes, and these are at a great height from the
ground. Of these there are twenty on the south side and nine at the east
end. The monastery stands at the foot of the hill,